Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Liberation heritage: Bones and the politics of commemoration
- 2 Bones and tortured bodies: Corporealities of violence and post-violence
- 3 Chibondo: Exhumations, uncertainty and the excessivity of human materials
- 4 Political accidents: Rumours, death and the politics of uncertainty
- 5 Precarious possession: Rotina Mavhunga, politics and the uncertainties of mediumship
- 6 Mai Melissa: Towards the alterity of spirit and the incompleteness of death
- 7 After Mugabe
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - After Mugabe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Liberation heritage: Bones and the politics of commemoration
- 2 Bones and tortured bodies: Corporealities of violence and post-violence
- 3 Chibondo: Exhumations, uncertainty and the excessivity of human materials
- 4 Political accidents: Rumours, death and the politics of uncertainty
- 5 Precarious possession: Rotina Mavhunga, politics and the uncertainties of mediumship
- 6 Mai Melissa: Towards the alterity of spirit and the incompleteness of death
- 7 After Mugabe
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Information
- The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000-2020Bones, Rumours and Spirits, pp. 247 - 281Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022