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

Dominated by scholars and empirical material from Europe, North America, New Zealand and Australia, 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 limiting understanding of death and its aftermath ‘elsewhere’. Further, because of the political and economic power of these centres for the study of death, it has also resulted in the imposition of Western knowledges and practices about death on populations in Africa through colonial rule and neo-colonial aid, development initiatives, and global health policies. We advocate for the decolonisation of death and ‘bereavement’ studies by which we do not mean a return to a pre-colonial past, but instead the embracing of a plurality of epistemologies and ontologies about death and its aftermath, and a recognition of the power embedded in all claims about the meaning and processes of death in the continuing lives of the living. We explore these themes through a focus on three case studies in Senegal, South Sudan and Uganda.