Grave matters: dispossession and the desecration of ancestral graves by mining corporations in South Africa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dispossession is characteristically associated with the period of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Consequently, not much consideration is given to how the previously marginalised continue to be dispossessed in their everyday lives by coal mining activities in the current political dispensation. This article reframes dispossession as a perpetual post-apartheid experience in African communities. In this paper, dispossession does not only encompass events of deprivation, and the loss of land and property, but also covers the loss of the incorporeal. The relocation of African ancestral graves in Tweefontein (Ogies) is discussed as an aspect of dispossession. The politics surrounding household relocations and grave exhumations illustrates how communities not only lose the material; land and tombs, but also lose their intangible possessions; ancestral connection, identity, heritage and belonging because of mining.