Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper I present a case study of how death came to be for a daughter whose father, a victim of enforced disappearance, torture and extrajudicial killing in the Gambia, was reburied and given a state burial seven years after his death in government custody.

Paper Abstract:

Human remains are central to the politics of “truth”, “reparation” and “reconciliation” in the era of human rights (Ferrándiz and Robben 2015). Katherine Verdery (1999) insisted that the corpse and the material and symbolic objects that accompany it (bones, bodies, graves, urns) carry political, cultural and social issues that are reinforced in moments of political transition. It is indeed around the control of human remains and the dead that contemporary necropolitical issues are now articulated (Ferrándiz and Robben 2015). As Rojas-Pérez (2017) points out, the possibility of localization (whereness), however imperfect and dubious it may be, insures the ineluctable temporality of enforced disappearance. The state funeral of Solo Sandeng, which I attended in January 2023 and the conversations I had with his 22-year-old daughter, reveal how the reburial ceremony, however symbolic it may be, opened a space-time of mourning, memory, and the coming to be of death. Forensic and humanitarian exhumation has been recognized as "a necessary step in the completion of the funeral ritual" as funeral rituals play a central role in the process of "making" death (Crossland 2015: 242). Not respecting prescribed funerary practices – which is all too common in conflict situations – is a way of “killing” the dead by denying them a hypothetical post-mortem life. In this paper I offer a reflection on Sandeng’s daughter’s experience of the state funeral and how the ritualized treatment of her fathers remains, as a concrete form of symbolic justice, impacted her mourning process.