The Politics of the Corpse: President Levy Mwanawasa’s Death, Funeral and Political Contestation in Post-Colonial Zambia

Abstract

Informed by recent scholarship that underscores the centrality of death, corpses and funerals in contemporary African politics, this article explores the ways in which political actors in the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and the opposition Patriotic Front (PF) in Zambia appropriated the corpse and legacy of President Levy Mwanawasa to mobilise political support in 2008. The article insists that in order to secure support indispensable to winning the presidential by-election necessitated by his death, leaders in the MMD and PF deployed the president’s corpse in their conflicting bids to retain power and to construct an alternative political order, respectively. In placing Mwanawasa’s death, corpse and funeral and resultant rival discourses at the centre of its analysis, this article distances itself from secularist and modernist scholarship that disconnects death and mortuary ceremonies from contemporary African politics.