Only one thing disturbs the silence and tranquillity in this cemetery. It is not the bodies that lie here with stories that remain untold; nor is it my friends who passed away silently, leaving me with the stares of their fatherless children piercing my skin. The silence is stabbed by the memory of gunfire from the shooting range on the other side of the cemetery. Once whites would shoot whatever they wanted to shoot. The sound of their guns hit the wall of that mountain and rebounded into the silence of this home of the dead.

I do not know how many times mourners turned their heads, with knees shaking, thinking that the heavily armed police had run out of patience again. Gunfire, like death, is never an easy acquaintance. What is worse, the shooters at the range seemed to wait for the time when the priest was fiddling with his little booklets trying to find a fitting citation; the gun shot would crack and the priest would find his verse with haste while mourners’ murmuring whispers would warn, “We should get out of this place.”

There is a park outside the cemetery. Here, four low, cold concrete benches, around each of four rectangular concrete tables, stand in a patch of dried grass. Nearby, a small garden offers a strip of dying flowers. The place is littered, yet the bins stand empty. There are pieces of all kinds of things: a folded scrap of paper, a torn greaseproof packet of some snack, cigarette butts, a used condom, a soiled and wet disposable nappy, a shapeless KFC packet lying near a dried chicken rib cage and a gnawed thighbone. The only attraction that seems to be free of filth is that wall built with beautifully smoothened bricks that were made to attract faces, standing as both a barrier to and decoration of the cemetery, holding huge metal plates inscribed with “STEVE BIKO GARDEN OF REMEMBRANCE”.