The previous chapters have begun to explore the multi-faceted nature of Zimbabwe's politics of the dead, and the complex efficacies of bones, bodies and material properties and flows that animate it. Chapter 2, in particular, focused on how the corporeal transformations that are essential to ‘proper’ funerary processes, through which people are made ‘safely’ dead, can also be a key feature of the violence that precedes death, and of the ‘secondary violence’ that can follow it, both of which interrupt and disrupt normal processes of containment and transformation through which people, living and dead, are bounded, stabilised and constituted. Managing, containing and stabilising these corporeal transformations are, as a result, also often part of the contested processes that are purported to offer resolution or ‘healing’ to troubling past legacies of violence, disrupted funerals and unresolved death, by ‘remaking’ the dead; processes that are always potentially unfinished or incomplete. This is how the long-standing politics surrounding state commemoration, and more recently ‘liberation heritage’, are connected to and intertwined with the troubling and increasingly noisy silence surrounding the gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s, and with the recurring, deepening violence of the post-2000 period.

This chapter pushes this analysis further in two ways. Firstly, by considering how the excessivity of human remains – animating their ‘alterity’ or ‘otherness’, and which demands but ultimately always retains the potential to defy resolution, stabilisation and ‘closure’ – provokes or reveals a profound uncertainty that is central to Zimbabwe's politics of the dead. And secondly, to begin to explore how this uncertainty, provoked by the alterity of human corporeality but often manifest in a myriad of rumours and competing, contested accounts of past lives and unresolved deaths, can have its own duplicitous political utility as part of a performative stylistics of power located between the tensions of bio- and necro-politics. This question about the politics of uncertainty and the ‘incompleteness’ of death will then be further discussed in Chapter 4 looking at what I call ‘political accidents’.

Here I focus particularly on the much publicised controversies, rumours and contestations that emerged in 2011 around the war veteranled, vernacular exhumations of hundred of bodies from a disused mine at Chibondo, in northern Zimbabwe. As discussed, these were not the first exhumations of human remains dating to the liberation struggle that war veteran groups like the FHT, or indeed NMMZ, had been involved in since independence.