Death, Belief and Politics in Central African History

CHAPTER V - Politics of the Gravesite: Funerals, Nationalism and the Reinvention of the Cemetery on the Zambian Copperbelt

CHAPTER V Politics of the Gravesite: Funerals, Nationalism and the Reinvention of the Cemetery on the Zambian Copperbelt Walima T. Kalusa Introduction In early 1962, an unusual funeral/burial procession led by the United National Independence Party (UNIP) snaked its way from the municipal mortuary to the cemetery in Luanshya, a small mining town in the Zambian Copperbelt.1 Conspicuous at the head of the cortège was a municipal hearse with four coffins of Southern Rhodesians who had died in a road traffic accident. There were also many officials of the nationalist party’s Women’s Brigade, the Funeral Committee and the choir. Belying the solemnity characteristic of most African death ceremonies, the Women’s Brigade ‘blocked roads to traffic on the funeral route’, brusquely demanding money as a funeral contribution from motorists and other passers-by. The brigade also ensured that the mourners were distributed evenly ‘in single file on either side of the hearse’, no mean task given that there were no less than fifteen thousand mourners in the procession.2 On the other hand, the Funeral Committee gave each mourner a small stick, while the choir endlessly sang of the deceased. Its songs, which apparently attracted more people to join the cortège, ranged from sorrowful dirges to Christian hymns. But more popular were the choir’s political songs imploring Kenneth Kaunda, Simon Kapwepwe and other top UNIP leaders to liberate the country from British colonial hegemony and to secure power from reluctant European settlers. Arriving at the cemetery, the Women’s Brigade divided the mourners according to gender, with women sitting ‘on the eastern side of the graves and the men on the western side’.3 The brigade also saw to it that children, hands linked together, stood quietly not too close to the graves. At the same time, Funeral Committee officials, who thoroughly dominated the burial rites in the cemetery, went around collecting more money and the sticks they had earlier given to the mourners. They then invited a clergyman from the Free Church to conduct the burial service. But the UNIP officials gave the churchman little time for prayers. This prompted him to complain against the functionaries’ propensity for politicking in the cemetery at the expense of praying adequately for the dead.4 UNIP’s peculiar cemetery rites reached their climax when the relatives of the dead shared with the chairman of the Funeral Committee the rendering of the obituaries of those about to be interred. In his obituary, the party leader effectively linked the deceased’s social conduct and personalities to the party,5 even though the dead men seem not to have been UNIP members in their lifetime. After committing the bodies to the graves, the chairman made the final speech thanking the mourners for attending the interments and for their financial contributions toward the cost of the funerals and burials. He also implored them to attend other funerals in future, irrespective of the mourners’ cultural or ethnic origins. The official warned that UNIP would not accord dignified funerals and burials to families that shunned mortuary ceremonies. Most importantly, he assured the gathering that the spirits of those they had just interred would support UNIP nationalists 166 walima t. kalusa in their struggle to liberate the territory from colonial misrule, and to create a new sovereign state.6 The extraordinary mortuary rites that the nationalist movement orchestrated in the 1960s and earlier in Luanshya and other Copperbelt towns cast a long shadow on academic scholarship that insists that colonial subjects infused local beliefs and practices surrounding their management of death into burial spaces of European origin. Peter Harries-Jones, an anthropologist who witnessed UNIP’s ceremonies of death in the mining area in the 1960s, subscribed to this view. To the anthropologist, these rites were little more than ‘traditional rituals’ that the party leaders and migrant workers replicated in the urban milieu.7 Had UNIP tried to jettison such rituals in the mining area, its leaders, Harries-Jones reasoned, would have been met with ‘a storm of protest’ from tribal elders,8 who saw themselves as the true custodians of indigenous culture of death in urban contexts.9 Eager to win the elders’ support for the crusade to dismantle colonial power, UNIP therefore merely truncated the rituals ‘both in time and the personae ritualis’, its functionaries taking over the performance of death rites traditionally carried out by the kinsfolk...