It makes sense that politicians should be very interested in the circumstances of their own funerals.
A great many of their predecessors, after all, never got the opportunity to weigh in on how or where they would go to their final rest, or in how many pieces.
Indeed, given the number of promising political careers that ended in a hasty show-trial, or a weighted sack in a lake, or simply on a spike over the village square, any modern politician who can reasonably expect to be buried in their 70s or 80s, in a pine box in a neat hole in the country of their birth, their funeral attended by at least three people who weren’t paid to be there, can claim to have finished almost as strongly as the most lavishly memorialised emperor.
In other words, you can understand why the ANC is trying to get its affairs in order while it still can.
According to the Sunday Times, the party is exploring the creation of a “heroes’ acre”, a sort of national memorial cemetery, in which “struggle icons are buried or honoured”.
The “or honoured” bit seems to have been shoehorned in to reassure the alarmed relatives of already-deceased revolutionaries: according to one Mathole Motshekga, “memorialisation does not necessarily include reburial of the stalwarts, because some of them during their lifetime expressed their wishes as to where they should be buried”.
The ANC stalwarts who fought the good fight, and who were honourable and beloved, have their memorials; in our democratic freedoms, in our constitution, and in the love and respect of the people who knew them.
Still, I imagine even the faintest possibility that they might one day find themselves dumped into the goat-haunted wasteland that an ANC-run cemetery will inevitably become, has produced a sudden burst of nervous energy among elderly cadres, hastily making sure that their wills are absolutely watertight.
Of course, that’s not the only reason this news will be controversial. We’ve only just digested Flag-gate — or was it Flagellate? — featuring the endlessly creative Nathi Mthethwa finding yet another way to tell South Africans artists and cultural practitioners how important it is that they give up on their dreams or emigrate as soon as possible.
Certainly, a memorial to the still-admired older generation of stalwarts is a fractionally better idea than a vast glow-in-the-dark flag woven out of the strands of our last collective nerve; but you’d have thought they might keep these sorts of pet projects on ice until they’ve, oh, I don’t know, discovered how to generate electricity or what railways are for.
At this point, I suspect that people like Mr Motshekga would point out the economic benefits of such a memorial; and in fairness, I must admit that similar acres in Zimbabwe and Namibia did, in fact, generate enormous sums of money and a great deal of national pride.
I mean, sure, they generated them for North Korea, via its Mansudae Overseas Projects company which was hired to do both gigs. And yes, it does seem a little perverse to celebrate newfound peace and democratic freedom by paying millions of dollars to a violently oppressive de facto monarchy to build you a vast yet simultaneously shabby monument to militarism. But let’s be honest: when you want vast swathes of concrete brutalism, you go to the experts.
Besides, some of Mansudae’s Stalinist landscaping is actually quite striking. Namibia’s heroes’ acre, for example, features a very dramatic statue of the Unknown Soldier, a gigantic man gripping a hand grenade which he is not so much throwing as waving at someone very far away. You can almost hear his martial cries: “You want it? Why not? What? You want a what? Egg mayonnaise? I thought you said ‘Big hand grenade’! What? No of course I don’t have an egg mayonnaise, it’s 42 degrees out here! What? Yes I know that if it’s well sealed and stored in a cool container it might still be OK, but I don’t have egg mayonnaise, I’ve just got this big hand grenade, and — what? Oh for God’s sake just come here so we don’t have to keep shouting!”
It’s even quite durable, at least by North Korean standards: according to some reports, the Namibian memorial has only started to fall apart now, 20 years after it was completed, which means it’s survived about 19 years longer than the average mid-level Pyongyang apparatchik after getting noticed by Brother Leader.
Unfortunately, there seems very little chance that Mansudae Overseas Projects will be involved in constructing our heroes’ acre should it ever come to pass. This country is full of eminently qualified, highly skilled architects and sculptors, all of whom are fully prepared to be ignored as the tender goes to Heroic Vibes, a four-person company dabbling in the broiler chicken game but quickly relaunched as a construction multinational seven minutes after a meeting with the relevant minister’s son.
The very large marble elephant in this particular mausoleum, however, is that SA doesn’t need a heroes’ acre, because it’s already got one: the ANC stalwarts who fought the good fight, and who were honourable and beloved, have their memorials; in our democratic freedoms, in our constitution, and in the love and respect of the people who knew them.
As for the others, who yearn to be immortalised in North Korean kitsch, well, they don’t understand that they, too, are already memorialised; their names and deeds burned into our municipalities, carved into our hospitals, scraped into our roads and welded to our amputated railways lines.
Yes, they will also be remembered.
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