Out of personal creativity and brevity in entrepreneurship, graveyard vendors at Ndola’s Kawama cemetery are teeming with personal conviction to earn whatever they can to sustain their families with food and other basic essential necessities.
The vendors prey on the mourners like starved vultures as they display portably packed water in plastics, flavoured ‘ice blocks’ and other cold drinks to quench the thirst of a mass of wailing mourners who often gather under the blazing sun during the burial processions.
The merchants are always trying to mournfully do the best in their business of selling drinks and water at the graveyard site – roundly shifting marketing positions as they move their cooler boxes nearer to the grave site where mourners gather to pay their last respects to beloved ones.
The hawkers know that it is a healthy business day for them each time there are more people being buried on a particular day.
A limping woman, in her old formative stages of life, exclaims in the full glare of mourners, charging: “How could you set your business of selling these things in front of mourners?” She bursts out as she filters in the mass of weeping and wailing mourners at the grave site: “You do not feel the pain of the mourners, and what type of people are you to enjoy doing what you are doing when people are mourning?”
Then an intoxicated grave digger thunders in a rather satirical tone: “You should also start selling nshima so that mourners could feast during burial processions!” He almost implied that there was no drinking after the cloud of death has engulfed the life of one.
But the vendors are not perplexed as one would have expected from the outbursts but instead elect to go about with their vending chores.
“You see,” Joshua Mulenga begins, “People do not respect the graveyard to an extent that they are freely trading at this rather sacred place of final rest of people. There are people buried here who have died from different ailments and it is a health risk for people to sell consumables here.”
Mr Mulenga, a resident of Pamodzi, says it is important that relevant authorities should address the issue of vending at graveyards with the desired sense of urgency to protect innocent people who are ignorant at the heath-risks associated with buying consumables at cemeteries. Ndola City Council (NCC) senior Press and public relations officer, Esther Banda, acknowledged that it is immoral to carry out any form of vending at the graveyard and that those vending at the necropolis – the resting place – were into their trade illegally.
Almost in a whitewashed tone, Ms Banda comes out clean that vendors at the cemetery are “usually told to do their business outside the boundaries of the graveyard. It is public hazard to sell such commodities at the graveyard and that is why one cannot find uncovered foodstuff being sold at the graveyard”.
As the status of the graveyard vending remains unchanged, it would always be possible for many third class people to eke out a living from the shores of the grave – elevating their lives from the pangs of abject poverty and squalor through a thousand innovative survival designs.
A vendor at the Kawama Cemetery when approached for a comment angrily retorted, almost like a storm in a tea pot: “You are the same people who want us to start stealing to earn a living. You simply keep on saying things about us selling at the graveyard in a negative way in the hope that if you keep writing about us continuously it will become true that we are doing something unacceptable. The Government has not ordered us to stop selling from here because it knows this was how we survive!”
You should have been there to witness the horrid chapter of vending at Ndola cemeteries.
It is the thirsty of mourners under the blazing sun that ignites the temptation to buy the merchandise on display at the graveyard.
At Mitengo Cemetery, vendors selling ice-creams are a common trait and appropriately appear well-informed when mourners were thronging the graveyard to put their loved ones to rest.
At the notorious Kantolomba Cemetery, the story is the same if not worse because the vendors undercover sell consumables and some grave diggers continue to trade in potent alcoholic drinks, including home-brewed beer.
My recent survey revealed that Chibuku Shake Shake – the traditional beer was selling like hot cakes among some mourners and especially the grave-diggers.
Kantolomba Cemetery was also gravely associated with incidences of disgruntled thieves ransacking graves – stealing valuable caskets and coffins, including undressing dead people.
Against this absurd scenario, Ms Banda, dejectedly, responds to a Times query that the ill-act to rummage through the graveyard was synonymous to trespass and against the laws of the land, adding: “It is illegal. That is why it is done in the night. It is a crime”.
At the latent site, nothing was so fatal to vend at the graveyard with such bustle simply creeping and souring at the same affair.
And the pro-profit element of graveyard chores remaining in favour of the paradox of economic survival has wide health implications for mourners who buy consumables from vendors at Ndola’s cemeteries.
Something must be done to serve the surviving innocent souls from the macabre graveyard vending.
Tuesday 16 October 2012
http://www.times.co.zm/?p=15724
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