Death in Slow Motion: Funerals, Ritual Practice and Road Danger in South Africa

Abstract

The article focuses on the development, within the Xhosa-speaking population of South Africa, of intricate cultural practices enacted around fatal road accident sites and en route to funerals. African funeral directors, whose informal enterprises are premised on the lucrative transport of dead bodies and mourners across long distances, attest to the potentially fatal hazards brought on by poor drivers, inebriated mourners and the stresses of overnight travel. Furthermore, apocryphal stories abound – of road accidents involving the corpse in transit, and of road accidents caused by the spirits of those improperly buried – which inscribe a type of malevolent agency onto the dead body, and imbue the sites of fatal accidents with particular significance. Through stories of ‘twice deaths’, I explore how both mourners and funeral entrepreneurs have responded to, and understood, the particular problems presented by death ‘on the road’. I then describe mourners' emergent language of ‘talking to’ the dead, a banal type of conversing occurring in mortuaries, at road accident sites and en route to interments, which both expresses and helps contain the spiritual risks embodied in engaging with this more mobile world. I end by considering whether this form of communication represents a distinct departure from, or a continuation of, older forms of mediating with the dead.

Keywords:

• death
• funerals
• road accidents
• mobility
• communication
• emotions
• entrepreneurs
• South Africa

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the Arts Humanities Research Council (UK) for its generous support of this research, as well as its funding of the larger collaboration with Megan Vaughan on ‘Death in Africa: A History c.1800 to Present Day’. I am also grateful to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, who provided a fellowship in 2011 – 2012, which aided in the writing-up of this research. I am indebted to Minah Koela, my research assistant, and to the many respondents whose testimonies critically inform this work. I greatly appreciate conversations on roads and accidental death with Megan Vaughan, Mark Lamont, Gabriel Klaeger, Jennifer Hart and Ruth Watson, and I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer from African Studies for their informed comments.

Notes

Address by Sibusiso Ndebele at the launch of the ‘Decade for Action for Road Safety 2011-2020’, Boksburg, Gauteng, http;//www.info.gov.za/speech/Dynamic Action?pageid = 461&sid = 18244&tid = 33077 (accessed 2 June 2011). A high percentage of victims of fatal road accidents in 2008 – more than one-third – were pedestrians, reflecting the reality that in South Africa, as in other parts of Africa, the most vulnerable ‘road users’ are in fact vehicle-less, and RTMC ‘Road Traffic Report’ 17 April 2008.

If one were to compare mortality figures, road fatalities are dwarfed by AIDS-related deaths, which claimed the lives of an estimated 310,000 South Africans in 2009 (see UNAIDS, http://www.unaids.org/en/regionscountries/countries/southafrica/).

This epidemiological approach to road injuries and fatalities has been manifest in somewhat problematic public service campaigns which tend to stress that a ‘cure’ can only be wrought through behavioural change, such as increasing seat belt usage. This is echoed in others parts of the continent (for a critique of the Kenyan context, see Lamont 2010). For South African road safety campaigns, see the Arrive Alive website, http://www.arrivealive.co.za/

Daily Sun 25 November 2008.

See Lee and Vaughan (2008) for an overview of the scholarship on death in Africa.

Africanist scholarship on this subject is augmented by work done outside of the continent, particularly recent scholarship on non-Western appropriation of ‘automobility’ and technology (see Dalakoglou 2010; Siegelbaum 2009).

It is part of an ongoing collaboration with Professor Megan Vaughan (History, Cambridge) titled ‘Death in Africa: A History, c.1800 to Present Dday’, funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. Please visit www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/deathinafrica for further information on the project.

All names of informants have been changed to protect their identities.

See www.news24.com (31 January 2011); www.monstersandcritics.com (31 March 2007).

Posted by jonckie, 29 March 2011 http://roadsafety.co.za/2011/03/29/dont-cause-a-funeral-on-the-road-to-another-funeral, accessed 2 June 2011.

This would accord with national trends – an estimated 65 per cent of South African motorists are uninsured, according to the South African Insurance Association, http://www.arrivealive.co.za/pages.aspx?i=2872 (accessed 18 October 2011).

This can be contrasted to the fitting of mechanical ‘speed governors’ in Kenyan matatu people transporters which capped the maximum speed a matutu could reach to 80 km/hr. This was one of several government-mandated safety measures enacted in 2003 and better known as the ‘Michuki Rules’, after the then Minister for Transport and Communications (Lamont 2012, this Special Issue).

An anthropology of boredom could perhaps be useful in re-examining patterns of African sociality, in life as well as in the face of death. Murray Last (in discussion) ‘Death in African History: An Interdisciplinary Conference’, University of Cambridge, 5–6 May 2007.

How masculine identities constructed through the funeral industry may connect to other (and older) forms of masculinities, such as those shaped by labour migration and the HIV/AIDS epidemic is a fruitful area of further enquiry (Campbell 1997; Mfecane et al. 2005).

See http://www.arrivealive.co.za/aggressive.aspx?title=rage (accessed 19 October 2011).

Funeral director Makhaya Mgangathi related a similar story about his great grandfather, who he claimed was shot and killed in an unknown location during the First World War. Mgangathi himself was involved in two major car accidents, and his father and brother were held at gunpoint. A sangoma told him to find the location where the great grandfather was killed, and bring his spirit back home. Mgangathi himself was not in a hurry to conduct this ceremony, as he thought he would be able to devote his attention to this once retired, although he is not sure how he will go about finding the location of the grave, especially as his parents (who knew the most about the story) have both passed away (Makhaya Mgangathi, 1 December 2008).

The ‘proper’ ritual shedding of blood also occurs during male circumcision, another central rite of passage in Xhosa systems of knowledge. Klaits (2005) observes how Batswana use the theme of blood, and in particular the potential harmful mixing with the blood of widows, to re-imagine social relations of care and kinship in a time of AIDS.

I am grateful for this question, which arose out of discussions when an earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Fourth European Conference on African Studies, Uppsala, Sweden, 15–18 June 2011.