This chapter begins to explore the ambiguous or dual agency of bones as both ‘persons’ and ‘objects’ in the politics of heritage and commemoration in Zimbabwe. It discusses the emergence of a new commemorative project known as ‘liberation heritage’ in the 2000s which increasingly focused on the monumentalisation of sites dating to the liberation struggle (1965–1979), and particularly on the identification, reburial, ritual cleansing and memorialisation of human remains of the war dead, within Zimbabwe and across its borders (Mozambique, Zambia, Botswana, Angola and Tanzania). Although related to ZANU PF's rhetoric of ‘patriotic history’ (Ranger 2004a), which became a key feature of Zimbabwe's political crisis in the 2000s, and which the new dispensation under Mnangagwa since November 2017 has continued to lay claim to, this liberation heritage project was also positioned awkwardly in the middle of a tension between two related but distinct pre-existing nationalist projects of the past – heritage and commemoration. Exploring the tensions that both commemorative and heritage processes can provoke between the ‘objectifying’ effects of professional practices, the reworkings of contested ‘national’ histories, and the often angry demands of marginalised communities, kin and the dead themselves (for the restoration of sacred sites or for the return of human remains), the argument that this chapter pursues (setting up what follows in later chapters) is that the politics of death is not exhausted by essentially contested accounts or representations of past fatal events. It must also recognise the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bones in themselves. This is picked up in Chapter 2 which engages further with anthropological discussions emergent in the 2000s about materiality, in order to explore how different ways of thinking about the ‘agency’ of objects and particularly the flows and properties of materials are salient to understanding the corporealities of violence and post-violence in Zimbabwe's politics of the dead.

The burial of Gift Tandare

In early March 2007, while the international media was focusing on the highly publicised, brutal beating by soldiers and police of Zimbabwe's main opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai of the MDC and several other well-known political activists including the lawyer Lovemore Madhuku, the dramatic events surrounding the funeral of Gift Tandare – a little-known MDC activist shot by police on the same day – was being reported in the local independent media. The events unfolded as follows.