Pretoria - A legal tussle has ensued in the Johannesburg High Court between a father and his two children regarding the burial his late wife and mother of the children.
The father wanted to bury his wife, but his children had put their foot down as they felt that their mother wanted them to handle the funeral.
Sidney Mkhize turned to the court for an urgent order interdicting his children, Moses and Pamela Mkhize, or anyone instructed by them from removing his wife’s body from the morgue. Audrey Mkhize died about two weeks ago.
He also wanted his children barred from going ahead with the funeral arrangements and asked that the body remained in the morgue for the time being until he launched a further application on a non-urgent basis, where they could vent all their issues.
Mkhize and his late wife entered into a relationship in 1985 and were married in 2002, and the two children were born of the relationship in 1989 and 1994.
Mkhize was convicted of murder in 2007 and spent eight years in prison before he was released on parole in 2015. He stated that when he returned home he found that his late wife and the children had lost their love and affection towards him and his relationship with his son was turbulent.
The married couple had disagreements about the performance of traditional Zulu rituals in the matrimonial home and the late Mrs Mkhize discouraged him from performing these rituals on the basis that she was a born-again Christian.
The court was told that these disagreements contributed to the breakdown of the relationship.
In 2015 he evicted his wife and children from the matrimonial home and obtained interdicts against all three to enforce the eviction. They relocated to family in Lenasia. During the same year he initiated divorce proceedings, but these were never finalised.
Mkhize said in court papers that the interdicts he obtained were obtained in order to comply with his parole conditions – a statement which Acting Judge J Moorcroft said was impossible to understand meaningfully.
Mrs Mkhize and the two children thus formed a family unit since 2007 until her death in 2022 – for 15 years.
Mkhize said that soon after his wife’s death and after the children initially agreed that the funeral be arranged by him out of the former matrimonial home, it became apparent that the members of his late wife’s family were insisting that the funeral be conducted out of the Lenasia house and that she be buried at a nearby cemetery. Mkhize said this was not acceptable to him.
The children, on the other hand, said their father never demanded the right to arrange the funeral and he had never communicated with them since their mother’s death.
Judge Moorcroft said the deceased was a born-again Christian who never practised or observed cultural practices. She was close to her children who naturally wanted to conduct the funeral.
“The late Mrs Mhkize’s express wishes were not before the court but one must infer from the evidence that it would have been her wish that she be buried under the supervision of her children out of the house she shared with them.
“Taking all the evidence into account I concluded that there was no merit in the application,” the judge said.
Pretoria News