Grave Cemetery

I do not know how the dead would feel if they should see their “final resting places” turned to overgrown bush and dumping grounds for garbage and human waste. The dead must really be dead not to mind seeing their graveyards bereft of beauty, civilization, and love. They must truly be dead, to ignore the violations to sacred ground and the hypocrisy demonstrated by the living in their pretence to a belief in the afterlife.

A colleague died recently and his family and friends had to scout around for a cemetery where he could be buried in one of the largest villages in West Africa. Naturally, visiting a cemetery comes with that primordial fear, which is founded on the belief that burial grounds are places where the spirits of the dead make their abode and/or interact. But it wasn’t just this fear that one could sense in the team that went to inspect the existing cemeteries to decide where we could bury our colleague. Rather, it was the horror of seeing how a cemetery has almost become like the traditional Evil Forest known in Igbo folklore as “ajo ohia” and the realisation that when one dies, one would be disposed off in one of those cemeteries just like other waste dumped there, and one’s spirit would have to roam such a place littered with human excrement and other indescribable kiniko kiniko. It was the realization that one would be a real waste matter, with one’s spirit ranging through this African version of Hell that provoked the horror.

The ajo ohia, which has been misconstrued as a place of human sacrifice and ritual, exists in the traditional Igbo society as a location where the bodies of people who die of swelling disease (like Chinua Achebe’s Unoka), or those who die after living a life characterised by abominations, are dumped because burying them would amount to a desecration of the physical presence of Ala the Earth Goddess.

Of course, such dumping of bodies can hardly find any modern scientific justification and has serious health implications for the community. But it nevertheless signifies the local understanding about the purity and sacredness of the kind of spirithood required to rejoin and animate the Earth. The ajo ohia thus is not a burial ground as such, at least based on the local belief that the bodies of those dumped there are NOT buried.

It would be an anathema, a total disgrace for graveyards of those who were buried properly to be allowed to look like the ajo ohia.

Cemeteries in many other countries look more like parks and are beautiful and quiet places where someone could go for a relaxation, where a family could have a picnic, where a writer could sit and drink from the fountain of inspiration. Why keep a cemetery when you cannot maintain it, or when you no longer understand the difference between a cemetery and the inglorious ajo ohia?

You may ask, what if the country itself is a graveyard of a kind or if the graveyard has swapped positions with places where many “living” citizens pretend to make their homes? What if the living are now the dead, located in an ajo ohia they call their nation? In an ajo ohia nation,

one could meet malevolent spirits, seven-headed spirits even and one may be abducted, unless one’s chi quickly intervenes, or one is still equipped with one powerful juju supplied by the dibia who provided the fortification for one’s trip to this ajo ohia? When I read Fagunwa, Tutuola, Okri, or watch the movie Igodo, don’t I see the ajo ohia of my journey to a postcolonial nation-state?

As the return of ajo ohia speaks about the hellish experience of the living dead in a postcolonial nation-state,

it also navigates one’s thinking into the shocking reality of the power of capital in giving the dead a place of final rest. Some Nigerians who are very rich cannot subject their dead to the disgrace of a cemetery-turned-ajo-ohia; they prefer to buy special tombs at Ikoyi and elsewhere, where their dead could continue to drive their Hummer cars and limos, probably in convoys with outriders and sirens, in an imagined spiritual realm. The cemetery-turned-ajo-ohia becomes a second hell in a poor citizen’s afterlife.

I am not quite sure that when I die I would like the idea of being accommodated in a cemetery-turned-ajo-ohia as my “final resting place”. I would definitely come out of my grave and proclaim that I no longer want to die. If there should be a grave, let it not be so grave and shameful and difficult to distinguish from an ajo ohia.