The mayor of Thulamela municipality, Khosi Vho Thivhulawi Makumbane, has urged people to practise ubuntu and to go back to the old traditional ways of caring for each other. Makumbane was speaking during the funeral service of 19 unknown people, who had been lying at the Tshilidzini Hospital mortuary for some time.

The bodies were mostly those of foreigners from neighbouring countries who had died in accidents and of natural causes and whose relatives could not be traced. The funeral took place at the Mbaleni cemetery last Wednesday.

According to the Mr Ailwei Mashapha, cemetery manager at Mbaleni, more than 40 unknown people have been buried at the cemetery this year in a joint effort by the Thulamela Municipality and the Vhembe Funeral Practitioners Association to give them dignified funerals. Mashapha said the prevalence of the dreaded AIDS and cholera epidemics, coupled with accidents, has led to the ever increasing number of deaths of people who either do not have relatives in the country or whose relatives could not afford to bury them.

“Sometimes relatives are there but never come out as they are too poor to carry the funeral expenses, and bodies lie at the morgue as unclaimed,” he said. “We do our best to trace their relatives, but after fruitless searches we are only left with one option, which is to bury them as paupers,” he said.

Makumbane said Africans have lost their culture and the spirit of ubuntu that used to prevail in the past. He said the municipality couldn’t afford to allow a situation where bodies could be thrown everywhere. “These people deserve decent funerals. They are our brothers and sisters even though we do not know them; we are all Africans,” he said. Makumbane said burying people was not part of the municipality’s responsibility but, as a caring municipality, they had a social responsibility to care for the dead and those who were still alive.

Makumbane commended the Vhembe Funeral Undertakers for partnering the municipality in ensuring that the departed had a dignified passage to the afterlife. “Undertakers are in business, but they have stretched their arms and opened their hearts by partnering us in burying these people. This goes to show the love they have for our people,” he said.