January 13, 2003
By Sheree Russouw
BY 2009, there will be no space for the dead in Johannesburg's cemeteries. Already, half of Johannesburg's 33 graveyards are so cramped that they cannot accept even one more body.
While this afterlife forecast may sound decidedly grim, Alan Buff, the director of cemeteries and crematoriums at City Parks, is confident that with the creation of more cemeteries and the technological advances in freeze-drying corpses, city residents are guaranteed their place in a city graveyard for the next 50 years at least.
Johannesburg's birth rate is now neck-on-neck with its death rate - in the last four years, the death rate has increased by 35 percent. And as the number of deaths has climbed, HIV/Aids has been fingered as the chief culprit. "There is no need to panic," says Buff.
In 1998, for every 1 000 people, 28 births were recorded, while 14 of those 1 000 died. However, recent statistics from the Department of Health show that as many city residents are dying as are being born: Johannesburg's birth rate has dropped to 19.5 per 1 000 while the death rate is 19 per 1 000.
Still, Buff avoids pointing to HIV/Aids as the single catalyst for the surge in the number of deaths. "Look, Aids is what everyone is saying is causing all these deaths. But we only look at what is stated on the death certificate, which states whether someone has died of natural or unnatural causes."
Buff recently told the New Scientist magazine that unless a cure for HIV/Aids is developed, the number of dead in the city will rocket from 20 000 in 2002 to 70 000 by 2010 - a development that undoubtedly means good business for funeral parlours, but bad news for limited urban space.
It's uncertain what will be done with the city's dead in the future, says Buff, adding that two new cemeteries in Midrand and Diepsloot will be built in the next two years. City Parks will be using about 1 000ha of land to build more cemeteries in the future, burial places that are likely to be concentrated in southern areas like Orange Farm and Eldorado Park. "We need these cemeteries because we've looked at the rate that people are dying. We also need our cemeteries to be regional (bigger than 80ha) and to cater for a large mix of the population," says Buff.
Fourteen of Johannesburg's cemeteries are considered "passive", which means that they have no space to bury today's dead, never mind tomorrow's. But even "active" cemeteries, which will hopefully hold out until 2009, face busy traffic. At Avalon cemetery in Soweto, for example, it has been reported that at least 200 funerals take place every weekend. This is Johannesburg's biggest and busiest cemetery, accounting for 40 percent of burials.
If conventional cemeteries do not manage to fulfil the needs of the dead, then there are always old mines, mausoleums and liquid nitrogen at the city's disposal, says Buff, adding that the five mausoleums at West Park cemetery, north of Johannesburg, are popular.
City Parks is entertaining the notion of using abandoned mine shafts as catacombs, that Roman favourite, as burial sites. If this happens, then visiting the grave of a friend or relative promises to be a somewhat different affair, and you probably won't have to bring fresh flowers along.
City Parks has held talks on the feasibility of these underground burial vaults with the Chamber of Mines, but Buff stresses "these are only talks". He expresses his enthusiasm about more novel innovations, such as freeze-drying corpses using liquid nitrogen. This method of disposal is already being touted in Sweden as the "green-friendly" burial method of choice because there are no harmful emissions. This contrasts with cremation in which harmful gasses like mercury are emitted into the environment.
Here's how it works: Your corpse is frozen and immersed in liquid nitrogen, which drains all of the water from your body. The result? Like breadcrumbs, the liquid nitrogen then turns your body into about 30kg of fine powder. The powdery you is then placed in a cardboard coffin, which disintegrates within a month. This is a rather instant food for soil and insects when you consider that it takes more than 60 years, or an average lifetime, for a body in a coffin to decompose, according to the Swedish environmental scientist pushing for liquid nitrogen body disposal, Susanne Wiigh-Masak. "This is an ethical way of giving back to nature and of understanding that death is a possibility for new life," she told the US Science & Spirit magazine in June last year.
But considering that only 400 of the 20 000 people who died in Johannesburg last year were cremated, these futuristic burial scenarios may seem somewhat far off. "There will have to be a change in mindsets for these ideas to be accepted by people," says Buff. "People are still very traditional about how they want to be buried. But we have to look at these innovative methods."
If mines and liquid nitrogen are used soon, then the by-laws governing the disposal of the dead will certainly change. For now though, the city still buries and cremates its dead as it has done for the last century. And Buff says that the draft by-laws governing cemeteries and crematoriums remain much the same as when they were rewritten in 1996 and made more uniform, equal and accessible.
