There she was, lifeless, lying on a hospital bed, her children and close family crying uncontrollably while nurses clad in COVID-19 protective gear wrapped the body to take it to a mortuary at the local hospital.
By Artwell Sithole
Musaemura Simango, a very influential member of our Rimbi community and a mother to ten, grandmother of 15 had died barely an hour after being admitted at a local hospital.
Earlier in the week, she had been complaining of chest pains and because she was such popular person, many people routinely flocked her home to check on her.
In the mind of everyone who visited her, Covid-19 never rang alarm because like many rural set-ups in Zimbabwe the deadly pandemic had only made waves in urban centres.
When COVID-19 was first reported in Zimbabwe, stories of people getting infected or dying reached rural communities as mere gossip or should we say hear-say.
Even when numbers turned into names and faces of people known by everyone, to rural folks it remained alien and a disease of the well to do.
So Simango’s death came as a big shock to every Rimbi community member and it made people realize that everyone is at risk.
Her death and the whole funeral process disrupted our Ndau cultural norms as alien protocols had to be observed.
This meant that there was no room for our own cultural processes which we have religiously observed since time immemorial.
Being an elder in our community, her body was expected to lie in state at her house for the night before burial but due to COVID-19 all that was thrown out through the window depriving many villagers of the opportunity to pay their last respect to a woman they so loved heartedly.
Knowing how influential she was, most people would have loved to give her a befitting send off but all that could not happen as the whole funeral process was presided over by strangers without any attachment to the deceased.
Furthermore our culture advocates for the chemai nevanochema approach but this was never to be the case as only 30 people were allowed to attend the funeral of such an important figure who had it not been COVID-19 could have pulled over a thousand people.
As Simango’s coffin was lowered down at the family cemetery, the big lesson our community and the rest of the country got from this pandemic is that our lives have been disrupted for good.
Handshakes which we have used as a form of greeting are no longer possible, attending burial of our loved ones is now limited to close family members and are now being presided over by trained and protected people. Many other disruptions I cannot list here have taken grip on our lives but for our own good as contagious diseases like COVID-19 can be fatal if preventative measures are disregarded.
The COVID 19 pandemic is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). It was first identified in December 2019 in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern in January 2020 and a pandemic in March 2020. As of 18 March 2021, more than 121 million cases have been confirmed, with more than 2.68 million deaths attributed to COVID 19, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history
In Zimbabwe, 36,553 cases and 1 508 deaths have been reported since March 2020.
