Bringing Home the Bodies: The Personal Cost of the Dalu Air Crash

It’s the day before the Dalu Air crash memorial is to be unveiled in Khayelitsha, and the press photographers are already circling. Teams of council workers have been bussed in to cordon off the area around the hastily constructed memorial sculpture–a sinister black glass pyramid that looks like it would be more at home on the set of a science-fiction B-movie. Why a pyramid? It’s a good question, but despite the number of editorials damning the peculiar choice of design, no one I’ve spoken to, including Ravi Moodley, the Cape Town city councillor who commissioned it, and the sculptor herself, artist Morna van der Merwe, seems to be prepared to give me (or anyone else) a straight answer.

The site is also swarming with conspicuously fit security men and women, all wearing stereotypical black suits and ear pieces, who eye me and the other press representatives with a mixture of contempt and distrust. Among the great and the good lined up to attend tomorrow’s ceremony are Andiswa Luso, who’s pipped to be the new head of the ANC Youth League, and John Diobi, a Nigerian high level preacher-cum-business-mogul who reportedly has ties with several US mega-churches, including those under the sway of Dr Theodore Lund, who hit the headlines worldwide with his theory that The Three are the harbingers of the apocalypse. It’s rumoured that Diobi and his associates are putting up the reward money for the discovery of Kenneth Oduah, the Dalu Air passenger deemed most likely to be the fourth horseman. Although the South African Civil Aviation Authority and the National Transportation Safety Board have insisted that no one on board Dalu Air Flight 467 could have survived, the reward has already ignited a hysterical man-hunt, with locals and tourists alike eager to get in on the action. And the fact that Kenneth’s name is etched on the memorial, despite the absence of his remains or DNA being discovered in the wreckage, has angered several Nigerian evangelical Christian groups–another reason for the high security presence.

But I’m not here to antagonise the security staff or petition the VIPs for an interview. Today, it’s not their stories I’m interested in.

Levi Bandah (21), who hails from Blantyre, Malawi, meets me at the entrance to the Mew Way community hall. Three weeks ago, he travelled to Cape Town in order to search for the remains of his brother Elias, who he believes is one of the casualties killed on the ground when the fuselage cut a deadly swathe through the township. Elias was working as a gardener in Cape Town in order to support his extended family back in Malawi, and Levi suspected something was wrong when Elias did not contact the family for over a week.

‘He sent us a text every day, and money came to us every week. My only choice was to travel here and see if I could find him.’

Elias is not listed among the deceased, but with so many unidentified remains–most believed to belong to illegal immigrants–still awaiting DNA matches for formal identification purposes, this isn’t a guarantee of anything.

In many African cultures, including that of my own–Xhosa–it is vital that the bodies of the deceased be returned to their ancestral homeland to be reunited with the spirits of the ancestors. If this is not done, it is believed that the spirit of the deceased will be restless and will cause grief to the living. And bringing home the body can be an expensive business. It can cost up to 14,000 rand to transport a body back to Malawi or Zimbabwe by air freight; without help, a sum way beyond the reach of the average citizen. For the families of refugees, transporting a body over two thousand kilometres by road is a daunting and gruesome prospect. I’ve heard stories of funeral directors colluding with families to disguise bodies as dried goods in order to cut the air-freight costs.

In the days following the crash, Khayelitsha rang with the sound of loudspeakers, as families of the victims petitioned the community to donate whatever they could so that bodies could be returned to their homelands. It is not unusual for the bereaved to receive double the amount they need; with many people from the Eastern Cape migrating to Cape Town for work, no one knows when they will be the one in need of help. And the refugee communities and societies are no different.

‘The community here has been generous,’ says David Amai (52), a soft-spoken and dapper Zimbabwean from Chipinge, who has also agreed to talk to me. Like Levi, he is in Cape Town waiting for the authorities to give him the go-ahead to bring the remains of his cousin, Lovemore–also a victim of the crash devastation–home. But before he left Zimbabwe, David had something Levi’s family didn’t have–the certainty that their loved one was dead. And they didn’t hear it from the pathologists working the scene. ‘When we did not hear from Lovemore, at first we did not know for sure if he had died,’ David told me. ‘My family consulted with a herbalist (sangoma) who performed the ritual and spoke to my cousin’s ancestors. They confirmed that he had connected with them and we knew then that he was gone.’ Lovemore’s body was eventually identified by DNA and David is hopeful that he can soon bring his remains back home.

But what if there is no body to be buried?

With no remains to bring back to his family, Levi’s only option was to collect some of the ashes and earth at the site, which would be immediately buried when he returned home. This is where his story veers into the stuff of nightmares (or farce). As he attempted to gather a small bag of earth, an over-zealous cop swooped down on him, accusing him of stealing souvenirs to sell to unscrupulous tourists and ‘Kenneth Oduah hunters’. Despite his protestations, Levi was arrested and thrown in a holding cell, where he languished, in fear of his life, for the weekend. Thankfully, hearing of his plight, several NGOs and the Malawian Embassy stepped in, and Levi was released relatively unscathed. His DNA has been taken and he’s waiting for confirmation that Elias is among the victims. ‘They say it won’t take long,’ he says. ‘And the people here have been good to me. But I cannot return home without some part of my brother to restore to my family.’

As I leave the site, I receive a text from my editor saying that Veronica Oduah, the aunt of the elusive Kenneth, has landed in Cape Town for tomorrow’s ceremony, but has refused to speak to the press. I can’t help wondering how she must be feeling. Like Levi, she is living in a cruel limbo of uncertainty, hoping against hope that somehow, her nephew hasn’t joined the ranks of the dead.