Posthumous Agency: Unmarried African Immigrant Women and the Subversive Act of Diasporic Burial

African Christian immigrant communities are witnessing a growing number of unmarried women opting to be buried in their host countries rather than repatriated to ancestral homelands. This shift unsettles inherited assumptions linking death, marriage, and belonging. This paper examines that choice, arguing that it constitutes not spiritual failure but a subversive act of posthumous agency. Drawing on decolonial feminist theory and diasporic empowerment, it frames diasporic burial as a practice that refuses inherited structures determining women’s ritual worth through marriage and male mediation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and a critical case study of Dr. Teresia Mbari Hinga, an unmarried Kenyan immigrant theologian buried in Chicago in 2023, the analysis traces how her decision navigated between African cosmological expectations and Western individualist frameworks. Findings show that her choice was not secular disaffiliation but spiritual bricolage, synthesising Christian faith, ancestral respect, and feminist consciousness while bypassing the patriarchal lineage that would otherwise have governed her resting place and ritual status. By inscribing herself into a new sacred geography on her own terms, the paper argues that unmarried women transform death from a moment of patriarchal re-inscription into a final act of self-definition, with implications for how migration, gender, and religious studies theorize belonging beyond marital status.