How can anyone in Grahamstown accept that the local cemetery has become a playground for children? The article in Grocott’s Mail of 19 February really made me realise the importance of conserving our cemeteries.
How can anyone in Grahamstown accept that the local cemetery has become a playground for children? The article in Grocott’s Mail of 19 February really made me realise the importance of conserving our cemeteries.
However, the city’s planners also need to shoulder some of the blame for their inability to create the kind of public spaces that would attract children.
There is hardly any park in Grahamstown that has swings, see-saws, jungle gyms or the kind of playground equipment that could keep young children occupied.
Indeed, if children are provided with safe and attractive places in which to play it is unlikely that they will go to cemeteries to play among the dead.
However, as adults we also have a responsibility to educate children that cemeteries have much to offer the living. Cemeteries are like museums.
They are the responsible stewards of the collections of the bones of our city’s people and of our loved ones. In a fast changing city like Grahamstown, its cemeteries, if preserved, will remain as the few places that will still offer many opportunities for reflection.
Grahamstown’s cemeteries are archival spaces of our memories of soldiers, doctors, sangomas, political leaders, academics and artists.
The various tombstones each with their unique designs allow us to enquire into the rituals of death. Each of the tombstones is a monument which can offer us a crucial contribution to our comprehension of local and national history.
It is an irreplaceable window into the past. As much as Grahamstown’s history is written in the design of its buildings, it is also written in stone on the memorials of people who are buried in this city.
Should the maintenance of cemeteries be left entirely with municipal officials? Certainly this can’t be right! Of course, the core business of municipalities should be to provide service delivery primarily to the living.
But cemeteries should still be maintained through a partnership between the municipality and the citizens of a city so that succeeding generations can enjoy and learn something about the past.
It is particularly for this reason that the Aesthetics Committee needs to get a kick up its glorious arse from a wandering ghost from anyone of Grahamstown’s cemeteries.
Over the past year, the city’s aesthetics gurus have only succeeded in presenting themselves as a toothless chihuahua that is suffering from a severe bout of nagging spouse syndrome.
Grahamstown’s Aesthetics Committee has been loaded with double standards about how it barks at the slightest sign of modernisation in certain parts of Grahamstown while it remains deadly silent about the urban decay that is hastily creeping through other parts of the city; and now even through the city’s cemeteries.
I believe it is time for this city to review the value of an Aesthetics Committee that is increasing being lost in inertia and to put foward plans for the establishment of an architectural, historical and cultural preservations action group that will be mandated with the responsibility of broadening its focus on matters relating to preservation.
Such an action group also needs to be able to legally have the right to challenge and to take authorities to court if the need arises.
In its present impotent form, the aesthetics committee might as well lay itself to rest among the city’s dead. In other major cities, authorities are also moving forward to form partnerships between the Department of Parks, heritage and legacy interest groups and also with cultural and religious organisations to maintain and preserve the city’s cemeteries.
As a result, cemeteries in cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town are becoming picturesque landscapes that offer its citizens a soothing escape from the temporal world.
There is no reason why that kind of public and private partnership should not be formed in Grahamstown. There is also no reason why a similar kind of public and private partnership can’t be formed to equip the city’s public spaces with swings, see-saws and jungle gyms so that the city’s children don’t have to play hide-and-seek among the dead.
Ismail Mahomed is Director of the National Arts Festival. He writes in his personal capacity.
