Ancestral fire and visions of the unresolved past: land, labour and death in South Africa

Abstract

This article develops the concept of ancestral fire to show how unresolved violent death and unreturned human remains continue to inhabit South Africa’s present. It considers two cases: the visions of sangoma Gogo Mshanelo, who had visions of prison labourers sent to work on burning sugar cane plantations in Dududu, KwaZulu-Natal, and the 2023 fire at 80 Albert Street, Johannesburg. In Dududu, Mshanelo’s visions highlight unmarked graves of prison labourers displaced and killed under the apartheid petty offender scheme, where Black bodies were arrested, removed and rendered missing, leaving deaths unresolved and mourning suspended. The fire at 80 Albert Street occurred in a building that once housed Johannesburg’s Central Pass Office, a site central to influx control and the petty offender system. The article examines these cases through Nguni cosmologies, were fire functions as a medium through which the dead ( abaphansi ) assert presence, rendering human remains – whether buried, burned or absent – into enduring social, spiritual and political claims that tie the living to histories of violence, loss and repair.