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Mbare Report 29 - Just bungling, or something more sinister?
Oskar Wermter SJ
Extracted from In Touch with Church and Faith, Number 67
April 07, 2006

There used to be a sign at my door "We start work at 8.00 am". No longer. There are no fixed working hours in a place like Mbare. Three women appeared at our door Saturday evening when we normally try to prepare quietly for the celebration of our Sunday services. Their relative had died on Wednesday, and the body was still with them. Unable to pay for the services of a funeral parlour, they had asked the police for help who refused. Now the Catholic parish was their last resort.

Tafadzwa, a young Jesuit, whose main job at present is teaching mathematics in our secondary school, agreed to help. It was a battle. He first took the body, already showing signs of decomposition, to the mortuary of Harare Hospital. They did not take it. Eventually he found an undertaker not charging too much. More running around to find a grave. Epworth turned out to be cheaper than Granville Cemetery. On Sunday afternoon finally the dead man was laid to rest. Tafadzwa was exhausted.

Jesuits perform many different tasks when trying to serve the people. So far being an undertaker was not one of them. But then burying the dead has always been a work of charity. When the social services of the state collapse the people must resort to self-help. Not for the first time in Africa, where the state no longer functions, the Church steps in as the people’s last hope.

We used to have such incidents perhaps once a year. This year we had already five funerals where we had to assist since the bereaved just could not raise the millions needed for a burying their relative. Another sign that the culture of Zimbabwe which values respect for the dead so highly is under severe strain.

Every day people come to show us bills they received from the City of Harare charging them many millions of dollars, the very same people whose dwellings were destroyed and who are arrested if they are found engaged in informal trading or arts and crafts.

Is this all the result of state bureaucracy and the usual apathy and rigidity of civil servants, their inefficiency and incompetence? Or is there something even more sinister behind all this? Are they deliberately trying to destroy these people?

Or a bit of both?

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