Introduction

In many societies, especially those where individual and collective memory are marked by the trauma that can accompany authoritarian rule, people attempt to come to terms with the past by finding ways of making it relevant to the present. One way to understand this complex relationship with history is through a careful examination of the practice of mourning. Mourning constitutes, above all, a framework from which the deceased's relationship with the living is collectively inventoried, evaluated, and debated so that the social work of memory may graft the experiences of yesterday onto a horizon of expectations. Defining the status of the deceased means making important decisions about how to "move on," since the moment of mourning is not only a moment for weighing the acts and deeds of the deceased, but also a way of testing more generally the criteria for becoming recognized as an ancestor. As death seems increasingly present in the lives of people in many parts of Africa, emerging forms of social mourning echo the need for new political futures, and mourning shows itself as an important terrain for the social production of meaning. The primary objective of this collection of articles is to look at how the process of mourning mediates between the past and the future, and how the practices and perceptions of mourning are linked to real and imagined divisions in political time. Mourning, in other words, is a way of rethinking time.

The opportunity to publish a series of articles on this topic in English is very timely—especially given the recent completion of a special issue in the Paris-based journal Cahiers d'études africaines (Jewsiewicki 2004)—and we appreciate that the editors of the African Studies Review have agreed to open the journal's pages to the larger problematic of mourning as a way of imagining political time.¹ While the articles in this ASR Focus are informed by the complexity of local culture and cultural variation, we have not made a systematic attempt to survey the voluminous ethnographic literature on death, funerals, and mourning (for one recent attempt to do so, see Parkes et al. 1997). Primarily because of our interest in the question of how mourning is related to ways that people imagine regional or national politics, the articles assembled in this issue are focused on various types of "nontraditional" settings: mass media, museums, city streets, the state, the Internet, and so on. Our hope is that the very public nature of these moments of mourning will shed some light on what is happening in the realm of politics and in changes in politics over time. More specifically, the struggle over the deceased is a struggle over what is relevant about the past, but also who will control representations of the present (see Cohen & Odhiambo 1992, 2004).²

Whether the subject is the colonial past or a more recent postcolonial past, the phenomenon of mourning has taken on new importance in many parts of Central Africa, in part because the necessary conditions for its occurrence are not always met. In order for mourning to occur, the body of the deceased must be physically present (Nsanze 2004; Omasombo 2004). In order to achieve a sense of closure with the past, the body of the deceased must be present so that all those who had something at stake in the deceased's life and death can witness the ritual transformation from adult to ancestor (Kopytoff 1971). Without these conditions, in the words of the historian Henry Rousso (1998), "the past cannot pass," and the ghost of the deceased remains obsessively in the present. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the fact that Lumumba's body was never recovered only adds to his status as a mythic hero (Jewsiewicki 1996), and this status continues despite public pronouncements about what really happened (De Witte 2001). The absence of Mobutu's body has a similar but opposite effect: Contemporary political discourse relies heavily on the image of Mobutu as a foil to responsible leadership and civic duty (White, this issue). In both cases, absence of the corpse...