(Journ) The Bones of History

This was a project for my Writing and Editing class. The assignment was to immerse ourselves in a particular path through Grahamstown and find something to write about along the way. Being my grim self, I chose to go investigate Makana's cemeteries in search of the settlers' physical history. 

The sun is harsh on the faces of the settlers.

Father, mother and little girl look into it, stony eyes invulnerable to the inexorable rays. Voluminous skirts and worn boots find root in a mottled stone plinth, in which a plaque announces the sculptor, Ivan Mitford-Barberton, and the date of construction – 1969.

The statue is surrounded by huge, hulking stones. A way off is the monument building – a huge light brown and grey exercise in rectangles and concrete. A half-hidden monolith proclaims the precinct as a national monument, celebrating the achievements of the 1820 British settlers.

There is another monument in Grahamstown that honours the region’s settlers. I only notice this one after I had driven beyond the Cathedral and visited two cemeteries in search of the places that literally hold Grahamstown’s past.

This second monument is on an uneven patch of grass, across the road from a childcare centre and surrounded by colourful colonial-style houses and new developments. It was built in the shade of the same trees whose leaves anoint the broken graves of its subjects.

The true settlers are afforded more shade in Grahamstown Cemetery than the generic statue on the hill. The three graves in one plot – two big and one small – are much more poignant than the expressionless faces of stone and the landscape of twisting trees and gnarled stone is more forgiving on the eye than the harsh silhouettes on top of the hill.

I would not mind being buried here. Barring vandalism and neglect, or perhaps because of it, the cemetery is more wistful than the dwellings of the more recently interred. Its broken fence and creaking gates are painted a light, sky blue, and the windswept graveyard bends and breaks to march of at least a century. The graves themselves are old and older, none completely intact, and they face all directions. Wherever I step, I feel like I am treading on someone’s bones.

This old and decayed place is more removed from death than Makana’s other cemeteries. It is in the middle of a living, breathing community. Makana Municipality Cemetery, in contrast, is at the top of another slope, on the unpaved road into which Fitzroy Street unravels. The landscape is bare, and graves, new and newer, stretch over a flat, treeless expanse. Roads within the cemetery cut them into blocks, and a wicked wind whips at the crooked tin and stone grave markers. These are the newly dead, and the landscape is the future home of the dying. It is much more oppressive, much ranker with the idea of death and loss.

It does not take long for me to return to the pretty cemetery, where I discover the second monument.

As I take pictures of the rough stone block, a little girl in the yard of Jack and Jill Day Care waves me over. She poses and giggles. Her friends rush to the lens, smiles pointed, “cheese!” playfully exclaimed through missing teeth.

As I pack away my camera and return to the monument on the hill, I cannot help but wonder in which cemetery they will be buried.