A State of (Greater) Exception? Funerals, Custom and the “War on COVID” in Rural South Africa

ABSTRACT

In the analysis of the implementation of the lockdown restrictions in South Africa, a great deal has been made of the unequal ways in which middle-class suburban communities, with access to large homes and biomedical support, have experienced the state of exception in comparison to the poor and unemployed in townships and shack areas. What has been less visible so far is the picture that is beginning to emerge from the rural areas and more marginal provinces. In this paper, we argue that when those experiences are carefully analysed, we begin to see that the former homelands were treated as a kind of “third country,” a country where custom and tradition posed particular threats and required specialised control and management. Using Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a state of exception to frame the discussion, the aim of this paper is to lift the veil from the state’s “war on COVID” in these rural areas during the first wave of infection (April to July 2020) and explore the frightening implications of suspended customary rights to cultural dignity, circular migration and social reproduction in these areas. The empirical focus of the paper is on changing funeral practices and burial rites, and how these were impacted by the COVID lockdown restrictions in the rural Eastern Cape Province, with special reference to rural municipalities in the former Transkei.

Keywords:

• custom
• covid
• cultural rights
• citizenship
• state power

We are now in a war. We are in a war zone and our rights will inadvertently be affected and restricted for our own survival … . The whole country is a hotspot on its own, including a number of areas where we thought the rate of infection would not be as big as in other areas.—South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, 16 July 2020.

Most black people live undignified lives and only see dignity in death. Our freedom is in the afterlife and that is why we invest so much money in planning for our funerals. COVID 19 has taken this last shred of decency from us. It has stolen our rites of passage into heaven, we can’t gather in the same way, or practice our traditions to properly send off our own and pay our last respects (except, of course, if you are some important government official, where the same rules do not seem to apply).

My mom was bundled up like trash, bound in plastic—she wasn’t allowed (back) into her own yard (to say goodbye). We couldn’t wash her or dress her to the nines for the last time, couldn’t watch her body over in a night-time vigil or give her a final touch goodbye.—Paballo Chauke. “Thief in the night: COVID took my mom,” Mail & Guardian, 19 January 2021.

Introduction

Alex De Waal (2021) suggests that, while the dominant discourse around chronic diseases such as diabetes centres on citizen responsibility, infectious diseases have generally allowed states to claim the initiative and mobilise a discourse of war in the name of protecting citizens from the external threat of pathogens. This approach empowers states and potentially diminishes the possibilities for democratic public health, invoking a special kind of “bio-politics.” Agamben (2020; see also Agamben 2004) argued that when the COVID-19 virus raged through Italy in March 2020 and the Italian state enforced extreme lockdown measures and population control, state officials deliberately created a “state of exception” where citizens’ rights and freedoms were compromised. He suggested that the authoritarian measures taken to confront the pandemic undermined democracy and could lead to fascism. Others disagreed, saying that such measures were necessary and only short term (Sotiris 2020; Corradetti and Pollicino 2021). But De Waal (2021) shows that this has seldom been the case historically as the increased state authoritarianism that comes with new pandemics tends to linger after the pandemic subsides (De Waal 2020; also Farmer 2020).

De Waal (2020) also shows that metaphors of war and fighting have centrally shaped the way in which modern states have responded to pandemics over the past 200 years and that the metaphor of “fighting” a disease, apt for the body’s immune response to a pathogen, has been adopted by modern states to suspend the rights, freedoms and liberties of citizens in the name of a collective effort to contain and restrict infection. When mobilising for war, he points out, states resort to authoritarian measures as “political leaders inveigh against ‘infestation’ by invaders or infiltrators that are akin to pathogens and, in times of health crisis, they like to ‘declare war’ on a microbial ‘invisible enemy’” (De Waal 2020, 10). Importantly for our argument in this paper, De Waal (2020; 2021) claims that while governments often insist that the medical crisis is unique and specific, historical evidence suggests that once states “declare war”—whether against another political entity or a disease—they lay claim to special powers and resources. These interventions tend to make greatly expanded state power and authoritarianism a legacy of pandemics (also see Corradetti and Pollicino 2021; Farmer 2020).

The response of modern states to plagues or pandemics has also favoured a discourse of inclusion by presenting the threat as affecting all citizens. They do that by insisting that the threat posed by pathogens is not limited to one segment of the population, a single social class or race group, but is a threat to the nation state itself. States consequently mobilise to protect all citizens irrespective of their social and economic standing or where they are located. Moreover, states’ need to include all citizens and marginal groups is how they then justify special allocations of public funds during pandemics.

In his reflections on the emergence of “abnormality” in modern western society, Foucault (1975) noted that, with modernity, European states moved away from separating the sick from the healthy, as expressed in the model of the leper colony, and embraced techniques of power that sought to observe, analyse and control human beings in order to individualise and normalise them. This shift was entrenched in then new responses to plagues, leading Foucault to argue that the modern subject was manufactured in part by state management of disease and biopolitics. Under COVID, many states have attempted to individualise citizen responses and normalise self-discipline, while at the same time assuming that not all citizens are equally capable or equipped to behave “responsibly.” Moreover, minority groups, migrants and traditional communities or “first nations” have been targeted for “special treatment” to bring them in line with what is assumed to be a modern response of urban populations, especially that of the middle classes. In terms of the leper colony metaphor, they are still seen to exist outside of modernity and in need of special treatment to normalise their behaviour and moderate their response. Farmer (1996, 2003, 2020), writing on the pathologies of power in a context of colonial, western biomedicine and neo-liberal economics, has shown how top-down, demeaning assertions about local culture are often used to mask inequality and inequalities of service delivery and care. Farmer argues that cultural difference is often used by anthropologists and medics as a way to bracket, describe and hide deep inequalities, suffering and structural violence in post-colonial settings.

In South Africa, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party was eager to grasp the opportunity to re-establish its credentials and legitimacy in the eyes of the Global North, and lead the way in Africa in reponse to the global pandemic. The state saw its ability to participate in the biomedical fix of the global COVID discourse as a means to win favour internationally as a trustworthy, progressive state with independent scientific capacity and a modern public health system. The South African government seized the initiative in March 2020 by updating and changing the national Disaster Management Act of 2002 as vehicle to manage the COVID crisis. The spirit of the original act was to allow the national government to intervene and provide support in cases of local or regional disasters, supporting local government bodies and structures. The revised act inverted the power dynamics of that legislation with the creation of an all-powerful National Coronavirus Command Council, which would lead the response from the centre, and employ a Ministerial Advisory Committee (MAC) of 37 high-level medical experts and scientists, appointed to advise the president on the changing nature of the threat and the measures needed to contain it. The response was centralised in the Office of the Presidency and framed as a universal set of measures for all citizens, rich and poor, urban and rural. The war on COVID was to be fought from the top down and within the framework of a biomedical, northern model adjusted to national realities by medical experts. In an address to the nation on 9 April 2020, the president justified the need for such an approach: “if we end lockdown too soon or too abruptly, we risk a massive and uncontrollable resurgence of the disease” (News24, 9 April 2020).

In Agamben’s (2004, 2020) terms, the South African state enforced a “state of exception” similar to that declared in Italy and western Europe and suspended or limited individual rights in order that the state could better fight the war on COVID. However, unlike the case of Italy and others in the Global North, the South African state was quick to announce that it was necessary not only to suspend individual rights, but also to cancel all customary practices, notably those associated with rural funerals. In this way, the South African state created a special category of exception that applied to certain socio-cultural categories or groups that lived in cultural enclaves in the former homelands or Bantustans. In terms of the revised national Disaster Management Act of 2020 and given that dangerous customary practices were not evenly distributed across the nation, the implementation of disciplinary regimes against custom was left to the provincial authories to implement on instruction from the centre. This was one of the areas where provincial and law enforcement agencies were given special tasks and duties, such as in the Eastern Cape, as preparations for the mid-year male initation season which had already started when the coronavirus struck in South Africa.

In the analysis of the implementation of the lockdown restrictions in South Africa, a great deal has been made of the unequal ways in which middle-class suburban communities, with access to large homes and biomedical support, have experienced the state of exception in comparison to the poor and unemployed in townships and shack areas. This appreciation is clearly expressed in both the title and the analysis of a new book by Friedman (2021), One Virus, Two Countries, by which he means the so-called First and Third World segments of South African society, essentially the suburbs and the townships in the cities.

What has been less visible so far is the picture that is beginning to emerge from the rural areas and more marginal provinces. In this paper we argue that when those experiences are carefully analysed, we begin to see that the former homelands were treated as a “third country,” a country where custom and tradition posed particular threats and required specialised control and management. Part of the reason why this dimension is not yet visible in the current national discourse and analysis is because the perceived customary threats from these areas were generally dealt with regionally, through special requests and instructions by the National Command Council to provincial and district councils, including the provincial houses of traditional leaders. The aim of this paper is to bring this experience into focus and to reveal not only the extent of the repression but also the frightening implications of suspending such rights for social reproduction at the margins, threatening to transform what Agamben (1998, 2004) would call a “bare life” into a “naked life” (for more details see Bank and Sharpley 2022).

The article is based on fieldwork conducted under lockdown conditions in 10 municipalities in the eastern part of the Eastern Cape (mainly the former Transkei homeland) between April and July 2020. The team of research assistants on the project were students and faculty from the Walter Sisulu University Department of Humanities and Social Sciences who agreed to participate in what was initially a one-month rapid rural assessment project on the impact of COVID regulations on funerals in the rural Eastern Cape.¹ The project was extended because of the difficulties in obtaining full ethical clearance to conduct fieldwork research under lockdown conditions. At this time when many COVID-19 research projects with a human sciences focus were based on telephone surveys, which tended to be conducted remotely, the project aimed to put people first and generate a perspective from on the ground. It collected information in the language and categories of local people, using their social and cultural points of reference. The authors conducted many interviews themselves and engaged with all the regional stakeholders.

The article focuses specifically on funerals. The analysis presented here is both historical and ethnographic, exploring how burial rites and funeral practices had changed in this region from the early twentieth century to the period since the 1994 start of South Africa’s democratic era. The paper then moves on to discuss the challenges and trauma that households faced as they tried to navigate rituals of death in the time of COVID, when their loved ones were “bundled up like trash, bound in plastic” and unceremoniously dumped in the ground. The paper documents the unfolding of a regional crisis of indignity and fear that ensued as the South African state waged war on COVID on behalf of the nation.

Death, modesty and mourning

Multiple authors (e.g. Geschiere 2005; Gluckman 1937; Lee and Vaughan 2008) have reported that, in various parts of Africa, dead bodies are often viewed as spiritually unstable and dangerous because they are in a liminal state as the deceased’s spirit moves from the world of the living to an ancestral afterlife. They explain that if this transition is not carefully managed, through communication and ritual treatment, and the body is disposed of quickly, then there is always a chance that the spirit can be captured by evil or malevolent forces. In the mid-1920s, Monica Hunter, based on ethnographic work among people from Pondoland, noted that family members would start to wail as soon as a death had taken place in the homestead or umzi (Hunter 1936, 227). The family would carry the dead body outside the door of the hut wrapped in blankets (or, formerly, in skins) and every effort would then be made to bury the dead as quickly as possible after death because the “corpse is regarded as contaminating and dangerous” (Hunter 1936, 228). Earlier, communities throughout this region used to bury the dead in a crouched position, but it was also common, following missionary influence, to bury the dead in coffins lying down (Soga 1932, 62). Some of the deceased’s valued possessions were buried with the coffin, such as beads and domestic items, as it was believed the deceased would need these items as they carried on their lives as ancestors (amathongo) in the next world. Maize, pumpkin seeds and husks were also sometimes added to the mix of dirt and thorns used to fill the grave. The thorns were included to protect the body from the work of witches, which could torment the spirit and bring bad luck to the family (Hunter 1936: 228).

During the period of the burial, the deceased’s immediate family often did not leave the homestead. Milk was spilt on the ground to ward off danger, and no man of the umzi was meant to sleep with his wife at this time. The men and children also often shaved their heads. After three or four days, beer was typically made, or a goat killed, to “wash out the mouth” (Hunter 1936, 229; also Soga 1932, 123). Only those umzi members who had washed, including with special medicines, were safe to interact socially with non-family members. The ritual process steered members of the immediate family away from the threat of pollution and danger presented at death and into a phase of mourning.

Before the period of mourning began, the blankets and clothes of the deceased were burnt. The widow had to ensure that all traces of the husband were erased from the homestead before engaging in prolonged mourning, often for longer than a year. Many months after death, a second beast was slaughtered in a ceremony known as ukubuyisa (bringing the spirit home) to help the deceased take their place among the ancestors and to make it easy for them to return to the homestead (see Ainslie 2014). This was not the beast of “washing” to ward off danger, but one of social integration and stabilisation. The ceremony brought together family, neighbours and extended kin. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Hunter suggested, the AmaMpondo, like other Xhosa-speaking people generally in the Eastern Cape,

have a great distaste for speaking of anything connected to death. The name of a person who has recently died is never mentioned in conversation. Children are warned not to mention people that have died and that it is ill-mannered to introduce the subject of death into any conversation … Christians tell me that the pagan fear of the corpse, and distaste for speaking of death, is not so great as formerly, their attitudes have been modified by the attitudes of Christians. (1936, 231)

Traditional Xhosa and Mpondo customs differed in some respects—for example, around the issue of male initiation—but this was not the case with their approach to death and burials. The accounts of funerals in this region from anthropological, local and mission accounts suggest that, besides revealing a fear of pollution and potential witchcraft and misfortune, these occasions were modest affairs, which brought local people together, neighbours and kin, in a process that laid the deceased to rest within the grounds of the homestead and started a prolonged process of mourning and observance until such time as the spirit could return to the homestead (also see McAllister 2006; Ainslie 2014).

Siphe Potelwa (2016, 5–6) has recently suggested that family and community cooperation were always a vital part of managing death within the spirit of ubuntu (humanity), where umntu ngumntu ngabantu (a person is a person by other people). He claims that, in the rural parts of the former Transkei where he grew up, death invoked a spirit of cooperation and care, as in the expression ndwandwe which, he reports, refers to a form of cooperation amongst women in a locality where they come together to assist one another. He says this is similar to the practice of ilima, where men, women and children come together to assist in weeding or harvesting the land (Potelwa 2016, 6). He argues that the original burial societies in the region were an extension of this spirit, but also connected people from the same rural localities across town and country. Potelwa recalls how this spirit of cooperation was invoked when his father died, shortly after South Africa’s transition to democracy. He remembers the modesty of the ritual and the extended period of mourning:

After my father’s death, my mother wore black clothes, and my siblings and I had our hair shaved. We wore buttons which were covered in black cloth. All these rituals lasted for a period of one year, after which the ukubuyiswa [sic] ceremony took place where an ox was slaughtered, and our father’s clothes were distributed as a token of remembrance, first amongst the children and then amongst the extended family … . Prior to the distribution of my father’s clothes, a ritual was performed in which a portion of the bile juice and blood from the slaughtered ox was mixed with water and sprinkled with the branch of a tree over the clothes. The ceremony was marked by happiness, and, for the first time we were allowed to make jokes about my father, something that had not been allowed during the yearlong mourning. (Potelwa 2016, 18)

In the part of the former Transkei where Potelwa’s father resided, colonial conquest came in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Communities were placed under colonial rule but not necessarily relocated or resettled. This was not the case in former Ciskei territories to the west, however, which had been forged out of war, as were some parts of the former Transkei. In these areas, families were moved around, and family graves scattered. In these circumstances, it was often necessary over time to undertake a process called “fetching the spirit,” or ukulanda amaxhego (fetching the ancestors), to resettle them closer to the new family homes. De Wet and Mgujulwa (2021) illustrated in detail how ancestral ritual practices have been adapted in conditions of forced removal to fetch the ancestors and to bring their spirits to the places of their scattered family members at their new places of residence. The process, they explain, was often initiated by reccurring dreams that related family misfortunes or hardship as a result of the forced scattering of ancestors’ descendants and consequent family disunity, often exacerbated by experiences of migrant labour. Resolving these issues, especially fetching the ancestors and introducing them to their descendants’ new place of dwelling, proved complex and required agreement about ritual adjustments. De Wet and Mgujulwa (2021) show that there has been constant adaption and innovation that involves both “continuity and change.” The issues they describe are common in South Africa, as resettlement and forced removal have been a critical part of the colonial and apartheid experience. In her work in the former Lebowa homeland in the present Limpopo province, for example, James (2009) has shown how home funerals and burial rites entrench family claims to land and territory in a country defined by colonial dispossession.

In the current age of urbanisation, the question of “fetching the spirit” often involves ensuring that the deceased can be safely transported from an urban area to their rural homestead for burial. This might involve collecting the body from the mortuary, returning it first to the place of residence in the city where relatives and friends can bid their personal farewells, and then organising for the body to be transported to the rural Eastern Cape for burial. Given that dead bodies are spiritually vulnerable, it is necessary for close relatives to accompany the body and watch over the corpse on the journey home. In the post-apartheid period, a whole range of new services were developed by entrepreneurs in urban townships to help families with “spiriting” their loved one’s home and ensuring that the whole funeral process went as smoothly as possible. Dignity here was often associated with extravagance. The cost and character of rural funerals changed after apartheid as many additions, innovations and adjustments were made through the new “burial industry” (Lee 2011; Nkosi 2011).

Spirit taxis, migrancy and rural modernity

In his book The Spirit Ambulance, Stonington (2020) contrasts local perceptions of death and dying in hospital and at home in Buddhist communities in northern Thailand. Buddhists’ belief in reincarnation is similar to the way that many Africans believe that upon death one becomes an ancestor who continues to influence the lives of the living. In the Eastern Cape it is believed that people who are very old may also make the transition to becoming ancestors (amathongo) even before they die (Hunter, 1936, 232; Mda 1995). The spiritual transition from this world to the next is not an event but a process that has to be managed socially and ritually. The process is guided by the living through attention to ritual preparation of the body. In addition, to ensure the safe passage to the other world, the deceased’s close kin need to ensure that any social disintegration occasioned by death is repaired, that the deceased is re-integrated back into the community and that group solidarity is preserved. Both death rites and the funeral process serve to guide the deceased and the living safely into a beneficial and life-giving balance with each other (Lee and Vaughan 2008; Geschiere 2005). Amongst Buddhists in northern Thailand, as well as in many other parts of the world, it is believed that the quality of one’s ancestral life, rebirth or reincarnation is affected by the conditions under which one leaves the world of the living and how one is ushered into the new world by those who are left behind. This is why many Thai Buddhists want to die at home, where they feel comfortable, cared for and have developed a strong sense of belonging through life.

Lee (2011), who conducted fieldwork on funerals in Cape Town between 2008 and 2010, noted how much the funeral industry had changed in the city since the end of apartheid with post-apartheid deregulation. New African entrepreneurs and especially taxi owners entered the market with a wide variety of products to jazz up their taxis, which ferried bodies and mourners between town and countryside. Lee (2011) documents how the new funeral and taxi businesses offered a range of products including embalming services to preserve bodies, access to expensive coffins, additional extras including fake lawn and carpets, as well as entertainment and refreshments for city mourners before their departure. The changes in the funeral business and the commodification of services were supported by continuities in circular migration and double rootedness in society (see Bank, Sharpley, and Paterson 2021). The HIV/AIDS pandemic contributed to the constant shuttling of people and bodies between urban and rural areas, but the congested living conditions, informal housing and insecure employment in the cities also contributed to the processes of rural reconnection, which might be called “displaced urbanism” (see Bank 2015).

In his 1995 novel Ways of Dying, Zakes Mda tells the story of an itinerant urban youth who makes his living as a professional mourner in the time of AIDS, moving from one funeral to the next. The mourner meets a kindred spirit from his rural home area, and they move in together in a shack. The interior walls of the shack are then plastered with magazine pictures of perfect modern kitchens, bedrooms and lounges, as they escape the grimness and pain of urban life in suburban fantasies that are seemingly impossible to realise. Mda writes here in the genre of magical realism. In post-apartheid South Africa, many amongst the urban poor continue to see possibility and promise in building for their families at their rural home, while waiting for the state to deliver houses and services in the city—or enough money to raise a bond (Mda 1995, 120–35).

During research into funerals in the time of COVID in the former Transkei, many people commented on how family spending on funerals in rural areas had increased exponentially over the previous decade as a plethora of new insurance products, taxi services and burial societies were now available. As one man remarked: it was almost as if the burial had turned into celebratory “after tears” parties, which usually happen a year after the death, when the families celebrated happily as their mourning period ended. The aim, he suggested, was now for families to outdo each other in terms of size and scale of funeral events, with fancy coffins, costly tombstones, elaborate programme design, even video equipment, and meals both before and after the burial (also see Mhlanga 2004). Not everyone could afford these luxuries and extras, but a trend towards competitive ostentation became embedded in a landscape that had previously been defined by modesty and sharing. It also appeared that the earlier desire to bury as soon as possible after death (see above) had been replaced by a longer process of ritual extension that could last weeks as bodies were kept on ice while final arrangements were made for the funeral (Nkosi 2011).

The consequences of these shifts were already evident in the early 2000s. A survey of over 20 000 households in KwaZulu-Natal, undertaken between 2003 and 2005, showed that funeral expenses rose sharply after apartheid ended as “households are [now] expected to spend a third of household permanent income on funerals, an amount shaded up or down according to … status” (Case et al. 2013, 34). In Soweto, another household income survey carried out at the same time discovered that families were choosing funerals that cost between three to five times the household monthly income. A study in Johannesburg found that low-income families were spending on average just under R10 000 on the funeral expenses of a single family, which did not include additional costs of food, transportation and other frills (Potelwa 2016, 44–46).

These developments are, of course, not unique to South Africa and are common in many parts of the continent today, as migrant families often try to outdo each other with ostentatious displays of wealth at family rituals, including funerals. In Ghana, fantasy coffins are sold on the internet at huge prices, some in the shape of cell phones which are said to keep the line open to heaven (De Witte 2003). Stylised home video productions of the rituals are circulated and stored as mementos of family unity, modernity and progress (Ibid, 554). In South Africa, funeral parlours offer embalming services or refrigerated transport home for the deceased, as well as double-decker buses for mourners. Portable green lawns create a particular middle-class suburban pathos at some funerals (Barhe 2007). While noting all these changes, Lee and Vaughan (2008, 350) warn that it is tempting to argue that this kind of commodification empties these rituals of their spiritual and social content, marking a “great transformation in African death cultures.” But this would be an oversimplification, they insist, because burials in Africa have always been about status and wealth, as much as they have expressed social connectedness, embeddedness and belonging (also see ibid). Moreover, they argue, money and commercial transactions cannot always be easily separated from local belief systems, sociality and exchange. Indeed, commodities are malleable mediators in local cultures and not simply markers of Western capitalist consumption, as is sometimes assumed (Hahn 2015; Newell 2016). The connection in South Africa between funeral ostentation and families’ desire to project themselves as upwardly mobile and modern is plain to see, but this certainly does not imply these rituals have lost meaning or significance. Quite the opposite, it would appear, as they are now asked to carry a huge cultural and symbolic load.

In our fieldwork during COVID-19, we found that some respondents applauded the government for imposing strict rules that cut the costs of funerals, like not allowing dead bodies to linger while expenses escalated. Zipho Xego, from Bizana, said that when her mother died in 2019, she suggested the family host the funeral 10 days after her death but that the local traditional leaders resisted, claiming that it did not give people wanting to travel from Gauteng and Cape Town enough time to get home. In the end, the body stayed on ice for three weeks and the expenses escalated. Zipho said that shortening the time between death and burial was beneficial because it limited the costs, not least of which was feeding the group of mourners who came to the house every day before the funeral. The elaboration of funeral rituals and costs was thus not just a creation by families; it was encouraged by rural leaders who were given a platform at these events that they used to encourage people to stay loyal to their rural communities. But despite the perception that the cost and commodification of funeral rites had gone too far, the consensus in former Transkei rural areas was that the government COVID regulations were an assault on the dignity of death and capacity of families to send their loved ones to the afterlife. It is difficult to comprehend the anger, shock and horror that accompanied the imposition of the COVID regulations at funerals in the rural Eastern Cape between April and August 2020. The discussion below provides a sense of this experience.

“It is as if this COVID virus is caused by our customs”

The lockdown rules of March 2020 stated that families were not allowed to have more than 50 guests in attendance at a funeral, that they had to be sanitised and socially distanced, that a register of all attendees should be kept, that funerals must be reported to the police and that the funeral service could take no more than two hours. The body of the deceased could not be accessible to the family or mourners because any form of contact with the body was assumed to spread infection. Alcohol could not be served because the customary practices of passing beakers of beer around at funerals was deemed extremely dangerous. These measures were extended to include wrapping bodies in plastic and using plastic to seal the coffin itself, to add further protection. The customary night vigils that conventionally occurred on the evening before the funeral and often went on through the night were also outlawed, ostensibly to stop families from opening the coffin, washing the body, and trying to communicate with the deceased as a means to assist them in their passage to the afterlife. Coffins were to be delivered on the day of the funeral and usually to the burial site, not to the specially erected funeral tent or to the house. Funeral-parlour workers who accompanied the body were dressed in Hazmat suits and often brought canisters of sanitiser to spray the premises before the funeral. In some instances, they would arrive at the house simultaneously with the funeral guests. The visual impact of men in white Hazmat suits moving around the yard with spray guns was confusing and intimidating, especially since none of the reasons for any of this had been clearly explained to residents. Consequently, they developed all sorts of theories about where COVID came from and what it could do. The cluster of regulations and the state’s explanations about COVID-19 were not widely shared with local communities, certainly not in local languages or through local leaders and authorities. Many traditional leaders were reluctant to hold meetings to share the new government rules because they knew they would be unpopular. Some of the most common statements from the traditional leaders in these communities are encapsulated in what follows:

We were not consulted by the government to represent our people’s views and in knowing what is to be done so we can explain to the people; but we were reduced in the eyes of the people as we were not able to respond to their questions and issues, simply because we had no information to share to answer or calm their fears. In some instances, during funerals gatherings, we were chased by the police together with the people we are supposed to govern and we had to run in confusion as they did. The way these regulations are expressed, and the law enforcement that accompanies them against funerals and customs, it is as if this COVID virus is caused by our customs, because the state is at war with us and our customs.²

In these circumstances, secrecy, fear and rumour dominated the rural landscape and many people soon tired of trying to come to terms with the pandemic, especially since little information was provided at the local level or in a format that would allow them to appreciate why some of the rules were imposed. They were consequently taken by complete surprise when the police arrived in numbers at funerals from April 2020 to enforce the COVID regulations. Families who had spent large sums of money on their funerals now watched as pots with food and beer were turned over and guests chased home.

Also in April 2020, during interviews across all the areas covered in the study, community members reflected critically on cases where the police had interfered in family funeral and customary rituals. They spoke out at what they considered to be a repressive campaign of intimidation by the state. One traditional leader recalled a case that was brought to his attention, where the family faced the dilemma of either obeying the rules of the state or honouring the wishes of the deceased family patriarch:

During the beginning of the lockdown, people were afraid of the police and the military army. There was a household where the grandfather died and, while he was still alive, he said to the kids that during his funeral they should slaughter a cow and eight sheep. And they [the children] did exactly that to pay respect to their father’s wishes. Many people went to that funeral, but the police came and chased them away. They said that only 50 members should attend. I believe that those family members knew about the rules, but they felt that [the] spiritual consequences of not obeying their father was greater than not obeying the police. It is our culture that people are always afraid of not respecting the wish of the dead people. They consider that has caused bad luck and misfortune in the family.³

Social media also indicated significant conflict between local people and police at funerals. One set of social media posts described how, at one funeral in Engcobo, police acted violently, turning over pots with cooked food, meat and “umqombothi,” the African home-made beer which is brewed as part of the funeral rituals. They also chased away mourners to keep the numbers down. Later the same day, a police car carrying officers returning from the Engcobo funeral overturned on the road—which was interpreted as an act of vengeance by the ancestors, punishing the police for failing to respect the precepts of their own African culture at the funeral earlier. The photographs below were taken at the funeral in Engcobo and distributed on social media (Figure 1).

Figure 1. A police officer dumps umqombothi and meat on the ground after dispersing a crowd at a funeral at Engcobo in the Eastern Cape, April 2020. (Source: Daily Dispatch, 6 April 2020.)

In another complaint against the police, a respondent from the Kentani area complained because the “local authorities and police would not allow the body, which had arrived from Cape Town, to enter the main house or the funeral tent.” They reported that the authorities insisted that the body had to remain outdoors and be put in the ground as soon as possible. This caused great consternation for the family and relatives who proclaimed that the deceased could not pass on to the next world under such stressful conditions and without communicating with the immediate family.

The clampdown in the rural Transkei was part of a national campaign by the police, sending out a message from the government that the lockdown measures were not optional. One traditional leader from Kentani explained that “there was a funeral at a neighbour’s house, where more than 100 people gathered.” The authorities took exception and raided the venue while the traditional healer was still in communication with the deceased. As he explained: “ndithe ndisathetha uba lomfana lo ndiyamazi, kwathwa nanga amapolisa ndathi Haibooooo, sabaleka sonke” [“I was still talking about the deceased and someone shouted police! Police! And the law enforcement officials entered, and we all ran away.”]⁴ The traditional leader said that the unannounced raid by the police undermined the process of communicating with the deceased and thus threatened the legitimacy of the funeral. Yet it was clear that the police wanted rural communities to realise that the regulations were compulsory, and they seemed intent on instilling a climate of fear. The message was that those who did not obey the new rules would soon find themselves in jail. The police officers interviewed said that they were not happy disrupting people’s family business but were given strict instructions to take decisive action where people were not following the COVID rules (Figure 2).

Figure 2. A funeral congregation dispersed by police in April 2020. (Source: Daily Dispatch, 6 April 2020.)

Over the Easter weekend, in mid-April 2020, many were offended by the way the police in rural areas were behaving, chasing people away from ceremonies and turning over drums of home-brewed beer. Many community members complained that they had not been consulted and that there had been no public education about the nature and risk of coronavirus. It was also noted that there had been little communication between national, provincial and local officials on how to manage communities in rural areas. As the cloak of lockdown enveloped rural communities, many felt as though they were caught in a tower of Babel, surrounded by the noise of new regulations and required changes in behaviours, but with little clear, credible information and advice. From within this cacophony, the police were following their instructions to enforce the regulations and disperse large social gatherings, while the traditional leadership independently announced that male initiation and similar customary ceremonies would be suspended until further notice. All funerals had to be reported to the police station and police were required to be present at each funeral to ensure that the rules and regulations were enforced. It is not difficult to imagine the chaos and confusion that ensured as families and mourners were made to confront the regulations, which made little sense to them in terms of their understanding of the requirements of custom. At numerous funerals attended by the fieldworkers, local people said that the police and government were intervening to “mess up” the rituals so that the spirit of the deceased would become confused and wander off course. The police commander in Engcobo confirmed that people were saying that the police were “destroying their traditions” and had been sent to do this by the government. Community members said that they wondered why traditional leaders were being so quiet and were not coming out to support the people, who were suffering. One man explained: “we had many years of struggling with the AIDS, but when somebody died of AIDS, they were buried in the same way as anyone else.” He concluded: “it is not like this Coronavirus because HIV never changed our traditions; yes, people were scared of AIDS, but at least they could be buried with dignity.”⁵

At the end of April 2020, almost as if to justify the actions taken by the police, it was reported that 40 people had tested positive for COVID-19 in the village of Machibini in the Port St Johns area (Feni, Fuzile, and Piliso 2020). The state claimed that the evidence suggested the Machibini cases could be traced back directly to a funeral that had taken place in a nearby village more than a month earlier, on 21 March, even before the national lockdown had started. This funeral and two other funerals in the city of Port Elizabeth were said to have accounted for 200 COVID-19 cases in the Eastern Cape—about a quarter of the provincial total at the time. The media narrative around the reporting of the outbreak in Port St Johns also pointed a finger at rural residents who were portrayed as irredeemably selfish: “villagers—including some of those who are infected—do not seem to care,” reported the region’s Daily Dispatch newspaper (25 April 2020). “The chaotic situation in Machibini village, where there is virtually no policing or army boots on the ground, is threatening to realise the health authorities’ worst nightmare about a virus explosion in the province’s rural areas” (Feni et al. 25 April 2020). In response to the concerns raised around the spread of the virus from the funeral in the Port St Johns area, King Zwelozuko Matiwane of the AmaMpondomise Kingdom decided to suspend all gatherings, including funerals and night vigils, in the villages under his sway (Jubase and Ellis 2020). Clarifying the decision, the AmaMpondomise spokesperson, Nkosi Bakhanyisele Ranuga, said that an old tradition of ukuqhusheka, in which the body was taken straight to the graveyard accompanied by no more than 10 family members, would be instituted (Ibid).

As the months passed and the COVID-19 crisis intensified in the Eastern Cape, government restrictions on funerals tightened even further, with a shortening of the period between death and burial, new cuts to the number of mourners that could attend, and measures insisting that all bodies were tested for COVID-19, despite World Health Organization (WHO) advice that COVID bodies were not infectious after death (see Bank 2020; Bank, Sharpley, and Paterson 2021). The most controversial new measures that were enforced by the funeral parlours, partly for the safety of their own workers, were the placement of dead bodies in triple body bags to avoid contagion, and the burial of bodies without allowing the family to view them. This created further anxiety and confusion in rural areas. Some older men and women said that they could not recall another time when the state had wanted to dictate how families performed their customs. They said that the state regulations made it extremely difficult to bury their dead in culturally appropriate ways and to ensure safe passage for their loved ones to the afterlife.

Case studies collected in communities in the former Transkei revealed that restricted access to viewing and interaction with the corpse had been a major source of anxiety. The regulations stipulated that the bodies of those who had died from COVID-19 should not be accessible at funerals, especially not inside the house, and should, ideally, be wrapped and buried in solid plastic, even if placed in a coffin. In Kwa-Nikhwe village in Bizana, where a large funeral was held in June 2020, the body arrived on the morning of the funeral. The funeral service and rituals took place in a tent erected for the ritual, but without the body present, and the funeral parlour personnel took the body straight to the gravesite where it was buried before the funeral guests could bid their final farewells.⁶ The incident generated considerable complaint. The attendees said the funeral parlour personnel had no right to do what they did, but the personnel said their funeral parlour would have lost its licence had they broken the law.

A similar incident occurred at Maya Location in Qamata, Chris Hani district. The passengers of two Quantum taxis from Cape Town arrived at a funeral to see the body but were told that the funeral parlour personnel had taken the body straight to the gravesite.⁷ And in a case at Mbashe municipality, in a location near Willowvale town, the shortened funeral service and burial were completed before senior family members had arrived from Johannesburg. They were extremely angry because they had travelled a great distance to bid farewell and were unable to communicate with the deceased before their passage to the afterlife.⁸ In at least one instance, recorded from Sinqumeni location in Engcobo, families became so angry at the way their burial rites were compromised by state-imposed restrictions that they secretly exhumed the bodies after the police and mourners had left and then reburied the body after removing the plastic and communicating with the deceased.

Another regulation that had a marked effect was the prohibition of alcohol. During lockdown, when alcohol was prohibited, local police raided several funerals and overturned drums of mqomboti (traditional beer). Sharing beer and food is critical to the communal ethos of ubuntu at funerals. Beer is also needed to reward the gravediggers whose spades and picks are symbolically washed in “soothing” traditional beer.⁹

In other cases, authorities attempted to shorten funerals to prevent people from lingering. At one funeral, in June 2020 at Bhongweni village in Tsolo in the uMhlontlo local municipality, the body arrived from Johannesburg at 4am at which point, and in the dark, the family welcomed neighbours to view it. The next day, 50 people attended the funeral as stipulated under the COVID-19 restrictions. Fearing prosecution, they kept the funeral to under two hours, the mother of the deceased telling us that only two people had spoken at the funeral. She said she had cut it short because she feared that she would go to jail if they broke the law. Later, however, she spoke of regretting the decision because the funeral had felt “incomplete.”¹⁰

The regulation that no more than 50 people could attend a funeral was another problem. In Kentani, an old woman died in her 90s after serving as a prominent community leader. She was much loved and respected. At the time of her death in July 2020, the entire village community was ready and eager to attend her funeral to show their respects. But only 50 people could be invited, and, given the two-hour time restriction, only one or two representatives were able to speak at the funeral. The result was that much was left unsaid, and very many community members were left outside the homestead gate. According to the person who shared this story, there had been over a hundred people gathered in the street outside, all of whom had come to listen and participate as best they could “from afar,” as she put it.¹¹

In a setting where the size of local funerals has grown over time, keeping numbers down to 50 meant that many who wanted to attend were left uninvited. As Vuyokazi from Willowvale explained, the whole question of having to issue invitations was confusing because funerals were traditionally open events that anyone in the village could attend if they wished to show their respects. They were popular, too, she said, because food and beverages were always available.

Our research revealed that in most locations in the former Transkei, local headmen were previously careful to allow only one funeral per weekend so as not to split the loyalty of locals to different families. They did not want people to have to miss paying their respects at one funeral because they were committed to attending another. Yet, as the pandemic took hold in the Eastern Cape during the middle months of 2020, and especially during the second wave over December 2020 and January 2021, it was no longer possible for this rule to be maintained. As a result, funerals were held during the week too, sometimes almost every day, to manage the numbers needing to be buried. As one woman from Lusikisiki explained in an interview in December 2020: “there are now more deaths than days of week in this location. I am not sure what the headmen will do now?”

The decision by the state to limit the number of people attending funerals was by far the most contentious issue. In all 10 municipalities where fieldwork was undertaken, families complained bitterly about this ruling. Some understood the need to reduce the numbers at funerals but said that it was insensitive to apply a single rule to all cases because the people who died were of different ages and standing in the community. The first issue they raised was the right of the state and the police to determine who could attend a funeral. They insisted that funerals are essentially a family affair or something to be determined at the local level. Older, more senior members of the community, they noted, who had returned from the cities long ago and had lived in the area for many years and were very well known and respected, deserved more recognition than a young man who had not yet managed to contribute much to the home.

Some of the interventions by the police in these areas came when families reported that they would only have 50 at the funeral but then did not turn mourners away on the day, allowing dozens more than the prescribed number to gather. In such instances the police would then arrive and ask all those who were not on the invitee list to leave and, if they resisted, the police took harsh action, often driving people away by force or overturning food and beer pots.

Another issue that confused mourners was the imposed requirement that they wash their hands on entering the yard where a funeral was being held. In customary terms, hands were washed only at the grave site when mourners would wash their hands in a mixture of water and the bile of an ox (inyongo) as a concluding gesture. This practice, also known as “washing the spades,” was associated with drinking beer in recognition of the communal labour of the young men who dug the grave. The idea that hands now needed to be repeatedly washed at the beginning and during the service seemed peculiar to many, as it seemed to imply the ritual was coming to an end before it had even started.

Yet another issue that concerned mourners was the confusion surrounding the arrival of the body only on the morning of the funeral. They expected that, as previously, the body would already have been collected from the mortuary the day before and then blessed, washed, and clothed the previous night while close relatives, friends and spiritual leaders spoke to the deceased and put them at ease. The ritual service, which usually began at 10pm and was known as umlindelo (night vigil) or inkonzo yokuqala (first or initial service), gave the family a chance to say their final goodbyes in an intimate setting. In the absence of this process, mourners said, they expected that there would be some welcoming of the body when it arrived at the homestead. They mentioned a practice, ulwamkela umzimba (acknowledging the body in a form of a welcoming ceremony), wherein family members would do a short prayer and welcome the deceased home before proceeding to the tent or the grave site. The fact that the funeral parlours were now not only delivering the deceased on the same day, often while the body acknowledgment was being made in the tent or the yard, but also then proceeding straight to the grave site and burying the body before the mourners could arrive, was regarded as appalling because it meant that the deceased went into the ground without having been welcomed home.

The transit of the body and its accompanying spirit from the city, or local mortuary if it was a local death, was a delicate affair, as explained above. According to various interviewees, there was always the chance that the spirit could be trapped and not move on to the next life. The spirit needed to be nurtured and then welcomed home and constantly reassured that their life had been worthy, and that they were recognised and respected at home, so that they could then move on to the next life with ease. The COVID rules were not adapted to meet these expectations, nor were they communicated clearly to communities in rural areas (reflection from the researchers’ fieldwork notes from the 10 rural communities in OR Tambo District Municipality).

As described by Sharpley (2021) based on an interview with a senior community member of Mtshaze rural Community in Mount Frere, Eastern Cape, the preparations for a funeral and feeding the guests was also a complex cultural process that involved planning and ensuring that the appropriate cuts from the sacrificial beast were distributed amongst the most senior men and close kin, who were also served first. Careful consideration of seniority and gender was observed in matters involving the distribution of food and beer. The consumption and spilling of home-brewed beer at a homestead was an invitation to the ancestors to visit, and this was especially needed at times of death. The seating at the funeral had to be arranged to reflect the status hierarchy based on an acknowledgement of gender and generational divisions. Senior women directed preparation of food and traditional beer, a process that started days before the actual funeral by the young women or oomakoti (young brides). The young women or oomakoti also usually do the washing and dress the body during the night vigil in the case of the deseased being a woman, whereas men carry out this task in cases where the deceased was a man. The process is directed and supervised by elderly men and women of the family and clan. On the day of the funeral, they also had to serve the guests, placing themselves at the front lines of possible infection.¹² Young men in the home and the village were responsible for digging the grave and assisting with the slaughtering of the sacrificial beast, which usually occurred on the Thursday before the funeral at the weekend (also see Bordges 2020). With the banning of alcohol and the restriction on the number of attendees, the critical social process of collective consumption at the funeral was terminated as families now prepared food parcels for guests to take home with them once the funeral service was complete and the body buried. Additional packages were prepared for mourners who came to the gate or sat against the fence outside the yard (Sharpley 2021).

The absence of senior chiefs and traditional leaders at funerals was another feature of these rituals in rural areas during the first wave of COVID in the Eastern Cape. Traditional leaders, as mentioned above, were civil servants and as such were instructed to enforce the COVID rules and regulations. In the Eastern Cape, both the regional House of Traditional Leaders and the Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa publicly endorsed the COVID rules and regulations, confirming that customary practices would cease in their territories and that funerals would have to comply with the COVID rules (see Feni 6 April 2020). But when they realised how opposed people were to the regulations, and how much trauma they were causing in local communities, senior traditional leaders stayed away from funerals and out of the public eye. Many of our respondents said that in the context of all the changes made in the rituals, local people were looking to senior traditional leaders to reassure them and did not want to see a young, junior chief or local headman standing in for the senior traditional leader in the area. Some people said they believed the traditional leaders stayed away because they feared infection and sent younger men, who, they understood, stood more chance of surviving infection. Village residents were also highly critical of urban elites in the ruling ANC who seemed to have forgotten about the rural poor, and hosted funerals in the cities that did not conform to the rules they insisted be enforced in rural areas.

The triple-layer plastic wrapping of bodies by funeral parlour staff for delivery to rural areas, together with the delivery of bodies directly to graves, created enormous anxiety as this became increasingly common practice by the end of June 2020. In Nyandeni local municipality in the OR Tambo District Municipality, one woman explained that “as Xhosa people, we bury our family members in a way that they can come and visit us after death at our homes, and to do this they need to be free, not wrapped in plastic.”¹³ Another mourner said: “I can say that our normal way of doing things are disturbed by these COVID rules, because during funerals it is not our culture to wrap people in plastic.”¹⁴ And a local community leader added: “I can say that it is affecting people emotionally because family expect to be able to communicate with the body at the home, and in other ways before they are buried, but this is not possible through plastic.”¹⁵ Another mourner said that wrapping bodies in plastic caused the spirit of the dead person to become “overheated,” creating misfortune and chaos.¹⁶ One local councillor pointed out that the triple plastic covering made it difficult for people to determine who was in the bag, and that in more than one case this had led to the wrong corpse being buried. He mentioned, in particular, a case where the wrong body was sent from Cape Town to Cofimvaba for burial, while the body meant for Cofimvaba ended up in KwaZulu-Natal.¹⁷ Local residents said that these errors had occurred because so many nurses, doctors and government bureaucrats were on strike and because there were consequently “no longer qualified people to register the dead.”¹⁸ In a number of instances, our fieldworkers were told that communities had chased funeral parlour vehicles away from homesteads because of the alien and unacceptable state in which bodies had been delivered, all wrapped in plastic.

Conclusion

Customary practices in rural areas are fluid and changing. As one respondent noted: “there is no bible documenting our traditions where you can point to the passages and the verses of what needs to be done, or which way is the right way.” “Ours,” he said, “is an oral tradition, it depends on the knowledge old people have of how our customs are meant to be performed, but also what passes as the correct or adequate way of doing things is always open to persuasion and change.” In the rural villages of the Eastern Cape in 2020, customary practices are far from homogeneous or monolithic. They are dynamic and often differ from one area or family to the next, as different versions of custom have been adopted and performed. Families, individuals, churches, healers and even state officials can influence the way things are done. However, within this diversity and contestation, the key concern is always whether the rituals can do the cultural work for which they are intended. Can they secure a legitimate passage from boyhood to manhood, make a woman into a respected wife, or carry the spirit of a deceased man or woman from this life to the next? Today, as is always the case, especially in times of broad social crisis, the meaning of custom is a matter of constant debate and dispute, between genders and generations, between the old and the new. But local people also know that cutting corners or making radical changes is dangerous and can lead to emotional and spiritual anxiety and to family misfortune. If villagers cut the time allocated to rituals, miss phases, ignore critical elements or fail to cook and distribute food and drink in customary ways, they fear they might later pay the consequences since they believe that those who change ritual practices and sequences always run such a risk in the long run. This is no less true of funerals than it is of initiation rites or any other rite of passage.

The involvement of the state in customary affairs is well established in the Eastern Cape, with constant monitoring and debate around male initiation which results in around 100 deaths in the rural areas every year (see Zuzile 2019). The level and nature of the state’s involvement are nevertheless limited and circumscribed here so as not to threaten the cultural legitimacy of the rite of passage, as in the Eastern Cape Customary Male Initation Act of 2016 and 2021. In 2020, however, the state created a special state of exception where rites of passage were suspended in rural areas under a blanket ban and where rural funerals, in particular, were placed under intense scrutiny as potential “super spreader” events. Moreover, as the regulations became ever tighter, and ever more invasive and repressive, local people came to believe that the state was seeing custom as the cause of COVID, especially when they heard repeated references to rural funerals as potentially toxic events from the lips of the president and the MAC. Indeed, as the South African state and medical establishment boxed custom into a corner and constantly used the aberrant behaviour of rural people as a way of deflecting attention away from the limits of its own polices (see Bank, Sharpley, and Paterson 2021), it entrenched a state of exception and effectively closed the gate, ukuvala isango, on the opportunity for families to perform common cultural practices related to community rituals and rites of passage. This denied families the capacity to enact practices of social reproduction and led them to believe that they were being treated as exceptional, disposable citizens, whom the state was no longer prepared to protect.

Richards (2016) revealed how effective a more inclusive, participatory and preventative approach to viral disease management and control was, in this case for Ebola in Sierra Leone, than the top-down biomedical fix of radical isolation and field hospitals that withdraw all those who seem under threat from their communities. Richards’ work shows how, in the absence of a functional local public service, communities, including healers, ritual specialists and villagers, worked intensively with the personnel of international aid agencies and the WHO to debate and adjust customary practices to ensure that they could still do their cultural work, while also serving as a script for preventative practices in the communities at large (see also Fairhead 2016; Tett 2021). Farmer (1996, 2003, 2020), on the other hand, writes of the historical tendencies, in West Africa and elsewhere in the colonial world, for the western biomedical fix in combination with neo-liberal economics, to use conceptions of culture to mark difference, when the use of such difference is merely an excuse to reinforce inequality, coloniality and what he calls “structural violence and extreme suffering” (also Bernault 2020). In the South Africa case, the use of rural areas and customary practices as a scapegoat for state policy failures, and the failure of the state and traditional leaders to adopt a democratic and inclusive approach to public health, has left a legacy of fear, insecurity and mistrust in specific places where it not only threatens the future of democracy in South Africa, but has undermined the well-being and spiritual security of some of the country’s poorest and most vulnerable people and their communities.

The striking feature of the application of Giorgio Agamben’s idea of a state of exception to South Africa is the extent to which the “discarded people” of the homelands are still confined to spatial zones that remain camps on the geographic outside, set apart from the normal space of law, institutional care and inclusive development (see Bank and Sharpley 2022).

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Eastern Cape Socio-Economic Consultative Council (ECSECC) and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) for their financial support in making this research possible. The views expressed in the article are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of the funders of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The project was funded by the Eastern Cape Socio Economic Consultative Council (ECSECC). The municipalities covered were Intsika Yethu, Engcobo, Umhlontlo, Nyandeni, King Sabata Dalindyebo, Umzimvubu, Bizana and Ingquza. The Walter Sisulu University fieldwork team included Vuyiswa Taleni, Mandlakazi Tshunungwa, Puleng Morori, Buleka Shumane, Athi Phiwane, Zipho Xego, Siyasanga Fayini, Balindi Mayosi, Phelisa Ellen Nombila and Singa Siyasanga from the Department of the Humanities, Social Sciences and Law. The authors of the article acknowledge and thank the fieldworkers for the role they played in gathering information under lockdown conditions.

2 Interview, Phelisa Nombila, 30 April 2020.

3 Interview, Mandlakazi Tshunungwa, 5 June 2021.

4 Interview, Siyasanga Phindile Shinga, 20 April 2020.

5 Interview, Phelisa Nombila, 30 April 2020.

6 Interview, Siyasanga Phindile Shinga,10 June 2020.

7 Interview, Mandlakazi Tshunungwa, 24 June 2020.

8 Interview, Balindi Mayosi, 15 August 2020.

9 Interview, Siyasanga Phindile Shinga, 15 May 2020.

10 Interview, Bukeka Shumane, 23 May 2020.

11 Interview, Aneza Mandini, 30 July 2020.

12 Interview, Siyasanga Phindile Shinga, 10 December 2020.

13 Interview, Vuyiswa Taleni, 2 July 2020.

14 Interview, Buleka Shumane, 30 June 2020.

15 Interview, Mandlakazi Tshunungwa, 10 July 2020.

16 Interview, Aneza Madini, 30 May 2020.

17 Interview, Puleng Morori, 21 May 2020.

18 Interview, Balindi Mayosi, 24 June 2020.