Help us help keep you in touch with your dearly departed loved ones.
That is essentially the call being made by Mnquma municipal bosses to families whose loved ones are buried in Butterworth's oldest public cemetery.
On Tuesday municipal spokesperson Loyiso Mpalantshane told the Dispatch they were on a quest to ensure that all graves in the cemetery were properly marked and included in their database.
The cemetery has about 900 graves, including reserved plots.
Some of the oldest graves reportedly date back to the early 1900s.
“We want to compile a reliable tracking list of all graves in the cemetery so that future generations are able to locate their ancestors’ graves many years after their passing on,” Mpalantshane said.
“We will achieve this by placing a grave number next to the name of the person who is buried there.
“We are issuing a clarion call to all those families who buried their loved ones at the town cemetery, particularly the white community who have since left the area of Mnquma post-independence or before the new dispensation to come forward.”
It was reported recently that the local authority had spent R1.4m on closing off the cemetery with a strong palisade fence and a gate with controlled access as a way of protecting the dead from scrap mental scavengers, vandals and criminals who prowled in it in recent years.
Authorities said many of the graves had been vandalised and defaced.
Others had not only been desecrated, but had granite slabs and headstones removed and stolen.
Some of the graves had also been damaged by animals who grazed inside the cemetery, they said.
Mpalantshane confirmed there had been a lot of pillaging by vandals in search of scrap metal in the graves over the years, earning the cemetery a bad reputation as thieves and robbers also used it as a place to hide from the police or to stash stolen loot.
This week, Mpalantshane said the marking of the graves would help ensure the municipality was able to keep track of how much land was still available in the cemetery, so more graves could be dug.
“Though the gravesite is old and nearing capacity, it is still in use because some families bought large plots for future burials.
"[However] if people do not come forward, it means there will be graves which are unaccounted for and it will be a challenge for us to know when the graveyard has reached its maximum capacity and whether its future use should be discontinued.”
He said municipal law enforcement officers now constantly monitored the cemetery, and a guardroom had been built.
Last year, a forum for funeral parlours in Mnquma told the Dispatch the theft of tombstones had reached crisis levels in the area, and it was suspected that funeral parlour owners and those who sold tombstones could be behind the pillaging of tombstones.
The National African Federated Chamber of Commerce and Industry chair in Mnquma, Zukile Mbelani, was quoted as saying business owners in Butterworth had initiated a project to install security upgrades at the cemetery.
The facility was used mainly by ratepayers who contributed to the municipality’s revenue through taxes and levies.
This week he praised the municipality for maintaining the cemetery.
Daily Dispatch
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