Avalon Cemetery in Soweto.

Avalon Cemetery in Soweto

Avalon Cemetery, which opened in 1972, has always been in the back of my mind since I started taking photographs of cemeteries. It was this almost mythical cemetery where huge funerals happen, and that stretches for miles and which is supposedly full of steel cot like frames over the graves. More than 300,000 people are buried on this huge 430 acre site and it was expected that it would reach its capacity by 2010, although a new section is starting to come in use.
My real aim at Avalon was the Mendi Memorial and with that as a goal I headed out on 17 December 2010 to see what I could find. For starters I was not 100% sure where the main gate was, but Google Earth and my GPS set me on the straight and narrow and if you follow the directions will probably get there, although at times I was not sure where I was going. The entrance to the cemetery can be found at the Google Earth co-ordinates 26°17'18.29"S , 27°52'25.85"E or download the KMZ file

Panoramic view of Avalon (1506x420 new window)

One of my biggest concerns was safety, and I did stop at the gate and asked the guards whether it was safe and they were confident that it was. However, being a holiday period and a weekday it may be that it was quieter than usual. The dustbowl did not exist, green grass flourished and extremely heavy rain for that week had flooded quite a few of the roads. The cots were there, but there were a lot of stones in very good condition, and overall the maintenance seemed to be very good. To actually capture on photographs the complete cemetery is a huge task that I cannot undertake, but apparently there are records, and there is some sort of system in place to find graves. I made a second trip in April 2011 to find a few more graves and I suspect I will go back again one day. The photographs I have chosen cannot even begin to represent what I have seen at Avalon, but I hope they do dispel some of those urban legends. To their credit I always found the staff were helpful and courteous, and I came away having done what I had wanted to do for many years.
Images open in a new window.

Mendi Memorial	16 June 1976 Memorial	Overview	Rough outline
Joe Slovo grave	Helen Joseph grave	Jabu Khanyile grave
	Hector Pietersen grave