Your family may not have been on speaking terms with the neighbours for years, but once they have a death in the family, you are all in mourning.
Out of respect for the death, you are forbidden to play loud music or indulge in any other activity that may disturb the peace. Each evening until the day of the burial, you’re expected to attend prayer services at which the deceased is remembered through songs and speeches. Your family bakes scones and prepares meals to help feed the scores of mourners visiting the bereaved family every day.
That’s the expectation in many townships and urban centres. Once there is a death, differences are set aside as the community unites in solidarity with those who have lost a loved one.
Ubuntu, the elders teach us, demands that the entire community observes the mourning period because “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu — I am because you are”.
Somehow, again judging by social media, it has become acceptable to gloat over a political opponent’s death – to celebrate the fact that they are no more.
Openly celebrating someone’s death, no matter how much the families hated each other, is taboo.
In some communities, at the height of the political violence that claimed thousands of lives during the turbulent 1980s, it was not unheard of that residents of an area controlled by one political party would send genuine condolences and funeral donations to a family that lost a member in a neighbouring area controlled by the rival group.
The political atmosphere was too volatile for anyone to physically cross the border separating the communities, but they would find creative ways of showing their sympathy and paying tribute.
Ubuntu transcended political allegiances.
That was in the bad old days when political differences, for too many of our communities, were a matter of life and death. Literally.
We are in a different world now, a democratic country in which freedom of association is guaranteed and political differences ought not to turn people into mortal enemies.
Yet, judging purely by social media, a death — especially if it’s a polarising political figure — brings out the worst in us.
Somehow, again judging by social media, it has become acceptable to gloat over a political opponent’s death — to celebrate the fact that they are no more.
What has become of our society and the concept of ubuntu — botho? Have our values as a people living in a free, albeit still unequal and unjust, society changed so drastically that we have abandoned the basic teachings that were transmitted from one generation to the next?
When news broke that struggle stalwart and former cabinet minister Pravin Gordhan had been admitted to hospital, many of us watched in horror as some of our compatriots took to social media to celebrate and express their wishes for the worst.
Most of those expressing such feelings regarded themselves as his political opponents, largely because of the stance he took against what has come to be characterised as the state capture years.
In their condemnation of the man, they ignored all the good he did in his five decades of service to the struggle for liberation. They sought to portray him, wrongfully so, as an agent of the economic elite who used his government position to keep the poor downtrodden.
Some of them did so, they believe, in the name of former president Jacob Zuma — the head of state who Gordhan openly opposed once evidence emerged suggesting he was using his power at the Union Buildings to enrich his friends, the Gupta family, and their associates.
Zuma probably had some personal grievances against the man he first met when he came out of his 10 years on Robben Island in the early 1970s.
Those close to Zuma say that towards the end of their relationship, he felt deeply disrespected by Gordhan who would apparently sometimes grab his jacket and walk out of a cabinet meeting as the then president was speaking.
By the time he fired Gordhan from the cabinet, the two of them were barely on speaking terms.
But even Zuma acknowledges, like he publicly did yesterday, that were it not for Gordhan giving him money to travel to Eswatini for a debriefing session with the ANC after the arrest of his comrades in 1975, he would have either ended up back on Robben Island or dead.
So why must his followers seek to vilify the man, some even resorting to racial slurs, when Zuma himself acknowledges the contributions Gordhan made — often at great personal sacrifice — to the struggle for South Africa’s liberation?
Of course he was no saint; Gordhan had his faults, but he was no devil either.
The very least we can all do, whether we agreed with what he stood for or not, is to allow his family and friends to mourn him in peace and dignity.
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