Short Abstract

“No such thing as a natural death” is a common aphorism in eastern Africa. Death is linked to structures of power, especially state actions; death has a spiritual politics, seen as supernatural, and in veneration of ancestors. This panel explores these interpretations through historical cases

Long Abstract

“There is no such thing as a natural death” is an aphorism that is often heard, and some would argue widely believed, across eastern Africa. In this region, death is readily linked to the policies, structures and infrastructures of power, especially the actions of the state; but death also has a spiritual politics, linked to beliefs in the supernatural, the occult, and to veneration of the ancestors. The politics of death has a spectrum of interpretations that epitomize the “African Prism” that is our conference theme. The papers on this panel will explore the full range of these interpretations through historical case studies. Foucault’s “biopolitics” and Mbembe’s “necropolitics” connect our cases to the power of the state, but other indigenous meanings of death provide vernacular, or local cultural interpretations. There is no equality in death, and even crises that contribute to large-scale killings are mediated by politics. Our cases will include stories of the martyrdom and South Sudan’s liberation leaders; ‘whodunnit’ mysteries of Kenya’s many political assassinations; the murders of political opponents in Mozambique’s Cold War; the selection of victims by Mau Mau’s death squads; the escalation of killing in remote lands as arms and munitions became cheaply available; the evils of ethnic-cleansing and its justifications; ritual killings as both cleansing and vengeance; and the racialised politics of death among colonial Kenya’s white settlers. To encompass these cases, we propose two panels (10 papers), the first drawing together papers from the eastern African region, the second focussing on Kenyan cases.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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