It all started in Sri Lanka a few months ago.
We were catching a tuk-tuk ride up in Trincomalee, a strategic spot which has seen few foreigners in the last 13 years because of civil war, when the driver pointed out a pristine Bougainvillea-bordered patch of ground amidst the war-ravaged countryside.

A few steps closer and the rows of white benches turned into perfect little crosses – not a refuge for tired travellers or locals, but an honorary haven for allied forces who fought here in World War II.

All too aware of the irony of seeming to be paying homage to an imperialist soldier in a Buddhist land, which ironically was once the source of slave labour for our country, I told the overseer I was a South African Buddhist.

Unperturbed, he proudly unlocked his register from a vault in the wall and, following the map to one South African citizen – 19-year-old Private SE Morley from Queenstown, the very place of my own birth – I flounder.

A halo appears around the head of this gentle man who has probably seen more senseless deaths than I have read about, and I am transported back to a time when my travelling partner, an unwilling conscript in the apartheid government’s great Angolan cover-up, nearly lost his life.

Not much I can do, but this I can - a photo for the family back home.
An act which, I discover on returning in search of this young man’s family, was pre-empted 100 years before when Rose McEwan and a band of women friends took to the Anglo-Boer battlefields in Lydenburg, photographed the resting places of fallen soldiers and sent the pictures to their wives and mothers.

A fitting tribute
She herself now occupies a respectable place in Brixton Cemetery (Krause Street, Vrededorp), which has recently been upgraded with tar roads and trees to accommodate tourist tours at the recent World Summit. Something macabre about the concept at face value, but on deeper reflection, a fitting and clever tribute to many who left their personal marks on the history of the country.

Her neighbours in this leafy olde-worlde cemetery include the likes of Johannesburg trade unionist Mary "Pickhandle" Fitzgerald and Samuel "Taffy" Long, whose spot in eternity is marked with a granite cross stating that he was executed "for a crime he did not commit" in the aftermath of the 1922 Miners’ Strike.

Laid out in 1912, Brixton Cemetery speaks silent testimony to battle and success across the board, and is the site of the first Hindu crematorium in Africa (built in 1918) conceptualised by human rights pacifist Mahatma Gandhi before he left the country for good.

A lesser-publicised inhabitant of the cemetery is Cornelis Broeksma who was executed by firing squad at Johannesburg Fort on September 30, 1901, for exposing the appalling conditions at concentration camps in the South African War at the turn of the 20th century, with the help of Emily Hobhouse. Her ashes were brought from England and placed at the bottom of the Vroue Monument in Bloemfontein to commemmorate the deaths of over 28 000 women and children in the camps.

Of the 115 white concentration camps, the biggest in Johannesburg was at the Turffontein Race Course, which housed around 5000 people, of whom 700 died and were buried in Winchester Hills, on a farm called Kliprivier Berg.

Vandalised by an anti-Ossewa Brandwag group during World War II, it was overhauled and re-opened in 1961. It now consists of a number of coffin-shaped terraces, with a memorial listing the names of the dead and a few headstones, including that of an eight-month-old baby.

Not far from Brixton, in Braamfontein Cemetery (Graf Street), lies another tragic rite of passage.

Unaware of the passive resistance campaign instigated by Gandhi in response to 1906’s Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance, by which Indians and Chinese were bound to register their presence in the Transvaal, a 24-year-old Chinese man, Chow Kwai For, registered.

When he realised what he had done, he committed suicide - his letter of apology (written in Chinese) is engraved on the headstone. Put this one high on your grave tour agenda.

Besides other passive resistors, the graveyard also accommodates dynamite explosion victims, South African War soldiers, cholera and flu epidemic victims, and a memorial to Enoch Sontonga, the creator of South Africa's national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, who died in obscurity at the age of 33.

Though it took authorities over a year to find his grave which itself had been buried, a glamorous black granite tribute to his unique legacy has now been erected.

Nearby, in Soweto’s overcrowded Avalon Cemetery, lie Communist Party leader, Joe Slovo; 1976 Soweto hero Hector Pieterson; and human rights stalwart Helen Joseph; not recommended if you can’t ignore the rows of cot-like structures and pauper’s graves of Aids victims that will forever bear witness to this tragic slice of SA history.

If you’re in Johannesburg, don’t miss the three words on the SAHRA memorial commemorating the casualties of the Soweto “uprising” in 1976: "Never never again…"

Fascinating, isn't it? And that's not all. Sharon Marshall has many more grave stories to share. We'll publish PART TWO of A grave guide through SA next week.

Pictures from: www.joburg.org.za