Mr Njini lived to 45. He was an old man  Togara Sanyatwe was
buried in the sprawling West Park cemetery on the edge of
Bulawayo at 83 years of age. The granite headstone reveals
nothing more about his life but he would already have been
considered an elder of his community at the time those who now
lie around him were being born.  They include Zah Zah Ngwenya,
who was just 28 at the time of her death on the same day as Mr
Sanyatwe. A little further on lies Mabutho Njini, who died a
fortnight shy of his 46th birthday, but he still enjoyed more
years than Norah Manyati, who barely made it past 30.  Their
graves sit at the beginning of a narrow road running through the
newest part of the cemetery. Its length is a chronicle of
Zimbabwe's surging death rate and plummeting life expectancy as
political crisis and economic collapse have fused with rampant
Aids to transform the graveyards from resting places for the
elderly at the end of a full life to the premature final stop
for a generation barely out of youth.  In