Death, Belief and Politics in Central African History

Introduction: Death – Again?

INTRODUCTION Death – Again? Walima T. Kalusa and Megan Vaughan In 2008, one of the authors of this study gave some account of the research that forms part of this book to a Malawian colleague. She looked at the author critically, sighed, and then said, ‘What are you people going to do when we stop dying?’ She was not referring to the ultimate conquest of death promised by Christianity (though such an interpretation would not have been out of place in this deeply Christian country). Rather she was commenting on the research industry that has grown up around HIV/AIDS in Malawi and the fact that, with the greater availability of anti-retroviral drugs, death might not be so readily and easily available as a research topic to outsiders. Though the author did not think of herself as part of the HIV/AIDS research ‘industry’, it was a salutary moment. The series of essays that forms this book is part of a larger project on the history of death in central, eastern and southern Africa since 1800. The project began in 2004 and over the period in which we carried out the research and wrote it up what is so often referred to as the ‘landscape’ of death certainly shifted around us. Death did not go away, as our Malawian colleague had optimistically predicted, but as the availability of anti-retroviral drugs increased, what had sometimes felt like a collective death sentence had been commuted, not so much to a life ‘sentence’ but to a life of ‘adherence’ to a drug regime. It appeared not unrelated that ‘northern’-dominated scholarship on Africa, much of which had been preoccupied with death (perhaps with good reason) in the 1990s and early 2000s, was beginning to rediscover life. Miyazaki’s account of the anthropology of knowledge in Fiji, The Method of Hope (2004), became much cited by Africanists. As Patience Mususa’s work on Zambia reminds us, the ability to carry on with life in the face of hardship and death is highly valued in poor communities, and persisted through the worst times.1 But lifesaving drugs also help. Though mortality rates from HIV/AIDS and other diseases remain appallingly high in this part of Africa, there is a sense that some kind of corner has been turned, at least for as long as the drugs continue to be available. We had made a decision at the outset of our project not to study the HIV/AIDS epidemic directly, critically important though this was in informing contemporary ideas about death and death practices. In part we made this decision precisely because so much social research was now being directed at this subject that it threatened to over-determine all accounts of social reality. Malawi, for example, sometimes appeared to be overwhelmed by large research teams working on all aspects of HIV/AIDS. Rural Malawians were not unused to being visited by researchers asking them questions relating to poverty and food security – issues for which, unfortunately, the country has for decades provided plenty of research ‘fodder’. Malawians referred to this research as ‘what did you eat for breakfast?’, but now the detailed questions on diets and household budgets had given way to a wholly new set of more intimate enquiries on sexual behaviour and sexual practices. Adding our own enquiries to these did not seem like a particularly productive way forward, particularly as vast amounts of ‘data’ were already being generated. In this context our interest in death as historians has two broad dimensions. Firstly, and particularly in light of the very broad generalizations that the HIV/AIDS literature sometimes xii walima t. kalusa and megan vaughan made on the subject of African beliefs and practices around death, we wanted, quite simply, to historicize these and also to point to their diversity. Secondly, we aimed to place the history of death in this part of Africa within the wider, and ever-growing, comparative history of death in Europe, the Americas and Asia, and to address some of the broad themes discussed in that comparative literature, particularly around ‘modernization’ and the ‘secularization’ of death. Some of our findings on these broader issues are summarized in the Introductions to two journal special issues arising from the larger project.2 A number of these questions are discussed in the present volume, which focuses specifically on Malawi and on the Copperbelt and northern parts of Zambia. It...