Building Peace in Angola: The Role of the Exhumation Process in Kuito

Abstract

Angola endured more than 40 years of nearly constant war and is now in the process of building peace. The city of Kuito paid an especially heavy price when 20,000 to 30,000 people lost their lives there during an 18-month siege (1993-1994) and were buried in hastily dug graves scattered around the city. The exhumation of the bodies and their reburial in a special cemetery have allowed for proper mourning of the dead, offering the living the opportunity to move forward with their lives. The power of the exhumations in Kuito differs from recent cases in which countries have dug up the dead in search of truth and/or justice. Instead, the reburial and mourning of those who died in Kuito's siege was central to a process of individual and collective reconciliation. At the same time, the deceased took their rightful place as national martyrs and, thus, transformed the image of Kuito as a city of the dead to one in which the living have put the past in its proper place. In this article, I describe Kuito's exhumat...