The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020: Bones, Rumours & Spirits

Joost Fontein's book explores the complexities of human remains in Zimbabwe's postcolonial politics, challenging current scholarship on memory, commemoration, and the changing significance of traditional death practices. It examines how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics.

Format: Hardback
Length: 366 pages
Publication date: 18 March 2022
Publisher: James Currey

A fascinating and thought-provoking study that offers new perspectives on the anthropology of death and postcolonial politics.

In 1898, just before she was executed for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, the renowned spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, made a prophetic proclamation that my bones would rise again. A century later, bones, bodies, and human remains have taken on an increasingly complex role in Zimbabwe's postcolonial milieu. From ancestral bones reawakening in the fight for independence, to the resurfacing of bones of unsettled war dead; and from the troubling decaying remnants of post-independence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are intricately intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that extend far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration, and the representation of the past.

In this book, Joost Fontein delves into the complexities of human remains in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. Challenging and innovative, he takes us beyond the current scholarship on memory, commemoration, and the evolving significance of traditional death practices, to examine the political implications of human remains as material substances, as duplicitous rumors, and as returning spirits. By linking the indeterminacy of human substances to the productive yet precarious uncertainties of rumors and spirits, the book highlights how the incompleteness of death is politically productive and ultimately stems from the problematic, entangled excessivities of human material and immaterial existence, and is deeply intertwined with the stylistics of postcolonial power and politics.

Joost Fontein is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. He previously served as the Director of the British Institute.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781847012678