Winfilda Potoroya’s family could not begin to afford two or three hundred dollars for a proper funeral when the 36-year-old mother died of Aids last week.

So they improvised: they paid the police a Z$40 bribe to avoid the costs of transporting her body to the mortuary, having a postmortem examination and obtaining a death certificate. They cut a wardrobe in half for a coffin and put a mattress beneath her decomposing corpse when it began leaking fluids. They rented a street vendor’s trolley for another Z$10 and wheeled the makeshift coffin eight miles (12km) to a patch of common land that has become an unofficial cemetery for Zimbabwe’s poorest. There they paid Z$1 for a plot and laid their mother to rest – mattress and all – in a hole they dug themselves.

The whole affair cost Z$51 (less than 1p), raised largely through donations from friends and neighbours, but it was hardly a dignified send-off. Mrs Potoroya’s body was wrapped in old blankets, not the customary shroud. Barely a dozen mourners attended the burial because the family could not afford food for a wake. Her headstone will be an old wooden board.

The manner of her burial has merely compounded her family’s grief. “I’m very upset . . . The way she was buried is giving me nightmares,” said her daughter, Memory, 14, who fears that her mother’s spirit will be angry. “It’s very painful, but when you have no money what can you do?” asked Edisi Masarambani, 74, Mrs Potoroya’s grandmother.

Such stories are common in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, where 3,000 people a week die from Aids alone, life expectancy is the lowest in the world and 94 per cent are unemployed. It has become a country where millions can barely afford to live but the cost of dying is even more prohibitive. “For many a death in the family is financially an absolute disaster,” said Oscar Wermter, a Jesuit priest who works in Mbare, one of Harare’s poorest districts, and often receives desperate appeals for help from the bereaved.

In happier times Zimbabweans clubbed together to form burial societies, paying monthly dues into a common pot that would finance funerals, but with saved money halving in value almost daily most have long since collapsed.

An official told The Times that each month roughly 50 adults and 180 children receive paupers’ burials in mass graves at Harare’s municipal Granville cemetery. Father Wermter said that such conduct showed “the depth and enormity of [Zimbabwe’s] present disaster . . . Shona culture believes in the ongoing relationship between the living and the dead, and not to bury a person properly would cause people to be gripped by terrible fear that their ancestors might take revenge.”

Roadside vendors sell flimsy coffins for Z$50 but even if they had the money there is another reason why Zimbabweans might hesitate to spend lavishly nowadays. The graveyards attract thieves. Expensive coffins have to be covered in concrete so that they are not plundered for their brass handles. Slabs of plain granite vanish within days. “It’s rampant,” the owner of a gravestone company said. On the rare occasions when he sells a tombstone he makes sure that its surfaces are all covered with inscriptions.

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