AFTER working as a gravedigger for more than 20 years, Madoda Msweli (53) is now seeing images of dead people at night.
Funerals might be a final send-off to the afterlife and a beginning of a healing process for those left behind, but for Madoda it’s a beginning of grief fraught with ghostly nightmares.
From the rural heart of eZinkambeni Reserve outside Gingindlovu, Madoda has dug hundreds of graves and also works as a coffin receiver in the communty.
His duties includes ensuring the process of lowering the coffin runs smoothly and all rituals are done correctly.
Sometimes he conducts his job inside a family’s yard or at a designated burial area for some clans.
In the rural areas, when someone dies, men take the responsibility of digging the grave, and Madoda has been in the forefront since he was a teenager.
He is a strong man who uses his strength to assist his community.
There are no machinery at eZinkambeni as in urban cemeteries. Madoda uses his hands and shovel to get the job done.
He was only 18 when he dug his first grave.
His best friend had just died and he wanted to be an important part of his burial.
‘At the cemetery no one was willing to go inside the grave and receive the coffin, so I volunteered.
Responsibility
‘No one is really keen on doing this job, and I guess I have made it my responsibility,’
Madoda spends every weekend digging graves in the community and sometimes spend hours trapped in tight spaces six feet under – making measurements and perfecting the hole.
‘It has to be a perfect size,’ he said.
Because of his work, he has been called a weirdo and suffers violent attacks from some community members who constantly accuse him of witchcraft.
‘Just because I dig graves doesn’t mean I love death or that there is some dark to me. Being a doctor doesn’t mean a person loves blood,’
Msweli says the effect of working with dead people has started to terrify him.
‘At night I feel trapped and suffer from terrible nightmares. Mostly in my dreams I see myself being buried or someone I have help bury coming to me. I see dead people,’ he explained.
Last year Madoda’s terror intensified when he apparently saw his friend who died more than twenty years ago.
‘Most people think I am suffering from a mental breakdown, but I know what I saw. I am not crazy,
I have just been surrounded by death all my life. Sometimes I wish I can also die myself, but I am now afraid of death. I am scared of the hole.’
Yet every weekend he continues to dig graves for his community. Without him, most families of eZinkambani would be faced with a sad reality of digging their own graves.
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