ABSTRACT
When the Tanzanian film actor Steven Kanumba suddenly died aged 28 in 2012, the shocking news spread quickly via word of mouth and through the media. Some 30 000 people and high-ranking politicians joined in the public mourning at the funeral service; hundreds of young women fainted and the police were barely able to keep control over the evolving mass panic. After the funeral, the media event of Kanumba’s death contined in literature, news scandals, discourses, and myth, as well as in his post-mortem appearance in a movie. This paper looks at these mass-mediated practices and discourses of mourning and commemorations to reveal Kanumba’s social function as a celebrity in Tanzania, as well as the meaning and significance people ascribe to both his death and the relations between the real person and his fictional character in films. With these after-life productions, producers, fans, family, friends, as well as former enemies engage in the cooperative creation of a post-mortem mythology through which they make meaning of Kanumba’s life and death.
