I remember her calling me to tell me baby Lynne had died the next day, a Saturday. I went out to the dilapidated, inner city slum building known as SupaQuick, because it was above the SupaQuick Tyre shop in downtown Joburg. It was a large warehouse type three story building where an inner city slumlord had built small 3x3 shacks and was renting them for R 1500 each to mostly foreign people begging for a living. About 400 of these tiny rooms per floor with one central toilet. 

It was noisy and oppressive and we walked to Sukoluhle’s room where we found this beautiful woman, Sukoluhle, in a pool of tears with little Lynne’s lifeless body lying on the bed next to her. Lynne looked so content. Finally at peace with the world. But her struggle was not over. How do you get a body removed of a little child of a poor person with no money in South Africa? Who will help? I phoned the police and they said they would only help if the child died due to suspicious circumstances. I probably could have said, well it was the state’s fault because of Xenophobia and it was the clinic’s fault because of medical neglect and it was all of our fault because we live in a capitalist society that teaches us to ignore the huge wound caused by our greed, but the moment just did not feel like one in which any of those were appropriate. 

I phoned the Methodist bishop, Paul Verryn. At the time, the Cental Methodist church was housing nearly 5000 people in it’s sanctuary. They had fled Xenophobic attacks in our city and were now sleeping in every corner of the church building. Paul was in America at the time but still took my call. He told me to call an ambulance to declare the baby dead, which we did and then the name of an undertaker that could help. I phoned them and they came out. I remember a procession of 5 of us, Sukoluhle, her mom, myself and two men carrying lifeless Lynne’s tiny body through this inner city slum, to the waiting hearse downstairs.

We raised the R 2500 for Lynne’s body to be buried. What Sukoluhle has in her hands in the video is the receipt for the R 2500 which includes the words “baby coffin - R 500”, words which should not exist anywhere in the world but also words which this precious mom should not ever have had to see written to provide for her baby daughter.

We had the funeral at the Central Methodist church. It was supposed to be an open casket funeral. The funeral had started with singing but the coffin and baby had not arrived. After about 15 minutes, I phoned the funeral home to ask what was happening and apparently someone had stolen the clothes baby Lynne had been wearing when she died and so they asked me to come with new clothes. I rushed out with a Methodist priest to the local Pep store and bought Lynne a pretty little outfit and went to the morgue. The Methodist priest was an amazing woman who said she would not mind dressing baby Lynne so she went in and dressed her and then the hearse rushed off to the Central Methodist church with this once again suitably dressed baby and baby coffin for the funeral.

Part of the R2500 we had paid for included the hire of a taxi to take us to the municipal cemetery in Soweto to bury Lynne and so Trish and I and about 15 of Sukoluhle’s friends and family went off to the cemetery. I remember driving for ages when we got in and finally found a section of unmarked graves where those who could not afford tombstones were buried. An excavator was parked next to the hole in the ground where baby Lynne would be laid to rest. We held a short service at the grave sight and lowered this tiny white  coffin into the ground. It was not soft soil, but hard soil filled with big rocks and stones. We all picked up some of this gravel and threw it onto the coffin as it made noise of stones hitting the wood of the coffin until it was covered and then two young men used shovels to cover up the grave.

Lynne was the second baby of friends in 2012 who died due to unnecessary reasons, by the end of 2012, two more had died. 

In this video, three years later, Sukoluhle got a chance to tell her story to a representative of the mayor’s office and she gave them a framed copy of the receipt for the coffin to remember what happens when you treat people through the lenses of xenophobia.

I want project ARC to improve the lives of the many Sukoluhle's in South Africa and all over the world who are "othered" by a system that is supposed to care.