ABSTRACT
This article deals with the ways memorialization of the death of a leader factors into contemporary African politics. The peaceful transition from one-party dictatorship to multi-party politics with resultant creation of the Third Republic in Zambia in the early 1990s was greeted with unprecedented euphoria at home and abroad. To many observers, the transition marked the dawning of a new era in which the political class that took up the reins of power from the ousted regime would create a more democratic society and improve the living conditions of the majority of people. In practice, however, the country’s return to democratic rule proved much easier than ending power struggle, corruption, unemployment and poverty. This paper attempts to understand how the architects of the Third Republic in Zambia attempted to reverse on the symbolic terrain the process of de-legitimation that issued from popular disillusionment spawned by these challenges. It shows that the new political elites built three presidential mausoleums in the country’s capital city and infused them with sanitized legacies of dead presidents in the hope of securing popular support. Carving out such support on the symbolic front, however, proved more theoretical than practical. For ordinary Zambians read their own meanings and uses into the mausoleums, meanings and uses that seldom resonated with those of the political class.
