RESTORING LE REPENTIR CEMETERY

WHEN any native or resident of Georgetown sees Le Repentir cemetery today, it brings great sadness to one’s heart.  The cemetery is now the most horrible place in the city and makes the worst slums appear to be celestial.

The cemetery is always waterlogged even after days of sunshine and is flooded after a shower of rain, and relatives who can reach the burial site may sometimes have to place the coffin in a grave with floodwater.
The burial areas are overgrown with high grass and thick bushes and though the high trees with thick girths were cut down some 10 years ago, many tall trees have since grown up among the tombs, cracking or breaking them up.  Worse, the main roads of the cemetery have become rubbish dumps with old furniture, refrigerators, mattresses, car bodies, electronic waste and garbage of every description. Relatives trying to use the cemetery for burials would often have to pay to clear the roads so that hearses could drive to the graves.

The ornate grillwork, vases and statuary which decorated graves in the 19th and early 20th centuries have all been plundered by scrap-metal dealers and even the marble sheets with the names and details of the dead have been removed from the tombs.  This vandalism has destroyed an important segment of Guyana’s history.

The vagrants who sleep among the tombs and the thieves and bandits who conceal themselves in the high grass and bushes regularly attack and rob mourners and visitors.  A number of teenagers on bicycles snatch cellphones and handbags and disappear in the surrounding slum areas.

Before the cemetery had declined into the conditions, it is in presently,  it was once famed as the largest and best-kept cemetery in the Caribbean.  The perimeter drainage trench which surrounded the cemetery was well kept and was never stagnant, but kept flowing.  It was continuously cleaned of all weeds and was periodically dredged.  The burial areas were therefore always drained and dry.  Along the edges of the cemetery, hundreds of coconut palms were planted, and this improved its aesthetics, prevented earth slippage into the trench and provided an income to the Town Council from sale of the coconuts.

A team of weeders kept the cemetery clear of grass and bushes and were permitted to sell their grass to owners of animal-drawn vehicles and those who kept livestock, such as cows and goats.  A few rangers on bicycles kept the cemetery under surveillance at all times, and no one would attempt to clandestinely throw rubbish there.  The two arterial roads running across the cemetery from north to south and east to west were first built of red brick and then were asphalted and were tree-lined  with rare forest species;  on the east of the eastern part there was an avenue of majestic Royal Palms.  From these main roads branched off the narrower roads leading to the burial beds.  The parapets of the stretch of road from the Louisa Row gate leading to its junction with the east-west artery were planted with marigolds, African daisies and other bright flowers.  An impressive obelisk with Masonic symbols and a crucifix with a life-sized crucified Jesus stood at the junction.  The ruins of this monument still survive. The bridges and gates from Sussex Street, Broad Street and Lousia Row were sturdy and well built and were opened at 6 a.m. and closed at 6.30 p. m.  Today, the Broad Street bridge has disappeared and the Sussex Street bridge is in a rickety condition.

In these high days, one entered the cemetery with a feeling of awe and the beauty and peacefulness of the place were a comfort to mourners—the decline of the cemetery set in after independence.
Before independence, the town councillors were elected on a restricted franchise in contrast to the position after independence, when it became universal suffrage.  The councillors of those pre-independence times tended to be businessmen and professionals, some of whose names are commemorated by the city streets.  They brought high management skills to the governance of the Town, served pro bono publico and were never corrupt and it was they who created the well-kept Town and its various services, including Le Repentir cemetery.  Georgetown deservedly earned the appellation of “The Garden City.”   After independence, there was a short interregnum of professionals and national politicians as councillors and administrative workers and these included Dr Cheddi Jagan for a short time, Mr LFS Burnham, Sir Lionel Luckhoo, Mr R. B. Gajraj and Mr Claude Merriman and Town Clerks such as Mr E. A. Adams and Mr Elmo Mayers, or Town Treasurer such as Mr Romalho and Clerk of Markets such as Mr J.A.M. Pacheco and these kept alive the pre-independence tradition of governance.

By the 1970s, however,  the Council became fully democratised and the councillors became ordinary folk, many of working class origins. Without many management skills, the workforce responsible for administration became politicised.  The decline of the various services set in and among them was Le Repentir cemetery.  The media, for many years, have carried complaints and criticisms of the various facets of City Hall and its activities, so there is no need to repeat them.

The cemetery could be restored to its past glory, but such restoration could only be achieved by full central government funding and the establishment of independent and largely autonomous management of it.
Together with this restoration, consideration should also be given to leasing a large area on the eastern part of the cemetery to an investor to develop private funerary services to the public along North American lines.  One of the local undertakers may be interested in making the investment.

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