Critical Reflections on the Erosion of African Burial and Mourning Traditions

Dear Colleagues,

Like other developing African countries, especially the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, South Africa is still struggling with inequality, structural poverty, and ethnic and political tribal issues orchestrated, amongst others, by colonialism and apartheid. These structural inequalities managed to dislocate black people’s epistemologies from the centre of knowledge, rendering them unfounded, unscientific, unreliable and even barbaric at certain instances. This attitude ensured that not much had been written by African people about themselves; hence, knowledge like death, dying, burial traditions, as well as mourning and coping mechanisms available are Western and are not always successful in helping the traditional person. This is an identity loss that cannot be regained without locating people’s history, culture and traditions. The relevance of the Western-based theology and psychology had been questioned many times by African scholars (Nwoye, 2000; Long & Forster, 2013; Baloyi & Makobe-Rabothata, 2014). This missing information is vital for the transformation agenda, which attempts to harmonise the previous exclusions as a way to forge the way to reconcile and unite the divided society. Therefore, some of the transformational issues that are at the focus are to retain the lost equality, which must not attempt to exclude the muted knowledge about black people’s culture, including knowledge about their burial practices, which is at the heart of this study. However, it would be dangerous to isolate South Africa from the entire continent since the diversity that African people have does not mean they have no similarities or agreements in certain cultural traits. The call to this Special Issue invites academics, authors and writers who are on the journey of seeking the lost or muted knowledge about black people’s ways of burying their loved ones. This, however, will not be misunderstood as an attempt to retain all practices since culture is evolving and dynamic but to find out those helpful traditions as well as see how cultural change can be involved if modifications are needed. 

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarising their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors (baloye@unisa.ac.za) or to the Genealogy editorial office (genealogy@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer review. Every participant is urged to familiarise themselves with and follow the style of Geneology from abstract, formatting, referencing and source listing, which is found on the journal website.

References

Baloyi, L & Makobe-Rabothata., 2014. The African Conception of Death: A Cultural Implication. Papers from the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology Conferences. Grand Valley State University, pp. 232-243

Long, W & Forster, D. 2023. The changing face of irrelevance in South African Psychology. Pins, 45, 3-16.

Nwoye, A. 2000. Sources of gain in African Grief Therapy (AGT). Journal of Family Psychology 11(1):50-72.

Ranger, T., 2004. Dignifying death: The politics of Burial in Bulawayo. Journal of Religion in Africa, 34. pp 1-2.

Prof. Dr. Magezi Elijah Baloyi
Guest Editor

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• African funerals
• death
• mourning
• community
• rituals
• religions
• philosophy