‘Where there is life, death is a certainty; it's guaranteed’ announced the opening line of a recent advertisement for a ‘worldwide’ funeral insurance policy offering ‘body repatriation’ services for diasporan Zimbabweans. The odd mixture of morbidity and enthusiasm carried by that statement may be common to this peculiar genre of writing, and to the commercial activities it promotes, which have been the subject of a growing body of literature over the last decade or more (Golomski 2018a; Lee 2011). Although I have not focused particular attention here on the emergence of new commercial funerary activities in the context of broader, changing death practices across the region – a fascinating area of research where much remains to be done – the arguments developed in this book do suggest that, contrary to the statement above, there is much that is uncertain and unfinished or incomplete about death in Zimbabwe, and maybe elsewhere.

This book has focused on a particular, but multi-faceted, cultural-political phenomena in Zimbabwe that I call the politics of the dead. It is peculiar to Zimbabwe in so far as it animates, and is animated by, its particular colonial and postcolonial histories; especially the central role that legacies of violence from the liberation war, and from different post-independence periods, continue to play in its politics. But this phenomena is not limited to Zimbabwe's peculiar politics of violence and commemoration. It has both wider and more diverse salience within the country and beyond it; drawing on, feeding and gaining traction in the context of broader trajectories of change and continuity in meanings and practices to do with death. These include the rising significance of ‘liberation heritage’ across neighbouring countries that fought, or supported, struggles for independence, as well as broader patterns in the way that violence and post-violence has political efficacy in diverse contexts across the region. Zimbabwe's politics of the dead also resonates with a wider, revitalised ‘carnal fetishism’ and new (or renewed) concern with bodies and corporeality that scholars like Bernault (2010) and Ranger (2010b) also identified, and which the emergence of innovative funeral and mortuary practices similarly point towards, such as new insurance policies offering repatriation services which I began with above.