To walk the cemeteries of Johannesburg is to explore the city’s own history. The pioneering farmers, the city’s founders, the heroes, the fallen, the striking miners, the Boer concentration camp victims, Christians, Hindu, Muslims, Jews, and others, all equal in the earth. With every beginning, there is a resting place for those who have lived through history, great and small.

It began on a wide savannah grassland one Sunday morning in 1886, when a stonemason named George Harrison stumbled over an outcrop of lichen-covered rock. Being an old-time prospector, he crushed a sample, panned it, and knew what he found was gold. His discovery that day became Main Reef. Overnight the grassland became a tent town for miners, later a town, and then a city. Just as it was born, Johannesburg is a place of many beginnings, of eloquent rises and dramatic history, carrying the stories of many in its graveyards and cemeteries.

The first burial grounds in Johannesburg were farm cemeteries for farmers and their workers. Several are still in existence today. As the town leapt into existence with the discovery of gold, it quickly required new burial facilities. Out of immediate need, the first cemetery was developed between Bree, Diagonal and Harrison Streets. This cemetery had a short life, as the town quickly outgrew its boundaries. The remains of those buried in the original town cemetery were later exhumed and reinterred in 1897.

By 1888 the first regional cemetery, Braamfontein, situated near the central city, had been established. As Johannesburg was still developing in the 1880s, other cemeteries came into being under the control of churches, hospitals and mines. For those who were non-conformist, it was a struggle to find a place to be buried, and the town took over the handling of their burial sites.

The Anglo-Boer War fully occupied the country from 1899 to 1902, and during that time many thousands of Boers died in concentration camps, including one placed in Turffontein Racecourse. Today many of them are buried in Suideroord, in seven coffin-shaped grave areas

It wasn’t until 1907, at a Town Council meeting, that cemeteries came to rest under the city’s auspices. The Parks and Estates Committee reported, ‘The Parks Department has, since its inception in 1904, been a sub-department of the Town Engineer’s Department. We are of the opinion, t hat, owing to the increase in the volume of work in connection with the Parks (which included cemeteries), the time has now arrived for the formation of a separate Department of Parks. We have issued instructions accordingly.’

According to the Parks Department records, the expenditure on parks during that period amounted to £3,222.4.7. There was one cemetery under the control of the Town Engineer, and the average number of burials was 50 per week – 22 white and 28 coloured. Even then, the colour distinction was present.

Johannesburg continued to grow at a burgeoning rate, and with growth came more deaths. By 1905 it was estimated that Braamfontein Cemetery would be fully occupied within 20 months. Three years later, a new cemetery was established on an 84-acre portion of land at Brixton. That year there were 3410 burials. By that time, the town had 20 parks, varying in size from less than one acre to 289 acres, as well as two cemeteries.

On 1 October 1910, the first grave was made in the ‘New Cemetery’, Brixton, with Braamfontein nearly full. No one could imagine that Johannesburg would continue to grow at the pace that it has, continuing to be a challenge for town planners even today.

At that time, mourners requested locations for different religions, and a Jewish section was established, which lies adjacent to the Muslim section. Just outside these sections were places for Chinese, blacks, military, firemen, policemen and many more religious divisions. Cemeteries were laid out in European fashion, with long rows of graves alongside straight roads, divided into even sections. The graves of soldiers who were buried in Braamfontein during the Anglo-Boer War period were laid out in lawn and ribbon flower beds, on the same pattern as the war cemeteries in Europe.

In the early 1900s Mahatma Gandhi approached the Town Council on behalf of the Hindu community to construct a crematorium, which was built in 1918 in the north-western corner of Brixton. By 1956, a new crematorium had been built adjacent to the old crematorium. The old crematorium is now a national monument.

The development of cemeteries echoed Johannesburg’s own apartheid history. Cemeteries came to be developed along racial lines, with Asian and coloured cemeteries in Newclare, Brixton and Lenasia, and so-called native cemeteries in Alexandra and Soweto.

At Newclare, 108 acres of ground was acquired for what was known as the ‘Asiatic, Euro-African and Native’ cemetery. The crematorium in Braamfontein was opened in 1932 at a cost of £9,000. The demand for cremations was greater than could be met by a single furnace and it was proposed to provide for an additional furnace.

The Council purchased ground on Farm Waterval and Braamfontein for a new cemetery, which in 1937 became West Park. The number of cremations in a year in Braamfontein rose to 481, and ‘burials totalled 6,196 European and Non-European’.

The first burial in West Park Cemetery took place on 10 February 1942, and during the year there were 6 603 burials in the four cemeteries under the Department’s control, in addition to which, there were 641 cremations in the Braamfontein Crematorium and 25 at the Hindu Crematorium in Brixton.

The number of cremations continued its upward rise. By 1952, the existing spaces for memorials on the walls at the Crematorium were fully utilised, and it was decided to provide for such Memorials on sites flanking the paths in the Garden of Remembrance.

Newclare Cemetery, the Non-European Cemetery in the south-west of the city, originally catered for burials of ‘Coloured, Asiatic and Bantu’. Park reports stated that ‘The Bantu section is now filled up and this cemetery is now the only one in the city catering for the coloureds and the various Asiatic groups.’

It was only in 1972 that Avalon Cemetery was established, which today, at 172 hectares, is the second largest and busiest in Johannesburg. Avalon holds the mortal remains of many heroes of the struggle against apartheid, including the general secretary of the South African Communist Party and former Umkhonto we Sizwe Chief –of Staff, Joe Slovo, and the women’s struggle leaders, Lillian Ngoyi and Helen Joseph.

During the 1976 uprising, the building holding all burial records for Nancefield, Soweto’s first cemetery, was burned, and all records were lost. With its loss, the history of many of Soweto’s first residents was erased.

Over time, many more cemeteries came under the Parks Board, resulting in 35 cemeteries and two crematoria today under the custodianship of Johannesburg City Parks, and the crematorium at Brixton Cemetery under the control of the Hindu Community. Cemeteries today are no longer developed on racial lines, yet the history of old still remains.