Book Description

In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against colonial rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that ‘my bones will rise again’. 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 in the struggle for independence, and later land, to resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead; and from the troubling decaying remains of postindependence gukurahundi massacres to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent election violence, human materials are deeply intertwined in the politics of memory, commemoration and death. Providing a new perspective on death practices, the author examines human remains as material substances, as rumours, and as returning spirits, and shows how the incompleteness of death is politically productive, and deeply intertwined with postcolonial power and politics.