The Standard of Dying: Race, Indigence, and the Disposal of the Dead Body in Johannesburg, 1886–1960

Abstract

Between 1886 and 1960, Johannesburg's municipal authorities had to provide burial services for black and white indigents whose families could not pay for their funeral expenses. For bereaved Africans, however, pauper burials proved to be deeply unpopular and particularly so because the municipality treated the disposal of the bodies of dead whites and dead blacks very differently. This article explores how the bodies of dead indigents, both blacks and whites, became a location of intense conflict where white municipal authorities and bereaved Africans sought to articulate profound and competing narratives of the sacredness of the dead bodies and the value of their lives. In this struggle to control the disposal of the dead and the meanings attached to their remains, African burial societies would play a pivotal role. In the cities on the Witwatersrand, these societies allowed Africans not simply to re-claim control of their dead. More critically, they became deeply invested in the creation, elaboration, and propagation of new funerary rituals and new theologies of the dead body. While inescapably linked to the mortuary practices and ideologies of a bygone pre-colonial past, these orations of the dead were more urgently responsive to the immediacy and contingencies of living within a South African urban environment governed on the principles of white supremacy. But if life had its contingencies, death itself was certain. African burial societies therefore offered Africans a single guarantee: that in return for one's membership within the society, one's corpse would not be debased. They kept their promise.

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