Gamification of funeral rituals and procedures beyond the COVID-19 era among the Shona people in Zimbabwean urban and peri-urban settlements

At funeral events, Zimbabweans go beyond the traditionally known ‘chisahwira’ and ‘chiroora’, in which the closest friend imitates the deceased and the daughters-in-law entertain mourners with their performances, respectively. They have now devised a three-in-one hybrid funeral theatrical gamified phenomenon that combines funeral rituals, entertainment, and entrepreneurship. The paper is anchored on acculturation theory and based on critical content and discourse analyses of cultural innovation scenarios involving gamified funeral ritual processes and procedures that are trending on social media platforms. The ten (10) selected scenarios are triangulated with the open-ended interviews with purposively selected twenty (20) key informants. The findings revealed gamified hybrid funeral ritual processes and procedures that include advertising not only funeral service provisions but also offering mourning services on behalf of the bereaved. Instead of the usual sombre, moody mourning atmosphere, the Shona have adopted luxurious, celebratory mourning styles. The remodeled funeral mourning and burial ritual procedures are, to a greater extent, divorced from the traditional Zimbabwean ‘chisahwira’ and ‘chiroora’ traditional mourning performances. The paper recommends that similar studies be undertaken in other Zimbabwean communities to assess the rate at which funeral cultural heritage aspects have mutated over time since the advent of the Coronavirus (COVID-19).