In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against Rhodesian settler rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that ‘my bones will rise again’. Over a century later bones, bodies and human remains have come to occupy an increasingly complex place in Zimbabwe's postcolonial milieu. From ancestral ‘bones’ rising again as guerrilla fighters and mediums co-operating in the struggle for independence, and later for land, to the resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead; and from the troubling, decaying but profoundly silenced remains of post-independence gukurahundimassacres in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s, to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent post-2000 election violence, human materials are intertwined in Zimbabwe's postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. In this book I examine the complex political efficacies of human remains in what I call Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. This, I will argue, is a multi-faceted, cultural-political phenomena which resonates widely and in diverse ways across the region and beyond, and yet has taken particular form in Zimbabwe in a way which turns on the demanding, problematic and uncertain presence of both human corporeal and immaterial remains and, ultimately, on the unfinished nature of death itself.

Existing scholarship has become increasingly sophisticated in its analysis of the politics of nationalist historiography, of contested memory, commemoration and heritage, and of the changing significance of ‘traditional’ practices relating to ancestors, chiefs and spirit mediums across the region and beyond. These all turn on contested and contingent processes of (re)constituting the past and the dead. But the political imbrications of human remains as material substances, as well as that of returning spirits, in these highly contested processes is only beginning to be understood, despite a growing recognition of the transforming significance of human corporeality. Based on fieldwork, research and reflection spanning two decades, this book seeks to redefine the parameters of this emerging scholarship by exploring how the politics of the dead in Zimbabwe is necessarily intertwined with the changing and indeterminate materialities of human remains.

In Chapter 1 we began to explore how bones occupy a complex place in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. As both extensions of the dead (spirit ‘subjects’ making demands on the living) and as unconscious ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (provoking responses from the living), bones in Zimbabwe not only challenge state commemoration and heritage but also animate a myriad of personal, kin, clan, class and political loyalties and struggles. Political violence since 2000 – especially the troubled elections of 2008 – indicates, however, that it is not only dry bones but also the fleshy materiality of tortured bodies that are entangled in Zimbabwe's troubled postcolonial milieu. This chapter explores the complexity of agencies entangled in the affective presence and emotive materialities of both dry bones and leaky, fleshy bodies in Zimbabwe, in order to understand how the corporeal dimensions of violence and of post-violence are intertwined. If bodies inscribed with torturous performances of sovereignty do have significant, if duplicitous, political affects, how does this contrast with the unsettling presence of the longer dead? What does the passage of time – both the material and leaky decomposition of flesh, but equally the transformative processes of burial – do to the affective presence and emotive materiality of the dead? And how does the corporeality of physical violence – inter-rupting the bodily boundaries and processes of containment through which persons are normally constituted – relate to post-violence efforts to remake and safely settle the dead and resolve troubling pasts. How, in short, do broken bodies become bones?

To address these concerns, I consider how anthropology's turn towards questions of materiality, the properties of materials and the ‘agency’ of objects over the last two decades, can be usefully deployed to consider how both bones and bodies do things in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. Developing the discussion initiated in the previous chapter, here I explore how the different theoretical perspectives offered by Alfred Gell and Bruno Latour about ‘object agency’ are complemented by the work of Tim Ingold; and how all three can be usefully engaged to examine the affective presence and emotive materialities of bones and bodies.

In this chapter I consider more recent events in Zimbabwe, and what they suggest about its politics of the dead, particularly in the wake of President Mugabe's two deaths: first his political death after the so-called ‘Military Assisted Transition’ (MAT) removed him from office in November 2017 (Tendi 2020b; Nyarota 2018; Ndlovu 2019; Moore 2018, forthcoming A), and then his subsequent physical death and burial in September 2019. My purpose is to consider how the multi-faceted politics of the dead discussed in this book has continued or been transformed by events in the late 2010s. It is hard to refute that many aspects of Zimbabwe's politics of the dead are closely linked to Mugabe's long dominance of the country's political sphere, even if much of the critical cultural, political and historical context through which it gained its particular form and traction in the post-2000 period have both a longer durée within Zimbabwe, and reflect phenomena of wider contemporary and historical salience across the region. There are features of Zimbabwe's politics of the dead that could be ascribed to ‘Mugabeism’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2015), such as the National Heroes commemorative complex, the rise of patriotic history (Ranger 2004a), and the violent atrocities of the 1980s and again in the 2000s, and the increasingly ‘noisy silence’ imposed upon the terrible legacies of the gukurahundi. But other aspects may be less attributable to Robert Mugabe per se. For example, there is evidence that Mugabe was never a keen supporter of exhumations, whether related to the gukurahundi killings – where there were obvious reasons for his reticence – or to Rhodesian war atrocities (or indeed to Cecil Rhodes's dubious grave in the Matopos), where such actions had obvious political traction. If for Mugabe, as Chipunza (Chief Curator, NMMZ) explained, ‘the best thing is let the dead lie where they are buried’, then the increasing salience of exhumations in Zimbabwe suggest they are part of a wider phenomena not dependent on Mugabe's particular style of politics. Moreover, the approach developed here, looking at how the excessive uncertainties of bones, leaky bodies, spirits and rumours can animate, shape and give traction to particular kinds of politics, challenges the usefulness of looking for single or individual sources of complex, emergent cultural-political phenomena like Zimbabwe's politics of the dead.

The previous chapters have begun to explore the multi-faceted nature of Zimbabwe's politics of the dead, and the complex efficacies of bones, bodies and material properties and flows that animate it. Chapter 2, in particular, focused on how the corporeal transformations that are essential to ‘proper’ funerary processes, through which people are made ‘safely’ dead, can also be a key feature of the violence that precedes death, and of the ‘secondary violence’ that can follow it, both of which interrupt and disrupt normal processes of containment and transformation through which people, living and dead, are bounded, stabilised and constituted. Managing, containing and stabilising these corporeal transformations are, as a result, also often part of the contested processes that are purported to offer resolution or ‘healing’ to troubling past legacies of violence, disrupted funerals and unresolved death, by ‘remaking’ the dead; processes that are always potentially unfinished or incomplete. This is how the long-standing politics surrounding state commemoration, and more recently ‘liberation heritage’, are connected to and intertwined with the troubling and increasingly noisy silence surrounding the gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s, and with the recurring, deepening violence of the post-2000 period.

This chapter pushes this analysis further in two ways. Firstly, by considering how the excessivity of human remains – animating their ‘alterity’ or ‘otherness’, and which demands but ultimately always retains the potential to defy resolution, stabilisation and ‘closure’ – provokes or reveals a profound uncertainty that is central to Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. And secondly, to begin to explore how this uncertainty, provoked by the alterity of human corporeality but often manifest in a myriad of rumours and competing, contested accounts of past lives and unresolved deaths, can have its own duplicitous political utility as part of a performative stylistics of power located between the tensions of bio- and necro-politics. This question about the politics of uncertainty and the ‘incompleteness’ of death will then be further discussed in Chapter 4 looking at what I call ‘political accidents’.

Here I focus particularly on the much publicised controversies, rumours and contestations that emerged in 2011 around the war veteranled, vernacular exhumations of hundred of bodies from a disused mine at Chibondo, in northern Zimbabwe. As discussed, these were not the first exhumations of human remains dating to the liberation struggle that war veteran groups like the FHT, or indeed NMMZ, had been involved in since independence.

I first met Mai Melissa, or Rosina, in 1995, when I was travelling through Zimbabwe during a break from my undergraduate studies. Approximately 16 years old, she was a dancer with a traditional mbira dance group performing at Great Zimbabwe, in Masvingo District, central southern Zimbabwe. She then lived in the Nemanwa communal areas nearby, at the rural homestead of her elder, half-brother, Peter Rukasha, whose wife, Francesca, was one of the mbira group's leaders. This was my first encounter with the Rukasha family, whom I grew to know very well as they hosted me over long periods of ethnographic fieldwork in the area (1997, 2000–01, 2005–06) and numerous other brief visits in between and since, most recently in March 2020. The story of Mai Melissa's possession by her own father, Sekuru Shorty, in 2006, until her death in late 2007 is very much a story about this family's complex kinship history, the migration of Peter and Mai Melissa's father from Mozambique many years before, and the many trials and struggles that this family have endured since settling in the Nemanwa area shortly after independence in 1980, as ‘vatorwa’ or strangers, living under Headman Nemanwa, in what was then part of the Chief Charumbira's territory.

By the time of my next visit to the area in 1997, then doing research for my honours degree, Mai Melissa had become a mother (to Melissa) and was married to Daniel Mutevedzi, the mbira group's lead dancer and a member of a prominent Charumbira family, where she now resided about one hour's walk from the Rukasha homestead. I visited her and her husband several times during this period, for personal visits or to attend family events, and became gradually aware of her change in status, from being a child living under the authority of her half-brother (then in many respects a proxy for their dead father, Sekuru Shorty), to being a vatete (paternal aunt) to the Rukasha household, and muroora (wife) to the Mutevedzi family. These changes in status were marked by new formalities of respect, and different obligations between the people involved, but also sometimes tension as well as care between her and members of the Rukasha household, especially Francesca, Peter's wife, who herself, like all wives, is a muroora (to the Rukasha family).

The purpose of this chapter and the next is to continue to explore the uncertain and unfinished incompleteness of death (which we began in Chapter 4) by reconsidering the political significance of ancestors and spirit mediums in postcolonial Zimbabwe. The link between mediumship and politics has long animated scholarship on Zimbabwe (Matereke & Mungwini 2012; Lan 1985; Fry 1976, Garbett 1977, 1992; Ranger 1967, 1982b, 1985; Werbner 1991; Shoko 2007; Mawere & Wilson 1995; Mafu 1995; Fontein 2006a, 2015), particularly in the Shona-dominated eastern and northern provinces, but also in relation to the Mwari cult shrines of Matobo in Southern Matabeleland (Nyathi 2003; Ranger & Ncube 1996 Werbner 1989; Ranger 1999; Daneel 1970), and the wider region (Sanders 2008a; Bertelsen 2004; Ranger 2003; Jedrej 1992; Werbner 1989; Akong’a 1987; Packard 1981; Schoffeleers 1979; James 1972; Southall 1953; Krige & Krige 1943). Previous chapters have sought to nuance this by focusing on the transforming materialities of death with which it is imbricated. Implicit in those previous chapters is an approach further developed here, which demands that accounts of spirit encounters – whether ancestral possession events, witchcraft or frightening ngozi spirits – are taken seriously and not reduced to ‘social functionality’, ‘mimesis’ or ‘cultural texts’ in anthropological analysis (all of which over-emphasise meaning or explanation) in order to fully grasp their experiential, ontological and political dimensions. Questioning assumptions about the over-determinations common to spirit mediumship, I emphasise the uncertainties inherent to spirit possession which confront everyone involved, including not only politicians and others seeking the ancestral legitimacy or guidance that spirit mediums can offer, but also mediums themselves. In particular, I examine links between the precariousness of mediumship – both the conditions of precarity that often precede mediumship but also that which results from it – and the uncertainties which characterise relations between mediums and the spirits possessing them, which is often obscured by the historical narratives of successful initiation into mediumship offered by mediums themselves.

The larger purpose here, linking it the broader politics of the dead this book examines, is to explore how the uncertainty of death – its unfinished incompleteness – is not just a matter of the excessivity of human remains, demanding but defying stabilisation into meaning, such as revealed by the controversial Chibondo exhumations of 2011 discussed in Chapter 3.

‘Where there is life, death is a certainty; it's guaranteed’ announced the opening line of a recent advertisement for a ‘worldwide’ funeral insurance policy offering ‘body repatriation’ services for diasporan Zimbabweans. The odd mixture of morbidity and enthusiasm carried by that statement may be common to this peculiar genre of writing, and to the commercial activities it promotes, which have been the subject of a growing body of literature over the last decade or more (Golomski 2018a; Lee 2011). Although I have not focused particular attention here on the emergence of new commercial funerary activities in the context of broader, changing death practices across the region – a fascinating area of research where much remains to be done – the arguments developed in this book do suggest that, contrary to the statement above, there is much that is uncertain and unfinished or incomplete about death in Zimbabwe, and maybe elsewhere.

This book has focused on a particular, but multi-faceted, cultural-political phenomena in Zimbabwe that I call the politics of the dead. It is peculiar to Zimbabwe in so far as it animates, and is animated by, its particular colonial and postcolonial histories; especially the central role that legacies of violence from the liberation war, and from different post-independence periods, continue to play in its politics. But this phenomena is not limited to Zimbabwe's peculiar politics of violence and commemoration. It has both wider and more diverse salience within the country and beyond it; drawing on, feeding and gaining traction in the context of broader trajectories of change and continuity in meanings and practices to do with death. These include the rising significance of ‘liberation heritage’ across neighbouring countries that fought, or supported, struggles for independence, as well as broader patterns in the way that violence and post-violence has political efficacy in diverse contexts across the region. Zimbabwe's politics of the dead also resonates with a wider, revitalised ‘carnal fetishism’ and new (or renewed) concern with bodies and corporeality that scholars like Bernault (2010) and Ranger (2010b) also identified, and which the emergence of innovative funeral and mortuary practices similarly point towards, such as new insurance policies offering repatriation services which I began with above.

This chapter begins to explore the ambiguous or dual agency of bones as both ‘persons’ and ‘objects’ in the politics of heritage and commemoration in Zimbabwe. It discusses the emergence of a new commemorative project known as ‘liberation heritage’ in the 2000s which increasingly focused on the monumentalisation of sites dating to the liberation struggle (1965–1979), and particularly on the identification, reburial, ritual cleansing and memorialisation of human remains of the war dead, within Zimbabwe and across its borders (Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana, Angola and Tanzania). Although related to ZANU PF's rhetoric of ‘patriotic history’ (Ranger 2004a), which became a key feature of Zimbabwe's political crisis in the 2000s, and which the new dispensation under Mnangagwa since November 2017 has continued to lay claim to, this liberation heritage project was also positioned awkwardly in the middle of a tension between two related but distinct pre-existing nationalist projects of the past – heritage and commemoration. Exploring the tensions that both commemorative and heritage processes can provoke between the ‘objectifying’ effects of professional practices, the reworkings of contested ‘national’ histories, and the often angry demands of marginalised communities, kin and the dead themselves (for the restoration of sacred sites or for the return of human remains), the argument that this chapter pursues (setting up what follows in later chapters) is that the politics of death is not exhausted by essentially contested accounts or representations of past fatal events. It must also recognise the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bones in themselves. This is picked up in Chapter 2 which engages further with anthropological discussions emergent in the 2000s about materiality, in order to explore how different ways of thinking about the ‘agency’ of objects and particularly the flows and properties of materials are salient to understanding the corporealities of violence and post-violence in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead.

The burial of Gift Tandare

In early March 2007, while the international media was focusing on the highly publicised, brutal beating by soldiers and police of Zimbabwe's main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC and several other well-known political activists including the lawyer Lovemore Madhuku, the dramatic events surrounding the funeral of Gift Tandare – a little-known MDC activist shot by police on the same day – was being reported in the local independent media. The events unfolded as follows.

In August 2011, just as the Chibondo controversies had begun to settle, another event took place that would prove even more contentious. On 16 August 2011 Zimbabwe awoke to the news that retired General Solomon Mujuru, aka Rex Nhongo (his war alias) – former deputy commander of ZANLA and Zimbabwe's first black army commander, husband of the (then) Vice-President, Joice Mujuru, long-term confidante of President Mugabe, and widely regarded as ZANU PF's ‘kingmaker’ – had died in a mysterious fire at his farm (Alamein or Ruzambo), in Beatrice, 60 km south-west of Harare. Only four days later, on 20 August, accompanied by public statements of grief from across the political spectrum, and amid growing speculation about the cause of his death, Mujuru's remains were buried at National Heroes Acre in Harare, attended by tens of thousands of people. After the ‘inexplicable, horrendous fire accident’ – as President Mugabe then described it – there was only a ‘small pile of charred bones and ash’ to be buried, and workers reportedly needed ‘shovels to scrape his remains off the floor’. ‘Burnt beyond recognition’, unconfirmed reports suggested dental records were needed to confirm his identity; and unusually the ‘coffin remained sealed’. But the closed casket could not contain the plethora of rumours of foul play that emerged in the months that followed, which remain unresolved despite police (and later ‘private’) investigations and an official inquest.

This chapter uses Mujuru's death as way into discussing what I call ‘political accidents’ in Zimbabwe's recent history, in order to further explore the efficacies of rumours and the politics of uncertainty (begun in the previous chapter) in relation to what I term the unfinished nature of death. My purpose is not to offer any kind of determination or commentary about what might actually have happened, or who might have been responsible, but rather to explore the political salience and efficacies of the rumours, conspiracy theories and uncertainties this unresolved death provoked. I am not interested (nor could I claim any such competence) in trying to offer an explanation for what actually might have happened, or in ascertaining responsibility.