It’s the holidays in Zimbabwe. Time to celebrate by unveiling a family tombstone

HARARE, Zimbabwe — Chipo Benhure started saving early for a holiday season to remember in Zimbabwe, but it wasn’t for a party or vacation. “I didn’t want to be found wanting come Christmastime, so I was putting aside a few dollars each month,” Benhure said, standing at a crowded and dusty ground on the outskirts of the capital, Harare. Zimbabweans traditionally use long holidays such as the Christmas season to hold often joyous graveyard rites that include song, dance, Christian prayers or invitations for ancestral spirits to protect and guide the living. In Zimbabwe’s urban areas this holiday season, household yards and other open spaces have been turned into makeshift tombstone manufacturing zones by people trying to eke out a living. While some in Zimbabwe regard the ceremony as an essentially Indigenous ritual associated with the ancestral cult and reactivation of the spirits, others view it as a Christian event to remember deceased relatives, said Ezra Chitando, a professor in the University of Zimbabwe’s religious studies department.