The Sunday Mail
Stranger than Fiction
Tendai Chara
DURING the late 1980s, Stephen Mafunde of Mafunde Village, Bocha, died and was buried at the local community cemetery.
The following morning, members of his family visited his burial place with the intention of conducting traditional rituals. Lo and behold — just like Jesus Christ — Stephen’s body and the coffin were missing from the grave.
Bewildered, family members sought to understand the circumstances behind this startling discovery, all to no avail.
And the family was in for another “treat”.
Barely a month after the mystery that shook the community to its core, a local man working in South Africa and unaware of Stephen’s death, came forward with puzzling news. According to him, he had seen Stephen at Park Station in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Within a year, two more people claimed the same thing. However, there was always a slight twist. Those who claimed to have bumped into Stephen at Park Station said he somehow melted into the crowds whenever they tried to get closer for a chat.
As time went by, reports of such sightings became infrequent until they stopped altogether during the early 1990s. However, the mystery of the vandalised grave was never solved, neither was the issue of Stephen’s strange sightings. Up until this day, some locals still believe that Stephen is alive and well in South Africa, where they believe he has since built a new life. Others believe that Stephen might have faked his own death and moved to South Africa. Sekuru Friday Chisanyu, a traditionalist, said what happened to Stephen was caused by an avenging spirit.
“What the people saw was the shadow of a dead person. In Shona we call that sengu. The body might have been taken from the grave for ritual purposes. Those that came forward claiming that they had seen the deceased might have been involved in the disappearance of the body,” Sekuru Chisanyu said.
This is, however, not the only case in which dead people are said to have been seen mingling with the living. In 2016, a Masvingo family was left traumatised when a woman approached them claiming to be customarily married and living with one of the family’s sons in South Africa. The woman claimed that her husband had directed her to the family’s rural homestead near Rudhanda Shopping Centre in Gutu.
But, it emerged, to the woman’s utter disbelief, that the man she was referring to as her husband had actually died 10 years earlier.
“This might sound fictitious, but it actually happened. A woman came all the way from South Africa and claimed that she was living in that country with a man who had died 10 years earlier. The woman had to be shown her supposed husband’s grave for her to believe the family’s side of the story,” said Tinashe Muvori, a Gutu resident who is privy to the strange story.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines resurrection or anastasis as the concept of coming back to life after death. Other online sources further state that in a number of ancient religions, a dying-and-rising god is a deity, which dies and resurrects.
The resurrection of the dead is a widespread belief in the Abrahamic religions. Jesus’ resurrection is the central focus of the Christian faith. Many people are not comfortable discussing death. However, it has been a subject of intense debate since time immemorial.
