Contemporary responses in Africa to the aftermath of death: developments and decolonising challenges

Abstract

Despite death and bereavement studies being dominated by scholars and empirical material from Europe and North America, death and bereavement studies have often assumed the universality of their knowledge. This limits the epistemic and ontological potential of the field and can result in a misunderstanding of death and bereavement, including in Europe and North America. However, more than this, because of the political power of these centres for the study of death, it has also resulted in the imposition of knowledges and practices about death on populations around the world through colonial rule, aid and development initiatives, neo-colonial practices and global health policies. We advocate for the decolonisation of death studies by which we do not mean a return to a pre-colonial past, but instead the embracing of a plurality of ontologies about death and bereavement, and a recognition of the power embedded in all claims about the meaning and processes of death and its aftermath. We explore these themes through a focus on three case studies in Africa in Senegal, South Sudan and Uganda