The purpose of this chapter and the next is to continue to explore the uncertain and unfinished incompleteness of death (which we began in Chapter 4) by reconsidering the political significance of ancestors and spirit mediums in postcolonial Zimbabwe. The link between mediumship and politics has long animated scholarship on Zimbabwe (Matereke & Mungwini 2012; Lan 1985; Fry 1976, Garbett 1977, 1992; Ranger 1967, 1982b, 1985; Werbner 1991; Shoko 2007; Mawere & Wilson 1995; Mafu 1995; Fontein 2006a, 2015), particularly in the Shona-dominated eastern and northern provinces, but also in relation to the Mwari cult shrines of Matobo in Southern Matabeleland (Nyathi 2003; Ranger & Ncube 1996 Werbner 1989; Ranger 1999; Daneel 1970), and the wider region (Sanders 2008a; Bertelsen 2004; Ranger 2003; Jedrej 1992; Werbner 1989; Akong’a 1987; Packard 1981; Schoffeleers 1979; James 1972; Southall 1953; Krige & Krige 1943). Previous chapters have sought to nuance this by focusing on the transforming materialities of death with which it is imbricated. Implicit in those previous chapters is an approach further developed here, which demands that accounts of spirit encounters – whether ancestral possession events, witchcraft or frightening ngozi spirits – are taken seriously and not reduced to ‘social functionality’, ‘mimesis’ or ‘cultural texts’ in anthropological analysis (all of which over-emphasise meaning or explanation) in order to fully grasp their experiential, ontological and political dimensions. Questioning assumptions about the over-determinations common to spirit mediumship, I emphasise the uncertainties inherent to spirit possession which confront everyone involved, including not only politicians and others seeking the ancestral legitimacy or guidance that spirit mediums can offer, but also mediums themselves. In particular, I examine links between the precariousness of mediumship – both the conditions of precarity that often precede mediumship but also that which results from it – and the uncertainties which characterise relations between mediums and the spirits possessing them, which is often obscured by the historical narratives of successful initiation into mediumship offered by mediums themselves.

The larger purpose here, linking it the broader politics of the dead this book examines, is to explore how the uncertainty of death – its unfinished incompleteness – is not just a matter of the excessivity of human remains, demanding but defying stabilisation into meaning, such as revealed by the controversial Chibondo exhumations of 2011 discussed in Chapter 3.