ABSTRACT
Preparations for the burials of former KTL workers who died involved widows, family members, and friends who organized how bodies were managed and transported, the production of funeral posters and programs, and funeral activities. The use of specific burial objects and practices such as the purchase of coffins, the printing of funeral programs, and the making of different types of cemetery and home grave markers—which include cement covering, tiled cement slabs, and gravestones that may or may not include the names and dates of the dead—suggest how relations with the dead have continued and also have changed over the years. For while Muslim families prefer cemetery burial, the social ideal for many Christian families is burial within or adjacent to one’s house. Yet home burials were not always possible in practice, and urban-rural kinship connections were not always maintained. While burials ideally continue connections between immediate family members and place, the number of former KTL workers whose bodies were buried in Kaduna suggests a contraction of extended family relationships. Yet the persistence of home burials also suggests the “the work of the dead” in maintaining traditions from the past.
