The themes explored in this book have evoked memories of growing up in post-liberation Zimbabwe, where the postcolonial state led by the late President Robert Mugabe engineered what the anthropologist Richard Werbner describes as a ‘whole complex of elite memorialism’. We witnessed in the early 1980s the construction of what turned out to be the majestic National Heroes Acre, built diagonally opposite the equally majestic National Sports Stadium in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. The National Heroes Acre monument was, of course, built to immortalise the ideals of the anti-colonial struggle and to commemorate the bravery of those who had sacrificed their lives for the liberation of Zimbabwe. But at this national monument only the elite lie buried, to be joined by those remaining in the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF). This postcolonial monument to commemorate Zimbabwe's heroic elite has been described by Werbner as bringing together ‘pre-colonial symbolism, colonial stereotyping, both cultural and racial, social realism imported from North Korea (whose government co-financed the monument), and national imagery which is at once divisive and unifying’.

Yet in August 2019, former President Mugabe, Zimbabwe's longest-serving president until his overthrow in November 2017, surprised many Zimbabweans when he informed his family that he did not want to be buried at the National Heroes Acre monument. This, despite the fact that it was a structure which was to all intents and purposes his brainchild. The reason given was that he did not want Emmerson Mnangagwa, the president who displaced him, to officiate because of the way he had removed him from power and failed to apologise for what Mugabe deemed an assault on the Zimbabwean constitution, that is, overthrowing an elected president and his government. This refusal triggered a national debate, with social media comments ranging from the relevance of the monument and who is a hero to how Mugabe had ensured that a number of his contemporaries labelled as ‘sell-outs’ – such as Ndabaningi Sithole and James Chikerema – would not be declared worthy of burial at the National Heroes Acre.

But if some thought that Mugabe had minced his words because he was ill and bedridden in a hospital in Singapore, the unfolding conflict following his death on 6 September 2019 between the Mnangagwa government and his immediate family over his burial place showed that he was as obdurate in death as he had been in life.