The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe, 2000–2020: Bones, Rumours and Spirits
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; a...
