The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

“Postwars of the dead” in Zimbabwe after independence in 1980 took the form of an
elaborate variation on the memorial complex, which involved the selective and
hierarchical creation of national heroes from the ranks of the leaders of freedom fighters.
The modern memorial complex’s origins lay partly in the political, material and artistic
resources that went into the creation of national cenotaphs, mass military cemeteries and
tombs of the Unknown Soldier in Europe after World War I. This “unprecedented …
landscape of remembered personal identity”, which memorialised common soldiers,
dead and missing, had ironically been marked by “self‐conscious and sacralised
oblivion”, in which the “presence of an absence” had been recognised. This memorial
character stood in sharp contrast to the triumphal monuments of the nineteenth century,
which had commemorated heroes of war, statesmanship, and colonial ‘exploration’.
Richard Werbner has argued that in Zimbabwe after independence, the modern
memorial complex was given a “distinctive”, perverse postcolonial form, which
glorified “above all the individuality of great heroes of the nation”. 71
Heroes Acre, which was constructed as a national shrine in Harare around a cemetery
for the elite, and which served to memorialise “elite distinction” at the expense of
ordinary guerrillas, constituted a bizarre conflation of cenotaph and tomb of the
unknown soldier. Heroes Acre stood at the apex of an elaborate system of state
memorialism, which manufactured and graded an order of heroes from the national to
the provincial to the local, with each buried in “an appropriate place within [this]
graded order of heroes acres”. At Heroes Acre in Harare, the ranks of chosen national
heroes lay in luxury coffins after state‐financed funerals, whereas the masses at the
bottom of the hierarchy were expected to bury their own dead. In the rural areas, local
heroes acres lay neglected, sparking “indifference in the countryside towards
71 Richard Werbner, ‘Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun: Postwars of the Dead, Memory and
Reinscription in Zimbabwe’, in Richard Werbner (ed), Memory and the Postcolony: African
Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London: Zed Books, 1998), pp 71‐73; see also Norma Kriger,
‘The Politics of Creating National Heroes’, in Ngwabi Bhebe and Terence Ranger (eds), Soldiers in
Zimbabwe’s Liberation War (London: James Currey, 1995); on ‘sacralised oblivion’ and the origins of
the modern memorial complex, see Thomas W Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’,
in John R Gillis (ed), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. This ‘perverse’ memorialism
can also be seen as anachronistic in its 19 th century heroic approach.
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