Death, Belief and Politics in Central African History

CHAPTER IX - Big Houses for the Dead: Burying Presidents Banda and Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi

CHAPTER IX Big Houses for the Dead: Burying Presidents Banda and Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi Megan Vaughan When the President of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika, died in April 2012, his body was buried in a large white mausoleum, built in his home village in the south of the country. In addition to the dignitaries and diplomats and heads of neighbouring states, ordinary people gathered to witness the event, amongst them a middle-aged woman, Enelesi Kanichi, who was interviewed by a Zimbabwean journalist. She had come, she said, because she was curious about the ‘big house’: ‘I wanted to come and see this white building where the President will be laid to rest. This is something new in our culture that a house can be built for a dead person.’1 Houses for the dead do indeed appear to be an innovation in this part of Africa where historically it has been the practice to bury the dead in unmarked pieces of land, liminal areas outside the village.2 The dead body itself, far from being an object of veneration, was a source of fear and presumed contamination. Indeed, rather than building houses for the dead, traditionally it was the practice to destroy the houses of the dead. Mourning was in part a period of waiting – waiting for the body to completely decompose and fully release its spirit. Over the years burying one’s dead in graves with headstones within demarcated cemeteries has become more common in this region, particularly in the long-standing urban communities of Zambia, but cemeteries are not places in which most people linger for long. Big white houses for the dead mirror the big white presidential palaces built for living leaders, but though the public are excluded from the latter, they are welcomed into the former, encouraged to enter, view and reflect. Central Africa has not been without elaborate burial rites for political leaders, especially in polities with centralizing and imperialistic ambitions. As we have seen in Chapter II, the elaborate burial rites of the Paramount Chief of the Bemba in Zambia end in the burial ground of Mwalule, where the bones of generations of chiefs are preserved with other sacred ‘relics’. But there are some significant differences between these practices and the preservation of the body within a mausoleum. Though observers often refer to the Chitimukulu’s body as having been ‘embalmed’, in fact the dangerous work of the Bemba mortuary experts was to achieve the opposite of embalming. The object of their work was to speed up the process of decomposition, to desiccate the body so that it resembled a ‘seed’. Only when the flesh had gone could ordinary life be resumed. By contrast, the modern process of embalming (increasingly popular amongst middle-class communities in Africa and not just for presidents) aims, through the injection of chemicals, to preserve the appearance of a plump living body and to enable funerals to be postponed to allow for members of far-flung diasporas to return home.3 President Bingu’s body, embalmed and lying in a gold casket, travelled around the country to be viewed by ordinary citizens before being buried beneath the ‘big white house’ in Thyolo district. In her book on the reburial of the bodies of politicians in the post-socialist societies of Eastern Europe, Katherine Vedery discusses the political work performed by dead bodies. The symbolic effectiveness of the body, she writes, lies precisely in its multivocality, its capacity to express more than one thing 328 megan vaughan (while frequently purporting to have just one significance). The dead body of the politician is a site of symbolic capital and ‘political profit’ and it derives at least some of this power from the fact that it is in a sense ‘sacred’. The corpse evokes fear and awe, it disturbs and engages our emotions.4 Florence Bernault, amongst others, has discussed the political and sacred symbolism of the body in West Equatorial Africa in the context of colonialism.5 We have seen that, in the case of the nineteenth-century Bemba polity, the sacred symbolism of the Paramount Chief’s body (and to a lesser extent subordinate chiefs) spoke directly to the central concerns of the polity. There is nothing new, and certainly nothing specifically ‘African’ about the fact that the dead bodies of leaders have ‘political lives’ – the questions to be asked revolve around what kinds of political...