Dignifying death: The politics of burial in Bulawayo

Journal of Religion in Africa

Volumn 34, Issue 1-2, 2004, Pages 110-144

  Ranger, Terence ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61849085145     PISSN: 00224200     EISSN: 15700666     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/157006604323056741     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. A valuable survey is Hilary Sapire and Jo Beall, 'Urban Change and Urban Studies in Southern Africa', Journal of Southern African Studies, 21, 1, March 1995
2. David Anderson and Richard Rathbone, 'Urban Africa. Histories in the Making', in Anderson and Rathbone, eds., Africa's Urban Past, James Currey, Oxford, 2000. p. 11
3. Carl Hallencreutz, Religion and Politics in Harare, 1890-1980, Swedish Institute of Missionary Research, Uppsala, 1998
4. A particularly striking example is Paul Maylam and Iain Edwards, eds., The People's City. African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban, University of Natal Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1996. This says a very great deal about the making of African urban cultures though it does not discuss death and burial
5. This was a re-statement of an old controversy, most cogently expressed by Bernard Magubane in his 'A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa', Current Anthropology, 12, 4-5, 1971. Magubane's critique was aimed mainly at Clyde Mitchell's classic study of urban dance and fashion, which he thought trivial and presentist, ignoring or suppressing the realities of colonial dispossession and repression
6. sought to defend myself against the possibility of such a criticism in my own study of Beni dance associations, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, UCP, Berkeley, 1975, p. 4
7. John Parker, 'The Cultural Politics of Death and Burial in Early Colonial Accra', in Anderson and Rathbone, pp. 205-221
8. Another treatment of the politics of death in Ghana is Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter. A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2000, chapter 3, 'Placing and Spacing the Dead'. Here the differences with Zimbabwe are even more striking. Not only does Green expand on 'intramural sepulture' but she insists that the Bremen missionaries were quite indifferent to how or where their converts were buried. This contrasts strongly with the determined attempts by missionaries in Zimbabwe to replace burial among the rocks with Christian village cemeteries
9. Terence Ranger, 'Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth Century Zimbabwe', Past and Present, 117, pp. 158-94
10. There have been a number of recent attempts in southern African studies to make use of this kind of evidence and of participant observation of funeral ceremonies. See: G.M. Dennie, 'The Politics of Burial in South Africa, 1886-1990', doctoral thesis, Johns Hopkins, 1997
11. Deborah Durham and Frederick Klaits, 'Funerals and the Public Sphere of Sentiment in Botswana', Journal of Southern African Studies, 28, 4, December 2002
12. Harri Englund, 'The Village in the City, the City in the Village', JSAS, 1, March 2002, p. 153
13. G.M. Dennie, 'Flames of Race, Ashes of Death: Re-inventing Cremation in Johannesburg, 1910-1945', JSAS, 29, 1, March 2003
14. Sapire and Beall remarked in 1995 that 'the urban history of Zimbabwe is in its early phases'. Since then, however, extracts from earlier, unpublished, dissertations have been presented in Brian Raftopoulos and Tsuneo Yoshikuni, eds., Sites of Struggle, Weaver, Harare, 1999. Moreover, there is a second wave of urban historical research at the University of Zimbabwe, the most impressive product of which so far is Ennie Chipembere's M.Litt. thesis, 'Colonial Policy and Africans in Urban Areas, Salisbury, 1939-1964', UZ, July 2002. This discusses the township culture of death on page 245. Many people have worked and are working on African urban life in Bulawayo
15. Durham and Klaits, 2002, p. 777
16. Tsuneo Yoshikini, 'Notes on the Influence of Town-Country Relations on African Urban History before 1957: Experiences of Salisbury and Bulawayo', Raftopoulos and Yoshikuni, eds., Sites of Struggle, chapter 3
17. S. Msebele, whom Busani Mpofu interviewed in Mzilikazi in June 2000, remembers 'an area full of graves' where Mzilikazi now stands. When Mzilkazi was being developed in the late 1940s some of the children's bones were unearthed, causing much consternation
18. Pathisa Nyathi, Traditional Ceremonies of AmaNdebele, Mambo, Gweru, 2001, pp. 133-134
19. Home News, 11 October 1958. On 16 July 1960 the Home News wrote of the 'few unused graves in the old graveyard on the Old Falls Road [which] are solely reserved for certain old and much respected Africans of very long residence in Bulawayo.' The Home News was edited by the Chairman of the BATAB, Charlton Ngcebetsha, who figures largely in this article
20. Home News, 6 June 1959
21. There is, of course, a large literature on women's church associations, particularly in South Africa. The most interesting recent discussion can be found in Rebekah Lee's 2002 Oxford doctoral thesis on African women in Cape Town. In chapter five, 'Associational Life in Town', Lee draws on the huge unpublished report compiled in 1955 by Mia Brandel, 'The Needs of African Women', which lists and discusses church associations, savings groups, welfare societies and burial associations. Lee herself draws on rich oral evidence to show how crucial burial societies were to black women in Cape Town and how they often belonged to many overlapping associations. In a fascinating article, 'Conversion or Continuum? The Spread of Islam among African Women in the Cape Town', Social Dynamics, 27, 2, 2001, Lee discusses women's disillusionment with the expense, hierarchies and 'maternalism' of the Christian associations. She cites a former Anglican whose funeral was attended by women wearing black rather than the more prestigious white. 'I thought I would love to be buried in a church by people who are wearing white' - but her husband had not paid his dues and only got 'cruel' black
22. Home News, 20 July 1957
23. Home News, 20 September 1956
24. Home News, 1 and 13 September
25. For the life and death of Thompson Samkange see Terence Ranger, Are We Not Also Men? The Samkange Family and African Politics in Zimbabwe, 1920-1964, James Currey, London, 1995. As I explain in the Introduction to this book, the idea of it was conceived in the Samkange family graveyard on Tambaram farm
26. Bantu Mirror, 19 February and 22 July 1944
27. Home News, 5 November and 10 December 1955
28. For discussion and photographs of such pilgrimages see Terence Ranger, Voices From the Rocks. Nature, Culture and History in the Matopos Hills in Zimbabwe, James Currey, Oxford, 1999
29. Joshua Nkomo, Nkomo. The Story of My Life, Methuen, London, 1984, p. 52. In his book Nkomo was writing thirty years after the event but he spoke to African Christian audiences about Westminster Abbey when he returned in 1953
30. See Terence Ranger, 'Joshua Nkomo: Nationalist and Cultural Nationalist', Bulawayo, April 1999
31. For the interaction of the Mutasa chiefs and young Manyika urban intellectuals see Fidelis Duri, 'The Role and Status of Mutasa Traditional Rulers during the Colonial Era, 1898-1979', History MA thesis, University of Zimbabwe, March 1999. The late Chief Kadzima Chimukoko Mutasa had been a patron of the cultural nationalist Manyika Association in the late 1930s, seeking to raise funds in his chieftaincy area to support the activities of the Association in the towns
32. For the earlier history of the Matabeleland Home Society see Terence Ranger, The African Voice in Southern Rhodesia, 1898 to 1930, HEB, London, 1970, chapter eight
33. and Ossie Stuart, 'Good Boys, Footballers and Strikers: African Social Change in Bulawayo, 1933-53', doctoral thesis, SOAS, 1989
34. For his career as a workers' leader see Terence Ranger, Are We Not Also Men?, 1995, pp. 115, 116, 117, 123, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147
35. Bantu Minor, 24 June 1944
36. Bantu Mirror, 12 and 16 April 1952. Sipambaniso died while touring 'the country districts' to collect evidence on the plight of African war veterans
37. In March 1951, for instead, one of Lobengula's queens, Mafungo, died. At her funeral Sipambaniso once again demanded 'a special burial ground for the Matabele royal family and other distinguished Matabele', Bantu Mirror, 17 March 1951
38. Terence Ranger, Voices From the Rocks, pp. 114, 123-124, 158
39. For the relationship between the Matabeleland Home Society and the chiefs of the Shangani Reserve see J. Alexander, J. McGregor and T.O. Ranger, Violence and Memory, James Currey, Oxford, 2000, pp. 89 and 90
40. Home News, 29 May 1954 and 19 July 1958
41. Bantu Mirror, 19 December 1956. The Home Society in turn repudiated the Kumalo clan's right to determine what should happen at Entumbane: 'No Zulu or Matabele Royal Family can pose as guardians or custodians of the same Royal Family's prestige or respect for its burial place. The Zulu or the Ma-Ndebele in the raw had an admirable taste and decorum towards such things. When it came to respect for Royalty . . . the tribe were the unchallenged watchdogs'. As for 'Ndebele history', 'the word Ma-Ndebele is very cosmopolitan like the word British. It takes Welsh, Scots, Shona, Indian, Ndebele, English, Jew etc to make British. The same goes for Amandebele'. This was too much a Bulawayo definition of identity to be acceptable to traditionalists
42. Home News, 29 August 1953
43. Joshua Nkomo, Nkomo. The Story of My Life, pp. 8-11. Ironically many people in Matabeleland today say that the region's current problems of under-development, violence and hunger exist because no umbuyiso has been carried out for Joshua Nkomo
44. Daily News, 16 June 1960
45. Unfortunately the Apostles and Zionists had no press of their own. However, academics have subsequently explored their ideas about death in detail. See I. Mukonyora, 'The Dramatization of Life and Death byjohane Masowe', Zambezia, 23, ii, 1998
46. One of the two case studies in Durham and Klaits's study of funerals in Botswana, cited above, is of death rituals in the Baitshepi spirit church. A pioneering study of an African prophetic church as an expression of urban culture is Timothy Scarnecchia, 'Mai Chaza's Guta re Jehova (City of God): Gender, Healing and Urban Identity in an African Independent Church', JSAS, 23, 1, March 1997
47. I. Phimister and C. Van Onselen, 'The Political Economy of Tribe; Animosity: A Case Study of the 1929 Bulawayo Location "Faction Fight"', Journal of Southern African Studies, 6, 1, October 1979
48. Terence Ranger, 'The Meaning of Urban Violence: the 1929 Bulawayo Faction Fight', Economic History Department seminar, University of Zimbabwe, April 2000; for the Manyika dandies see especially Stanlake Samkange, The Mourned One, HEB, London, 1975. I place 'Ndebele' in quotation marks here because the mobilised faction consisted of young men from all the subordinated ethnicities of the old Ndebele state. Thus 'Kalanga' youth gangs, whom Van Onselen and Phimister take as 'Shona' were in fact part of the 'Ndebele' coalition. It was this wider 'Ndebele' identity which Sipambaniso managed to incarnate
49. Richard Werbner, 'Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and Re-inscription in Zimbabwe', in R. Werbner, ed., Memory and the Postcolony, Zed, London, 1998
50. Zvidzai Ndava, 'A Study of the 1918-1919 Spanish Influenza Pandemic in Southern Rhodesia', History BA thesis, University of Zimbabwe, 1987
51. Terence Ranger, 'The Influenza Pandemic in Southern Rhodesia: A Crisis of Comprehension', in D.A. Arnold, ed., Lmperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, Manchester, 1988