The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

length, and were widely circulated in an official ‘Guide to the Heroes Acre’ in the media
and at ceremonial commemorations. 74
To challenge this official narration of national history as the biography of chosen heroes,
excluded ex‐combatants organised oppositional funerals for the banished, and
celebrated the lives of excluded dead heroes through the political critique of public
oratory. They built shrines and marked the sites where their comrades had fallen,
creating an oppositional memorial landscape, “an alternative imaginary nationhood, not
elitist but popular”. And they mourned those murdered by the postcolonial state, who
lay in unmarked mass graves, in an “imposed namelessness” and “censored beyond
commemoration”, but who represented “a memorial in the making”. Public biographical
production emerged as a key feature of the Zimbabwean memorial complex, as rival
claims were made on the boundaries of the nation and the narratives of its history. 75
‘Postwars of the dead’ in other African postcolonies have also seen the entry of the
memorial logics of modernity. The memorial complex of material infrastructure,
sculptural art and administrative processes has given shape and form to the political
imaginings of nationalism, and its search for a heroic narrative of the nation. In Namibia,
part of the cultural formation of the nation after independence also entailed the
construction of a Heroes Acre, along the lines of the Zimbabwe model. In Kenya in 2003,
as part of an attempt to overhaul its public image and to reinscribe the nation, the new
National Rainbow Coalition government announced its decision to locate and exhume
the remains of Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi from a mass grave, and give him a
“hero’s burial”. In a belated ‘postwar of the dead’ and in spite of opposition from white
settlers who had survived the violent Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, this state burial
would see Kimathi restored to a position of national hero in the official memorial
landscape. The anniversary of Kimathi’s death was also commemorated with tree‐
planting ceremonies in the area where he was arrested. 76
74 Richard Werbner, ‘Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun’, pp 82‐88.
75 Richard Werbner, ‘Smoke from the Barrel of a Gun’, pp 91‐99.
76 Sunday Times, 16/2/03.
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