Joost Fontein

Between tortured bodies and resurfacing bones: the politics of the dead in Zimbabwe

Bones occupy a 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 or the troubling remains of gukurahundi victims, it is clear that bones are intertwined in postcolonial politics in ways that go far beyond, yet necessarily implicate, contests over memory, commemoration and the representation of the past. As both extensions of the dead (spirit ‘subjects’ making demands on the living) and as unconscious ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (retorting to and provoking responses from the living), bones in Zimbabwe not only challenge normalizing processes of state commemoration and heritage, but also animate a myriad of personal, kin, clan, class and political loyalties and struggles. Recent political violence indicates that it is not only dry bones but also the fleshy materiality of tortured bodies that are entangled in Zimbabwe’s troubled postcolonial milieu. Therefore, the author seeks to explore and contrast the complexity of agencies entangled in the affective presence and emotive materiality of both bones and bodies in Zimbabwe. If bodies inscribed with torturous performances of sovereignty do have substantial, if duplicitous, political affects, how does this contrast with the unsettling presence of the longer dead? What does the passage of time — both the material and leaky decomposition of flesh, but equally the transformative processes of burial — do to the affective presence and emotive materiality of the dead? How do broken bodies become bones?

The substance of bones: the emotive materiality and affective presence of human remains

This special issue has its roots in a research network known colloquially as the ‘bones collective’ that emerged in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and grew to encompass scholars, professionals and advocates located throughout the UK and beyond. Initiated by Jeanne Cannizzo, Joost Fontein and John Harries, this has grown into a network of two dozen individuals. Its central, uniting problematic has been to query what it is about human bones and bone that provokes emotional, political, visceral and intellectual responses from those who encounter them. The collective hosted a seminar series at the University of Edinburgh between January and March 2008, inviting a broad range of scholars whose work had already focused on encounters and interactions with human bones in a wide range of different ethnographic and political contexts. This was followed in December 2008 by ‘What lies beneath’, a two-day workshop involving participants with backgrounds in museums, archaeology, social anthropology, fine art and reburial advocacy. The aim of the workshop was to explore the emotive materiality and affective presence of human bone – an approach that has proved productive as we work both deductively and inductively to generate theoretical approaches that illuminate encounters with bones. Developing out of the fruitful discussions of the workshop, the collective organized a session for the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) conference in Bristol in April 2009. Although

The Power of Water: Landscape, Water and the State in Southern and Eastern Africa: An Introduction*

A recent report by the Integrated Regional Information Networks (hereafter IRIN) entitled Running Dry: The Humanitarian Impact of the Global Water Crisis epitomises a growing consensus that exists about water. There is, we are often told, a global water crisis, of an unprecedented scale, unfolding. The report quotes a pithy statement by Fred Pearce, author of When Rivers Run Dry, to make the point about where responsibility for the crisis lies, and what the humanitarian stakes are likely to be: ‘Our demand for water has turned us into vampires, draining the world of its lifeblood. What can we do to prevent mass global drought and starvation?’ The IRIN in-depth report refers to a respectable list of other reports, authors and institutions to build its case for an escalating water crisis. According to the International Association of Hydrologists, with ‘a global withdrawal of 600–700 km/a [cubic kilometres per year]’ groundwater is ‘the world’s most extracted raw material’. Some experts warn that ‘the amount of water being used globally is more than twice the quantity being recharged by rainfall every year’, and terse statements about pending threats to international security – that in the 21st century armed conflicts, both international and civil wars, ‘will be fought over water not oil’ – have become common place. The anticipated ‘water crisis’ is not merely

The vitality and efficacy of human substances

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly work devoted to the ‘materialities of death’ in Africa and beyond. Aligned with a burst of activity exploring the changing nature of death (Lee and Vaughan 2008; Jindra and Noret 2011), ‘necro-politics’ (Mbembe 2003) and the ‘governance of the dead’ (Stepputat Forthcoming), much of this work has focused on the material dimensions of the politics of memory, commemoration and what Verdery (1999) calls the ‘political lives of dead bodies’ (cf. Posel and Gupta 2009). In part, this proliferation reflects an increasing recognition of the changing salience of human corporeality across a wide diversity of African contexts in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. These include movements for the repatriation of indigenous human remains from museums in the ‘north’ – such as Sara Baartman (Crais and Scully 2009) and Hintsa’s skull in South Africa (Mkhize 2009), victims of Germany’s Namibian genocide (Dobler 2012), ‘El negro’ in Botswana (Parsons and Segobye 2002) and the bones of Savorgnan de Brazza in Congo-Brazzaville (Bernault 2010) – but they also relate to growing concerns about illicit trades in body parts, ‘trophies’, organs and human tissues (Scheper-Hughes and Wacquant 2002; Jenkins 2010; Harrison 2012). Although sharing a focus on human remains and the political afterlife of the dead, the ethnographic scope of these studies is vast, stretching from the changing significance of funerals, graves and reburials in the politics of land, migration and belonging in South Africa, Kenya, Cameroon, Zimbabwe and elsewhere (Cohen and Odhiambo 1992; Geschiere 2005; James 2007; Fontein 2011), to the propagation of state-led and vernacular exhumations in post-conflict contexts as varied as Rwanda, Kenya (Branch 2010) and Zimbabwe (Fontein 2009, 2010, Forthcoming). In charting the changing meaning of death across the region and beyond, this expanding scholarship has also reflected upon new funerary practices, which have in some contexts created new forms of ritual expertise and, in South Africa in particular, a growing popularity of new embalming practices by ‘funerary entrepreneurs’, exploiting changing popular demands and expectations for the handling, return and burial of the dead (Jindra and Noret 2011; Lamont 2011; Lee 2011). Yet, although it is hard to deny that there have been profound changes to material practices, rituals and meanings associated with death across the region, it is also important to recognize that the salience of human corporealities has a much deeper historical purchase. For example, the presence (and sometimes disquieting absence) of bodies in the ground is central to forging links between claims to ‘autochthony’, entitlement to land, and burial in the soil, as well as in the significance of

Silence, destruction and closure at great Zimbabwe: Local narratives of desecration and alienation

Based on recent research around Great Zimbabwe National Monument in southern Zimbabwe, this article considers the history of Great Zimbabwes ‘destruction’ and ‘desecration’ from the perspective of the elders of the surrounding communities. Although each clan puts forwards competing claims over Great Zimbabwe, their narratives of the processes that have led to its ‘desecration’ are remarkably similar. Using notions of ‘destruction’, ‘closure’, and ‘silence’ these narratives illustrate how the processes through which a place becomes a national and international heritage site can alienate local communities, and thereby undermine the ‘spiritual values’ associated with it. Local people often state that the ‘desecration’ of Great Zimbabwe began with the arrival of Europeans at the end of the nineteenth century. In particular whites are blamed for the destruction they caused as they dug for gold and relics, or for the source of the mysterious sounds and voices heard there in the past. Although archaeologists today often lament the reckless pillaging of ruins across Zimbabwe by early Rhodesian antiquarians, local narratives do not differentiate between the destructive diggings of early antiquarians and the careful, ‘scientific’, excavations of professional archaeologists. Rather, local accounts emphasise the ‘desecration’ caused by a lack of respect for the spirits and the ‘traditional’ rules regarding the site. Other issues raised in local narratives include the removal of artefacts, the appropriation of the site and distancing caused by the encircling fence, management of the site as a ‘business’, and the control of ceremonies. The implication of these narratives is that the fundamental cause of the ‘silence’ of the Voice at Great Zimbabwe is the refusal by the government and National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe (NMMZ) to acknowledge ownership and control of the site by the ancestors and Mwari (God).

‘Those who are not known, should be known by the country’: patriotic history and the politics of recognition in southern Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT Since the early 2000s, scholars have criticised how Zimbabwe’s ruling party has ‘distorted’ history to suit its political purposes through its rhetoric of ‘patriotic history’. There remains a lacuna of studies focusing on what purchase ‘patriotic history’ has had in specific contexts, and what alternative commemorations it has sometimes afforded. Examining efforts in early 2010s by war veterans, relatives and survivors to monumentalise two wartime massacres sites in southern Zimbabwe, this paper explores the localised politics of recognition through which ‘patriotic history’ gained local saliency. Based on interviews at Kamungoma and Hurodzavasikana massacre sites in Gutu district, we examine how Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front’s historiographical project re-fuelled local efforts to remake communities and landscapes marked by violence and death. What is striking at Kamungoma and Hurodzavasikana is the relative absence of unhappy spirits or problematic human remains which have dominated war veteran-led exhumations and National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe’s ‘liberation heritage’ programme elsewhere in Zimbabwe. Although hasty burials, landscapes scarred by violence and unsettled by the mingling substances of bodies and soil are part of the story here, at these Gutu sites the metonymy of past violence is more affective in the scarred bodies of survivors, in the failed futures of youth and kin lost, and of recognition delayed or denied.

Corporealities of violence in southern and eastern Africa

In a recent discussion on the display and concealment of bodies during Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, Nigel Eltringham asserts a common anthropological truism that ‘violence is discursive’, and that ‘the victim’s body is a key vehicle of that discourse’ (2015, 161). This point preambles his argument that scholars should pay ‘the same attention... to post-mortem disposal as has been given to ante-mortem degradation’ (2015, 172) in contexts of violent conflict. His argument points to the need to consider anteand post-mortem violence within continuous, coherent necropolitical frameworks of meaning (Fontein 2010), across often arbitrary or imposed distinctions between life and death. But the argument he develops also questions the validity of differentiating between ‘the instrumental, didactic display of bodies in “cultures of terror”, where the intention is to discipline a population and, in contrast, the concealment of bodies in contexts of genocide, where the intention is to exterminate a population’ (2015, 168). As he shows for Rwanda’s genocide, with comparative examples drawn from Argentina (Robben 2004), Columbia (Uribe 2004) and Zimbabwe (Fontein 2010), this dualism simply does not work. ‘Not all cultures of terror display bodies instrumentally’ and as the Rwandan case clearly shows, ‘not all genocides only involve concealment’ (Eltringham 2015, 167–168). Eltringham builds his case for the didactic and discursive significance of the diverse ways in which corpses were handled and disposed of during Rwanda’s genocide with reference to, amongst other things, Taylor’s well-known analysis of ‘flow/blockage symbolism’ in Rwanda’s conceptions of the body (1999). These, Taylor argued, were reflected in the way that the genocide was carried out, which

“She appeared to be in some kind of trance”: Anthropology and the question of unknowability in a criminal trial

This is a personal account of a recent criminal trial in the United Kingdom that the author was involved in as an expert witness, involving a young Zimbabwean woman who attacked her mother with a knife, when she (as she, her mother, and relatives claimed) was possessed by an evil spirit as the result of another family member’s witchcraft. Evidence for her abnormal state of consciousness was corroborated by police evidence that described her as “in a trance” on the night in question, and despite a wide range of medical and psychiatric assessments, no clear neurological, medical, psychiatric, or sleep-disorder causes for her “possession” were ever established. The article describes the difficulties encountered in producing anthropological evidence for the criminal court that sought to go beyond the limitations of conventional forms of “cultural defense” to argue for the limits of knowledge and the “possibility of other possibilities.” With a nod to Harry West’s notion of “ethnographic sorcery,” this unusual court case illustrates how anthropological expert evidence can be constrained by courts constructing their own kinds of certainty, and yet still have efficacy in unintended ways.

Damming the Zambezi: Light and Power for Which Nation?

There are now very many large dams, most constructed in the second half of the 20th century. Over 50,000 by the year 2000, and still more are being planned and constructed, albeit at a slower rate. In Africa, more than a thousand dams were constructed in the second half of the 20th century. There are also many books about dams, and these too continue to increase. Putting aside the literature that formed part of the high-modernist fervour fuelling the feverish dam building of the mid to late 20th century, there is now a veritable industry of academic critique, on both social and ecological grounds, of large-scale dam schemes. The two books under review here follow in this fine tradition. And they do so admirably. They demonstrate the maturity of the debates at hand, but also stretch beyond them by firmly setting each dam in its multiple political, social, historical and environmental contexts. In so doing, both books are also about much more than two monumental dams built on the Zambezi river system within 20 years of each other. They are about, as the Isaacmans would have it, the ‘delusion of development’, and what happens when large-scale dam development is deployed on the eve of decolonisation, using the distorted ideological frameworks and discriminatory structures of a colonial past to build a utopian but unreachable future. Or, perhaps more precisely, they are about what happens when large hydrological interventions are implemented as a means of

Crossing Africa and Beyond: essays in honour of Marian Charles Jedrej (1943–2007)

In collating this special issue in honour of a much-missed colleague, our purpose is to reflect upon some of Charles Jedrej’s unique, if too often under-recognized, contributions to Africanist anthropology. Almost uniquely, Chuck, as he was affectionately known, crossed various boundaries that still often keep Africanists in check, in particular places, and tied to particular themes. He worked in Sierra Leone and then moved to Sudan. Later he worked on English settlers in Scotland. For many his work was marked by its strong commitment to structural and symbolic interpretation, and this is particularly apparent in his work on West African masking rituals, on Ingessana religious institutions and, in a different way, in his work on dreams. But he also worked on agriculture and ‘deep rurals’ and did consultancies for Department For International Development (DFID) and other development organisations. He wrote about female rain makers in Eastern and Central Africa, and later his work became increasingly historically focused, exploring the transition of Sudanese peoples from the fringes of 19th-century, ‘pre-modern’ states into ‘modern’ 20th-century ‘tribes’, anticipating a renewed historical sensibility in Africanist anthropology which is still gathering momentum. Here we publish a collection of essays by former colleagues and students, all of whom have engaged with his work in different ways and benefitted from his wise, warm, and often witty counsel. Several of these articles were first presented at the University of Edinburgh’s annual Charles Jedrej Lecture in Africanist Anthropology, before revision and publication here. Collectively they give a warm insight into the subtle yet diverse and creative influence that Charles Jedrej’s work continues to have on the broader field of Africanist anthropology. The issue begins by republishing one of Chuck’s own, lesser known articles, on the Southern Funj of Sudan under Anglo-Egyptian rule (1900–1933). This was part of his larger body of work on the people of the Ingessana Hills on the Sudanese–Ethiopian borderlands (Jedrej 1995). In this article Chuck reviews political and administrative developments in southern Funj during the first 30 years of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium. He argues that Ingessana culture was not the outcome of a self-contained history isolated from the wider region but, on the contrary, the consequence of a long duree of engagement with neighbouring groups and shifting centres of authority across this volatile border region, over a very uncertain period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He argues that through the process of defending themselves from subordination, Ingessana culture and religious institutions came to reflect precisely those forces, which included invading imperial powers from the North such as the Funj Kingdom, Turco-Egyptian rule, the Mahdist state, and then the Condominium. He suggests that these circumstances, despite ‘being often inchoate from the perspective of the people’, should be understood as enduring and as ‘having appropriately hostile and unpredictable characteristics’. Although there is not much publically available material about the early decades of Anglo-Egyptian rule in the southern Funj, this era was, he suggests, ‘crucial towards understanding the historical formation of