Death in Slow Motion: Funerals, Ritual Practice and Road Danger in South Africa

Abstract

The article focuses on the development, within the Xhosa-speaking population of South Africa, of intricate cultural practices enacted around fatal road accident sites and en route to funerals. African funeral directors, whose informal enterprises are premised on the lucrative transport of dead bodies and mourners across long distances, attest to the potentially fatal hazards brought on by poor drivers, inebriated mourners and the stresses of overnight travel. Furthermore, apocryphal stories abound – of road accidents involving the corpse in transit, and of road accidents caused by the spirits of those improperly buried – which inscribe a type of malevolent agency onto the dead body, and imbue the sites of fatal accidents with particular significance. Through stories of ‘twice deaths’, I explore how both mourners and funeral entrepreneurs have responded to, and understood, the particular problems presented by death ‘on the road’. I then describe mourners' emergent language of ‘...