In 1898, just before she was hanged for rebelling against Rhodesian settler rule, Charwe Nyakasikana, spirit medium of the legendary ancestor Ambuya Nehanda, famously prophesised that ‘my bones will rise again’. Over 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 as guerrilla fighters and mediums co-operating in the struggle for independence, and later for land, to the resurfacing bones of unsettled war dead; and from the troubling, decaying but profoundly silenced remains of post-independence gukurahundimassacres in Matabeleland and the Midlands in the 1980s, to the leaky, tortured bodies of recent post-2000 election violence, human materials are intertwined in Zimbabwe's postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. In this book I examine the complex political efficacies of human remains in what I call Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. This, I will argue, is a multi-faceted, cultural-political phenomena which resonates widely and in diverse ways across the region and beyond, and yet has taken particular form in Zimbabwe in a way which turns on the demanding, problematic and uncertain presence of both human corporeal and immaterial remains and, ultimately, on the unfinished nature of death itself.

Existing scholarship has become increasingly sophisticated in its analysis of the politics of nationalist historiography, of contested memory, commemoration and heritage, and of the changing significance of ‘traditional’ practices relating to ancestors, chiefs and spirit mediums across the region and beyond. These all turn on contested and contingent processes of (re)constituting the past and the dead. But the political imbrications of human remains as material substances, as well as that of returning spirits, in these highly contested processes is only beginning to be understood, despite a growing recognition of the transforming significance of human corporeality. Based on fieldwork, research and reflection spanning two decades, this book seeks to redefine the parameters of this emerging scholarship by exploring how the politics of the dead in Zimbabwe is necessarily intertwined with the changing and indeterminate materialities of human remains.