The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

through biographic presentation. But biography is enmeshed with other rituals of death as
well. Autopsies and inquests try to construct narratives of transition from life to death.
Burial entails interring the body into the land so that social and cultural identities are
inscribed as permanent markers into the landscape. 149 The site and materiality of the
grave, the design of the tombstone and its inscriptions constitute commemorative
memorials, the biographic and the funereal rolled into one. 150 The social and cultural
processes of remembrance associated with each stage of the funereal process from death to
burial and after contain biographic elements connecting the dead to a memory of life and
to the lives of the assembled mourners. Indeed, biography can be seen as the essence of
memorial.
Mass state funerals of Chris Hani, Oliver Tambo and Joe Slovo constituted biographic
arenas in South Africa during the mid‐1990s. They may have been ritual ceremonies of the
state, but they connected genealogically with a memory of mass political funeral
processions of the 1980s, which had become a feature of political expression under
apartheid’s repressive conditions with restrictions on political gatherings. 151 The
biographic nature of state funerals continued to express itself with the deaths of senior
149 For an excellent study of a dispute about burial in the Kenyan context, see David William Cohen and
E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa,
London: James Currey, 1992. After S.M. Otieno’s death in 1986, his corpse lay unburied in the City
Mortuary in Nairobi as a struggle for control over his bodily remains ensued in seven legal settings
over five months. These struggles were accompanied by large street demonstrations. At the centre of
the dispute were questions about who would bury S.M’s body and where that burial would be. These
issues were also the subject of debate in the streets, in bars, in the press and in academic seminars. In
the process, powerful contestations emerged over Luo and Kenyan culture and history, over the
meaning of ‘tradition’, ‘custom’ and ‘modern’. As a result of these debates and disputes, S.M’s dead
body was “invested with life” (p 33) and became a “metaphor for history” (p 96). The case was “a most
significant moment in the construction of a Kenya nation” (p 92) and a “laboratory for the study of the
production of history and the sociology of power in contemporary Africa” (p 12).
150 On graves as signs see David Bunn, ‘The Sleep of the Brave: Graves as Sites and Signs in the Colonial
Eastern Cape’, in Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin (eds), Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial
and Postcolonial Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. ‘Requiem’, the Fourth Story
(“Quarto Racconto”) of the film Kaos, directed by Paolo and Vittorio Tavani, deals with a struggle over
the location of a cemetery between the occupants of a portion of land and the landowner. The
landowner denies the occupants the right to construct a cemetery on the land and bury their dead for
fear that that would mean a permanent inscription of their identity and history.
151 Garrey Dennie’s doctoral research studied politics of mourning ritual in South Africa. See Garrey
Dennie, ‘The Cultural Politics of Burial in South Africa, 1884‐1990’, Ph.D Dissertation, Johns Hopkins
University, 1997. See also Dennie’s article, ‘One King, Two Burials: The Politics of Funerals in South
Africa’s Transkei’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 11, 2, 1992.
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