Decolonising the Dead or Decolonising Death in Southern Africa? Some Hesitations

This chapter engages with debates around ‘decolonisation’ through lenses offered by recent research on death-related practices and meanings across the African continent, with a particular focus on Zimbabwe. Distinguishing between the urgency of dealing with continuing legacies of past, colonial, and postcolonial violence and death – framed here as ‘decolonising the dead’ – and the difficulties inherent to any attempt to ‘decolonise death’ per se, it focuses specific attention on how questions of materiality, corporeality and the contingent relationalities, agencies, flows, and properties of materials and stuff are pertinent to the changing, uncertain, and unfinished nature of death across the continent and beyond. It concludes by suggesting that if the problem of ‘decolonizing the dead’ circulates around the need to resolve, settle, and complete the unfinished deaths of those denied recognition and ‘proper’ funeral rites to make them ‘safely’ dead, then perhaps a widespread consensus that these processes require corporeal and material interventions of some kind are themselves an indication less of the possibility of ‘decolonising death’ so much as a feature of the emergent, changeable, and profoundly historical human-ness of death, which we all encounter, are involved in, and must respond to.