Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - December 1, 2004
Mateus Chale

On a recent Saturday, some 100,000 people carrying flowers and picnic bags crowded outside the gates of Maputo's largest cemetery, bringing traffic on a nearby highway to a virtual standstill.

Many stood silently, but others sang and danced, giving a festival-like atmosphere to an old tradition that is gaining strength in grim tandem with the country's AIDS epidemic.

"I must care for my relatives and I have returned here every weekend for the past 10 years since my father died," said Domingo Sitoe, 41, who visits the cemetery each week to clean his family's graves.

"This is my shrine. I come here for inspiration and courage," said 17-year-old Domingoes Alberto, whose mother died when he was 10. "She is the secret source of my strength."

The crowds at cemeteries on Saturday mornings are much bigger than those who attended rallies for the leading candidates -- the ruling Frelimo party's Armando Guebuza and main opposition challenger Afonso Dhlakama from Renamo -- ahead of Mozambique's presidential elections this week (Dec. 1 and 2).

Part of local tradition, Saturday visits to the graveyard and elaborate funeral parties are becoming more common as Mozambique joins other countries in southern Africa in counting the costs of the world's worst regional AIDS pandemic.

No precise statistics are available, but officials say AIDS deaths are on the rise, with some 1.5 million of Mozambique's 18.7 million people infected with HIV.

Health workers say AIDS has cut life expectancy in Mozambique to around 37 years now from around 55 a decade ago, and a government initiative to supply life-prolonging anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs is reaching just 8,000 people out of 120,000 who need them.

Carlos Colaco, a sociology professor at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, said AIDS was rallying Mozambican families to find what defences they can, and that demonstrations like the graveyard visits were proof of community solidarity.

"It is not just the cultural manifestations. You are thinking that some of these deaths will result in AIDS orphans that need caring for, that there will be people needing schooling that must turn to extended families for resources," he said. "You need to know society will stand by you."

TRADITIONAL BELIEFS REEMERGE

Southern Africa's AIDS epidemic has led to similar scenes at cemeteries in South Africa, where officials say some cities are running out of space to put new graves.

But in Mozambique the tradition of graveyard visits is part of a wider resurgence of traditional beliefs as religion reasserts itself after its marginalisation under the ruling former Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) party.

Shortly after independence in 1975 Frelimo banned Christmas for two years although it returned it to the calendar -- under a new name of "Family Day", under which it is still celebrated.

Attempts this year by Muslim leaders to enact a law providing for Islamic holidays were turned down by parliament.

Some 50 percent of Mozambique's population follow indigenous traditional religions, 30 percent are Christian and 20 percent Muslim. Though divided on religious grounds, Mozambicans are united in their visits to cemeteries.

Sitoe said that like many Mozambicans, he never questioned the custom of visiting graveyards at the weekend.

Scholars say funerals and cemetery visits have their roots in the concept of a family, which in African tradition includes both the living and the dead.

Traditional protocol holds that after the funeral and burial, families and relatives usually gather by the graveside and then at the family home on the seventh and 13th days after the death, and then on the three month- six month- and one year anniversaries.

Some like Sitoe visit every week.

BIG FUNERALS FOR POOR FAMILIES

The costs of these memorial parties are borne by the family alone, however, and seen increasingly as an economic hardship in a country where half of the population lives below the World Bank's international poverty threshold of $1 a day.

"Funerals have a direct implication for the economy, management of the resources among families, most of which are poor. No one shares the cost," Colaco said.

For a poor family a funeral costs around $300 in a country where more than half the people live in dire poverty. Hundreds more dollars are spent on food and flowers for cemetery visits.

But funerals, memorials and graveside visits have social status -- which is increasingly part of their allure in a society where overt, big ticket consumerism is largely out of the question.

"Social prestige is strengthened or not depending on the way the rituals are conducted and realised. There is a logic to holding funeral parties to keep a good image, which unfortunately is incompatible with a poor society like ours," Colaco said.

"The funerals should be a simple tribute, but they are not. Our relatives must live with the buzz of visits every weekend."

(Additional reporting by Manoah Esipisu)

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