Ignorance leads to rescheduling of Bishop Silinda’s funeral
All efforts to bury him a week later after he had passed away, failed and they had to take his body back to the mortuary after a funeral service that lasted almost the whole day.
MBOMBELA – There’s an African saying that suggests that a deceased’s wishes that he made when he was still alive should be respected.
The family of the the late Bishop Benjamin Silinda learnt a valuable lesson about this saying when they tried to ignore his orders to be buried two weeks after his death.
According to Silinda’s daughter, Ms Hope Zwane, all efforts to bury him a week later after he had passed away, failed and they had to take his body back to the mortuary after a funeral service that lasted almost the whole day.
“A few days before the planned funeral it rained very hard and his grave was filled with water.
Nevertheless, we went ahead with the service while other people were trying to clean the flooded grave, but that took the whole day until we decided to take his body back to the funeral parlour,” said Zwane.
She added that throughout his life, everything to do with him had to do with rain and when he took his last breath while being surrounded by his wife and children, a huge thunderstorm followed.
“Even when we fetched his body from Freedom Funeral Parlour it rained buckets and to our surprise it only rained at the area where the parlour is.
I know that it happens at times, but after what happened when we had to reschedule the funeral I realised that it had to do with my father,” added Zwane.
Silinda was finally laid to rest on Thursday, two weeks after his passing in a tunnel-kind of grave, the very type he introduced to the country on his return from his missionary trip to Israel many years ago.
His father was apparently the first person to be buried in such a grave.
See pictures of the funeral here:
