Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T18:59:29.988Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Burying “Zik of Africa”: The Politics of Death and Cultural Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2021

Wale Adebanwi
Wale Adebanwi*
Affiliation:
African Studies Centre, School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
*
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article uses the death and burial of one of the most important political leaders in twentieth-century Africa, and Nigeria's first and only ceremonial president, Rt. Hon. (Dr.) Nnamdi Azikiwe, to reflect on how and why the deaths and burials of significant persons in Africa represent occasions for the (re)production and management of cultural crises. It argues that the extant literature on the death of consequential persons in Africa either understates or overlooks the generalizability of the “essential contestability” of the material and immaterial relations of the past, present, and future provoked by such deaths. This is particularly visible when these relations are disturbed or challenged by the absence of the person and the process of their burial or reburial.

Keywords

deathburialAzikiweculturecrisispoliticsIgboNigeriaAfrica
Type
“Big Men” Pasts
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 63 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 41 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adebanwi, Wale. 2008a. The Cult of Awo: The Political Life of a Dead Leader. Journal of Modern African Studies 46, 3: 335–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Adebanwi, Wale. 2008b. Death, National Memory and the Social Construction of Heroism. Journal of African History 49, 3: 419–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Afigbo, A. E. 1972. Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in South Eastern Nigeria, 1898–1914. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Almeida, Sónia Vespeira de. 2007. Campanhas de Dinamização Cultural e Acção Cívica do MFA: Uma Etnografia Retrospectiva. Arquivos da Memória 2 (nova série): 47–65.Google Scholar
Almeida, Sónia Vespeira de. 2009. Camponeses, cultura e revolução: Campanhas de dinamização cultural e acção cívica do MFA (1974–1975). Lisboa: IELT-Colibri.Google Scholar
Almeida, Sónia Vespeira de and Ferreira, Sónia 2015. Dictatorships and Revolutions in Portugal and Chile: Ethnography, Memory and Invisibilities. History and Anthropology 26: 597–618.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anigbo, Osmund A. C. 1982. The Igbo Idea of Death in Relation to Their Social Order. Africa: Rivista trimestrale di studi e documentazione dell'Istituto italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente 37, 4: 515–27.Google Scholar
Azikiwe, Nnamdi. 1945. Assassination Story—True or False? Onitsha: African Book Company Ltd.Google Scholar
Azikiwe, Nnamdi. 1969. Origins of the Nigerian Civil War. Ottawa: Office of the High Commission for Nigeria, 1969.Google Scholar
Babarinsa, Dare. 2003. House of War: The Story of Awo's Followers and Collapse of Nigeria's Second Republic. Ibadan: Spectrum Books.Google Scholar
Bernault, Florence. 2006. Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa. Journal of African History 47, 2: 207–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernault, Florence. 2010. Colonial Bones: The 2006 Burial of Savorgnan De Brazza. African Affairs 109: 367–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bernault, Florence. 2013. Carnal Technologies and the Double Life of the Body in Gabon. Critical African Studies 5, 3: 175–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernault, Florence. 2015. Aesthetics of Acquisition: Gabonese Spectacles and the Transactional Life of Bodies and Things. Comparative Studies in Society and History 57, 3: 753–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Branch, Daniel. 2010. The Search for the Remains of Dedan Kimathi: The Politics of Death and Memorialization in Post-Colonial Kenya. Past & Present 206, supplement 5: 301–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carrington, Walter. 1996. A Tribute from the African Diaspora. Guardian, 15 Nov.: 22.Google Scholar
Coates, Oliver. 2018. “His telegrams appear to be hysterical, but he is very astute”: Azikiwe's Spectacular Self and the 1945 General Strike in Nigeria. Journal of African Cultural Studies 30, 3: 227–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohen, David William and Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. 1992. Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa. London: James Currey.Google Scholar
Cohen, David William and Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. 2004. The Risks of Knowledge: Investigations into the Death of the Hon. Minister John Robert Ouko in Kenya, 1990. Columbus: Ohio University Press.Google Scholar
Coleman, James. 1958. Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comaroff, John L. and Comaroff, Jean. 1993. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Comaroff, John L. and Comaroff, Jean, eds. 2018. The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dudley, Billy J. 1978. The Political Theory of Awolowo and Azikiwe. In Otite, Onigu, ed., Themes in African Social and Political Thought. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers, 265–82.Google Scholar
Echeruo, M.J.C. 1974. Nnamdi Azikiwe and Nineteenth-Century Nigerian Thought. Journal of Modern African Studies 12, 2: 245–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferreira, Sónia and Vespeira de Almeida, Sónia. 2017. Retrospective Ethnography on 20th-Century Portugal: Fieldwork Encounters and Its Complicities. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 25, 2: 206–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flint, John E. 1999. “Managing Nationalism”: The Colonial Office and Nnamdi Azikiwe 1932–43. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27, 2: 143–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fontein, Joost. 2010. Between Tortured Bodies and Resurfacing Bones: The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe. Journal of Material Culture 15, 4: 423–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fontein, Joost. 2014. Remaking the Dead, Uncertainty and the Torque of Human Materials in Northern Zimbabwe. In Stepputat, Finn, ed., Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 114–40.Google Scholar
Fontein, Joost. 2018. Death, Corporeality, and Uncertainty in Zimbabwe. In Robben, Antonius C.G.M., ed., A Companion to the Anthropology of Death. Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 337–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fontein, Joost and Harries, John. 2013. The Vitality and Efficacy of Human Substances. Critical African Studies 5, 3: 115–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fuller, Harcourt. 2008. Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor: Kwame Nkrumah, Symbolic Nationalism and the Iconography of Ghanaian Money 1957—The Golden Jubilee. Nation and Nationalism 14, 3: 520–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geschiere, Peter. 2014. The Funeral in the Village: Urbanites’ Shifting Imaginations of Belonging, Mobility, and Community. In Diouf, Mamadou and Fredericks, Rosalind, eds., The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 49–66.Google Scholar
Goody, Jack 1962. Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the Lodagaa of West Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, April. 1995. Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in Kenya: “Burying Otieno” Revisited. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 20, 4: 883–912.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grindal, Bruce T. and Rhodes, Robin. 1987. Anthropology and Journalism Share Several Similarities. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator 41, 4: 4, 11–15, 33.Google Scholar
Hannerz, Ulf. 2002. Among the Foreign Correspondents: Reflections on Anthropological Styles and Audiences. Ethnos 67, 1: 57–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harrington, Walt. 2003. What Journalism Can Offer Ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry 9, 1: 90–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobsbawn, Eric and Ranger, Terence, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ingold, Tim. 2014. That's Enough about Ethnography! HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, 11: 383–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jackson, John L. Jr. 2008. Toward an Ethnographic Lingua Franca: Communication and Anthropology. Journal of Communication 58, 4: 664–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jindra, Michael and Noret, Joël. 2011. Funerals in Africa: An Introduction. In Jindra, Michael and Noret, Joel, eds., Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon. New York: Berghahn Books, 1–14.Google Scholar
Kalusa, Walima T. 2017. The Politics of the Corpse: President Levy Mwanawasa's Death, Funeral and Political Contestation in Post-Colonial Zambia. Journal of Southern African Studies 43, 6: 1137–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lamont, Mark. 2011. Decomposing Pollution? Corpses, Burials, and Affliction among the Meru of Central Kenya. In Jindra, Michael and Noret, Joel, eds., Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon. New York: Berghahn Books, 88–108.Google Scholar
Lee, Rebekah and Vaughan, Megan. 2008. Death and Dying in the History of Africa since 1800. Journal of African History 49, 3: 341–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1948. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Mbiti, John S. 1969. African Religions and Philosophy. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Newell, Stephanie. 2016. Life Writing in the Colonial Archives: The Case of Nnamdi Azikiwe (1904–1996) of Nigeria. Life Writing 13, 3: 307–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nkrumah, Kwame. 1957. Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. New York: International Publishers.Google Scholar
Nwakanma, Obi. 2005. Nnamdi Azikiwe: A Celebration. Online Nigeria, 19 Nov. At: http://nm.onlinenigeria.com/templates/?a=6057 (accessed 24 Mar. 2019).Google Scholar
Nwakanma, Obi. 2013. Madiba (A Tribute to Nelson Mandela). Sahara Reporters, 9 Dec. At: http://saharareporters.com/2013/12/09/madiba-tribute-nelson-mandela-obi-nwakanma (accessed 15 Jan. 2019).Google Scholar
Nwakanma, Obi. 2017. Harlem, the “New Negro,” and the Cultural Roots of Azikiwe's Nationalist Politics. History Compass 15, 8: e12402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nwankwo, Arthur Agwuncha. 1996. Zik: Emancipation as a Paradigm. Enugu: Fourth Dimension.Google Scholar
Obiwu, , 2007. The Pan-African Brotherhood of Langston Hughes and Nnamdi Azikiwe. Dialectical Anthropology 31: 143–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posel, Deborah and Gupta, Pamila. 2009. The Life of the Corpse: Framing Reflections and Questions. African Studies 68, 3: 299–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roitman, Janet. 2013. Anti-Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Smertin, Yuri. 1977. Kwame Nkrumah. Moscow: Progress.Google Scholar
Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2004. Burials and Belonging in Nigeria: Rural-Urban Relations and Social Inequality in a Contemporary African Ritual. American Anthropologist 106, 3: 569–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2018. Migration, Death, and Conspicuous Redistribution in Southeastern Nigeria. In Robben, Antonius C.G.M., ed., Companion to the Anthropology of Death. Hoboken: Wiley and Sons, 71–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Harold. 1993. The Plot to Kill Zik. Harold Smith's Libertas Homepage, 16 April. At: http://www.biafraland.com/harold_smith/players.htm#Indiscreet (accessed 16 Apr. 2020).Google Scholar
Soyinka, Wole. 1996. Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ståhlberg, Per. 2006. On the Journalist Beat in India: Encounters with the Near Familiar. Ethnography 7, 1: 47–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stamp, Patricia. 1991. Burying Otieno: The Politics of Gender and Ethnicity in Kenya. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16, 4: 808–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stepputat, Finn. 2014. Introduction. In Stepputat, Finn, ed., Governing the Dead: Sovereignty and the Politics of Dead Bodies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 3–10.Google Scholar
Tonkin, Elizabeth. 1990. Zik's Story: Autobiography as Political Exemplar. In Barber, Karin and de Moraes, P. F., eds., Self-Assertion and Brokerage: Early Cultural Nationalism in West Africa. Birmingham: Birmingham University African Studies Series, 35–45.Google Scholar
van der Zweerde, Evert. 2007. Friendship and the Political. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 2, 2: 147–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Gennep, Arnold. 1960. Rites of Passage. Vizedom, Monika B. and Caffee, Gabrielle L., trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Van Meter, Mary Jane S. and White, Ronald K.. 1982. The Death Crisis and Pastoral Counselling. Journal of Religion and Health 21, 3: 235–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Verdery, Katherine. 1999. The Political Life of Dead Bodies: Reburials and Poststructuralist Change. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar