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From sacred to clinical: how the lack of proper burials during the Covid-19 pandemic affected communities in Uganda

By Henry Okidi Okoth 6 October 2022

When Covid-19 started spreading across the globe, the World Health Organization issued strict burial guidelines in a bid to curb the spread of the virus. In Uganda, the national health department took over the burial of Covid-19 victims, interring them quickly and without adhering to proper cultural and religious procedures. In a country where death rituals form a central part of the grieving process, the undignified burials that took place during the pandemic have had severe psychological consequences for bereaved families and communities.

In the Global South and in Africa particularly, most development studies research concentrates on survival issues; economic needs and death/loss are generally discussed in relation to poverty or AIDS, while the few available bereavement studies focus on the grieving experiences of individuals or groups.[1] However, injustices are also apparent in processes of grieving; unpacking the way in which grief is collectively and individually experienced is a necessary first step in addressing these injustices. Here, I show how the strict burial guidelines imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic were received in Uganda and why we should take note.

The many facets of death rituals

Death rituals, defined as “forms of expressions and connections performed by individuals, groups of people or communities in communication with the living-dead and the Supreme Being”[2], connect the dead and living in Africa. These rituals serve to mediate between the physical and spiritual worlds as the spirit of the deceased crosses between worlds. Many African families for example have a graveyard within the compound they live in because they believe that the dead remains part of the living family.[3]

During death rituals, the bereaved family plays a direct role in preparing the body, washing the body and shaving the deceased’s head; domestic animals are also slaughtered for ritual purposes. Slaughtering a sheep, for example, is meant to please the ancestors so that they do not demand another death.[4] And a death is communicated to the entire community as part of the ritual. A study of death rituals in Bugumba in Uganda shows how community members participate in death rituals once a large bonfire has been lit in the compound of the deceased to communicate bereavement to everyone in the community.[5]

Other death-related rites and beliefs include a belief among the Ethur of northeastern Uganda in life after death, with the spirit of the dead person travelling to the realm of ‘Obanga’, as well as the common belief that the dead are spirits that can send curses if disturbed.[6] Not performing death rituals would be considered one way of disturbing the dead. Similarly, in northern Uganda, a harmonious relationship between the living and dead is maintained to avoid ‘cen’, or vengeful spirits, by performing rituals.[7]

Death rituals are considered so important that in cases where a bereaved family lacks adequate resources to perform crucial rituals, community members may contribute the required resources – something that is reciprocal. In studying bereavement, the concept of Ubuntu[8] helps us to understand how cohesion and solidarity are maintained during and after burial through communal rituals and mourning. People travel from far away to participate in death rituals or attend funerals because death comes with misfortune for those who don’t participate in rituals. Paying close attention to the rituals while maintaining solidarity is a key healing factor from loss due to death.[9]

The inability to say goodbye properly

Limitations on death rituals during the Covid-19 pandemic and the interment of Covid-19 victims by health authorities thus caused great distress in Uganda and beyond. During the pandemic, following protocols issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) to curb the spread of the virus, strict guidelines for burials were issued by the government of Uganda under its Ministry of Health. They included limiting the handling of the deceased body to health/burial teams only, wrapping the body in waterproof plastic bags before handing it over for burial, and preventing the public from seeing the body. Family members and other mourners had to stay two meters away from the body.

Many district governments came up with further burial guidelines that included the time at which the burial was to take place, the prohibition of death announcements over radios to prevent the burials from attracting crowds, and ensuring a burial would take no more than two hours. The burial team, dressed in white wellington boots, full plastic protective suits, goggles, face shields, and gloves besides preparing the body secured the burial sites, dug the graves, and conducted the burials. They were nicknamed ‘Angels’ because they appeared mystical to the community members.

Indignation and defiance

Besides leading to personal suffering, these clinical burials also led to political dissatisfaction. The burial teams were heckled and some attacked for not following burial traditions. This is because in Uganda, a dead person is very special to the community and must be treated with full respect during the entire burial process. Burials were considered undignified because of the rough handling of the dead and the mourning of those close to the deceased in isolation, when this would usually take place as part of the burial process.[10] The departure from the traditional rituals led to psychosocial suffering (distress for bereaved families) that affecting healing, since no space was provided to express grief.

The community felt that the creation of distance between the deceased person and mourners, the wrapping of the body in artificial materials, and the handling of the body by seemingly alien entities did not ensure sufficient respect. The mystery and criticism was inspired by a deep distrust of the government during the pandemic, leading to allegations such as government’s burying of empty coffins and speculation that Covid-19 deaths concealed the trafficking of individuals.

“How could the spirit of the dead be reached and engaged when it is so trapped? Can the spirit be able to escape its ‘plastic prison’ and join the ancestors, or remain locked in captivity?” asks Brian Mukalazi in the Daily Monitor newspaper, describing how the burial of Covid-19 victims in a ‘scientific’ way angered the communities and led them to defying the burial guidelines by secretly exhuming the bodies to conduct decent burials. Communities such as the Budaka in eastern Uganda, the Buikwe, and the Palissa who resorted to this claimed they needed to ensure decent burials for their departed kin since their spirits had started disturbing their living relatives and some community members.

Conclusion

It is clear from the above that the suffering stemming from the loss of a loved one can be compounded by the lack of proper treatment of the deceased, in this case by the absence of proper burial rituals. However, these emotional impacts of injustices linked to bereavement processes on those close to the deceased and their communities are not yet sufficiently understood. It is crucial to address the psychosocial needs of those that lost loved ones to the pandemic. To prevent recurrence, and to help the bereaved find closure, academic research should focus more deliberately on cultural and psychological needs that arise during bereavement processes.

[1] McCarthy, J. R., Evans, R., Bowlby, S., & Wouango, J. (2020). Making sense of family deaths in urban Senegal: Diversities, contexts, and comparisons. OMEGA-Journal of Death and Dying, 82(2), 230-260.

[2] Baloyi, L., & Makobe-Rabothata, M. (2014). The African conception of death: A cultural implication.

[3] Umoh, D. S. (2012). Death is not natural: The African story.

[4] Haram, L. (2021). Bodily grief work meets Christian interiority: The Meru case. Death studies, 45(1), 51-60.

[5] Vokes, R. (2018). Before the call: Mobile phones, exchange relations, and social change in south-western Uganda. Ethnos, 83(2), 274-290.

[6] Wayland, E. J. (1931). Preliminary studies of the tribes of Karamoja. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 61, 187-230.

[7] Kembel, A. S. (2015). When the Dead Are Not Silent: The Investigation of Cultural Perspectives Concerning Improper Burials in Northern Uganda.

[8] As a theoretical perspective, Ubuntu is expressed in many languages in African communities but with the same meaning (Mugumbate and Chereni, 2020). Ubuntu caring solidarity translates to Uganda’s context through a saying which literally means “today it’s me, tomorrow someone else”.

[9] Lee, R., & Vaughan, M. (2008). Death and dying in the history of Africa since 1800. The Journal of African History, 49(3), 341-359.

[10] Lubega, M., Nakamya, C. S., Namugumya, E., & Najjemba, J. (2022). The effect of COVID-19 public health guidelines on the funeral traditions and burial rituals among the Baganda, a tribe in Central Uganda. PAMJ-One Health, 7(7).

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the author:

Henry Okidi Okoth holds a MA Development Studies degree from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. Currently, he is a researcher and consultant with Collaborative Social Change. His research interests are death and bereavement studies from a decolonial perspective, marginalization and poverty, gender, conflict, and human rights.

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COVID-19 and Conflict | The state’s failure to respond to COVID-19 in Brazil: an intentional disaster

By Fiorella Macchiavello, Renata Cavalcanti Muniz and Lee Pegler 16 December 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil stretches beyond the fight against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The inaction of the government over the past year to counter the effects of the pandemic has worsened living conditions for millions of Brazilians and ultimately resulted in the loss of lives. We argue that the intentional disaster resulting from the mismanagement of the pandemic was caused by the direct (in)action of the federal government as gross negligence rooted in apathy clashed with historically constructed conditions.

“The famous ‘stay home’ idea does not work for us here; it is not our reality […] quarantine in the favelas is the biggest fake news invented.” (Gilson Rodrigues, communitarian leader)

“The domestic worker already has a lot against her. If the boss gets sick, he uses his private healthcare system and is treated and cured. Domestic workers use the public system, stand in a large queue, and most of them die. This is the case not only for the domestic worker, but for all poor workers.” (Cleide Pinto, domestic workers union)

The above quotes provide just a glimpse of life during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, painting a picture of gross negligence, mismanagement, and death. These stories are not exceptions. Millions of Brazilians have had to navigate the pandemic, suffering as much from the inaction of the federal government as they did in fighting the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The pandemic became a crisis as the virus entered the country via elites and as existing inequities were compounded as the government stalled. The failure to act to save lives through imposing crucial pandemic measures is why we call it an intentional disaster.

To understand how this intentional disaster came to pass, we performed desk research and a qualitative comparative analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews[1] conducted with members of three civil society groups in Brazil: residents of favelas (informal settlements), domestic workers, and indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Interviews took place in July 2020, at the peak of the first wave of the pandemic in Brazil. The struggles of the three groups to survive the pandemic represent an ongoing fight, but also show their capacity to be organized, innovative, and quick in resistance. The common threat to the studied groups, besides the virus, was and remains the inaction of the government.

Inequalities in Brazilian society were dramatically exposed by the posture of president Jair Bolsonaro, who relativized deaths and disregarded the importance of the disease by claiming it was “just a simple flu”. Bolsonaro’s government attempted to obscure the official number of lives lost to COVID-19[2] and created obstacles for governors and mayors who felt compelled to implement measures to fight the virus[3]. Initially, governors rejected the directions of the president and implemented lockdown measures. It came to a point where the Supreme Court had to intervene, clarifying that the governors indeed had the responsibility to intervene and were permitted to do so. This provided a shimmer of hope in the face of the absence of larger, national measures.

Moreover, after the resignation of the Minister of Health in May this year, no other minister has been proclaimed; the ministry has since been run by a military general. It is notable that the country is facing the worst pandemic in a century without an official health minister. A lack of leadership, lack of planning, and lack of care for the dying population became the norm.

The devastation this level of inaction caused should not go unnoticed. The number of deaths from COVID-19 in Brazil surpassed 175,000 by beginning December – as a country of continental numbers, Brazil is now the third country in the world in terms of numbers of lives lost to the virus and confirmed cases. Similar to the US, a populist government openly denied scientific findings showing that COVID-19 was real and potentially lethal. A difference between the two countries, however, is that in the United States, Donald Trump eventually realized the need to take measures to contain the pandemic (even if due to electoral motivations). In Brazil, Bolsonaro seems to continue to ignore that responsibility.

What can now be witnessed is that Bolsonaro did not seem to learn, with all the lives lost, nor with Trump’s defeat, how crucial the imposition of measures are. The president continues to appear in pictures without wearing a mask and without adhering to social distancing measures. He now behaves as if the pandemic was over, plans to cut the emergency cash support to the population, and incites the population not to trust a vaccine originating from China. The year has gone from bad to worse.

Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro: protest in remembrance of 100,000 lives lost to the new coronavirus during the first weeks of August 2020, when the country hit the second place in the number of lives lost to COVID-19.
Picture: Rio da Paz. Authorized by authors.

How is this failure to act felt on the ground? What studies revealed in the Brazilian case is that a virus that arrived through elites when returning from vacation in Europe had a bigger impact in the most vulnerable spaces. People on the peripheries, residents of favelas, informal workers, the black population, and indigenous groups are hit hardest. The highest number of deaths seems also to be among the poorest. In a study of infections in São Paulo, almost 66% of the victims lived in neighbourhoods with average salaries of below R$3,000 reais (around 200 euros) per month, and 21% in places with an income of up to R$6,500 reais (around 1.000 euros) per month. Within regions where the average income was above R$19,000 (around 3,167 euros) per month, only just over 1% of deaths were registered.

This pattern found in São Paulo is likely to be repeated in other parts of the country. Populations with a higher socioeconomic status are those who can afford to be in isolation or lockdown and can work from home. A large part of the population cannot afford to do that. In the State of Rio de Janeiro, the first death due to COVID-19 was of a black domestic worker infected in the house where she worked after her employers had returned from a trip to Italy and were tested positive. COVID-19 in Brazil brings to the fore historic inequalities that follow the country’s development. Additionally, these inequalities are aggravated by an intentional policy of negligence by the federal government.

The failure of the Brazilian government to deal with the pandemic seems to be a combination of: (1) the obscure discourse of the president; (2) the lack of specific policies and proper communication with different groups; (3) the cover-up of official information, especially regarding the number of deaths; (4) the deliberate weakening of public services by the current government; and (5) a lack of strategy and planning. In summary, it is an act of complete neglect by the federal government, which in times of pandemic can be perceived as an intentional strategy to decimate the population, especially the most vulnerable, which is known in the literature as necropolitics[4].

In the words of indigenous leader Anderson Tapuia,

“here in Brazil we have a government that sends the message that if corona arrives at the villages, it should continue there, doing its work, which means exterminating indigenous peoples”.

[1] This is the first out of three posts to be published on Bliss presenting the main findings of the research work about COVID-19 in Brazil for the project ‘When Disaster Meets Conflict’.

[2] https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/06/08/veiculos-de-comunicacao-formam-parceria-para-dar-transparencia-a-dados-de-covid-19.ghtml

[3] https://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2020/06/08/veiculos-de-comunicacao-formam-parceria-para-dar-transparencia-a-dados-de-covid-19.ghtml

[4] Necropolitics is a process in which the state uses political power – by its discourses, actions and omissions – to put specific groups into a more marginalised and vulnerable position (Mbembe, 2019).

References:

MBEMBE, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, London : Duke University Press.

About the authors:

Fiorella Macchiavello is an economist and holds an MA degree in Urban and Regional Development from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. Currently, she is a PhD researcher in the third year of a Joint Degree between the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam and UnB, University of Brasilia, Brazil.

Renata Cavalcanti Muniz is a full time PhD researcher at ISS in the last year of her research. Her PhD research was funded by CNPQ-Brasil, and she is part of two research groups at ISS, DEC and CI.

Lee Pegler

Lee Pegler spent his early career working as an economist with the Australian Labour Movement. More recent times have seen him researching the labour implications of “new” management strategies of TNCs in Brazil/ Latin America. This interest expanded to a focus on the implications of value chain insertion on labour, both for formal and informal workers. Trained as an economist and sociologist (PhD – LSE), he currently works as Assistant Professor (Work, Organisation and Labour Rights) at the ISS.

The asylum procedure as a hope-generating machine

By Dorothea Hilhorst 19 November 2020

Over the past few years, the European Union has used deterrence as its main strategy to prevent an influx of refugees, becoming more hard-handed as the number of refugees has increased. A faulty asylum procedure creates false hope to those who are then met by an untimely death or horrific conditions upon reaching Europe instead of ‘making it’ as a handful of refugees before them did. This hope-generating machine divides instead of unites, diminishing the collective power of refugees to challenge the EU’s migration policy.

Some days ago I reread Power, Community and the State[1], a book by former colleague at Wageningen University Monique Nuijten, to contribute to a publication celebrating the author’s work on the occasion of her retirement. Back in 2003, Nuijten described how the Mexican state acted as hope-generating machine that disciplined and divided poor peasant communities. While rereading the book 17 years after it first appeared, I was reminded how much the world has changed in the last two decades. I also realized how appropriately the idea of a hope-generating machine describes the asylum system in Europe.

Power, Community and the State is written in a time when arguments that we had entered a deterritorialized and transnationalized world seemed compelling. The book quotes Hardt and Negri’s view[2] that ‘sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule’.

How dreamily naïve such a quotation sounds today. In contrast to what was then hoped would be a move toward greater global unity, today’s world manifests itself as reterritorialized and renationalized, especially when seen through the eyes of migrants. Most passports in the world do not travel far. Borders that seemed to have disappeared have been reinstated as real physical borders, paper borders, iron borders, or even—when we read about the plans for barriers miles away from coastlines or hear of surveillant ships shooting at migrant boats at open sea—borders of death[3]. As Linda Polman accurately remarked, ‘[t]he Human Rights Commission of the United Nations stated in 2018 that Europe has developed a refugee policy that implicitly and explicitly accepts death as an effective anti-migration instrument.’[4]

Yet the core idea of Nuijten’s book about the state as a hope-generating machine is more relevant than ever —certainly for the millions of migrants seeking entry into inaccessible states. Oliver Bakewell noted how prospective migrants in East Africa are completely devoted to collecting papers and building a portfolio for an envisioned migration. During his presentation at the Forced Migration Studies Association Conference in Thessaloniki in 2018, Bakewell echoed Monique Nuijten, who said that ‘[t]he culture of the state is central to the operation of the bureaucracy as a hope-generating machine. The hope-generating bureaucratic machine gives the message that everything is possible, that cases are never closed […]’ (p. 196). With reference to the migration policy in East Africa, Bakewell seemed to expand on her argument that ‘[s]tate intervention in Mexico tends to have a divisive effect on the population, and to frustrate independent collective organising efforts “from below”’ (p. 198).

What the example of East Africa shows is that, rather than seeking out their brothers in fate and rising to protest, migrants are driven by the hope of becoming one of the lucky chosen few, doing everything in their power to mould their individual behaviour and attitudes to the requirements imposed or favoured by the migration machines. The annual lottery that hands out 55,000 Green Cards to hopefuls wishing to enter the United States—with a 1.33% chance of people in the most eligible countries getting one—is indeed the ultimate hope-generating machine, steering millions of people away from engaging in protests and activism in their own countries against conditions they are fleeing from, and instead motivating them to be left at the hands of ‘fate’ in the form of a lottery, as in the US Green Card Lottery, and to maintain immaculate track records and build their individual case files to be considered ‘good citizens’.

Stories of refugees ‘slipping through the cracks’ of Europe’s asylum system and starting afresh continue to fire the continent’s hope-generating machine.

It is widely acknowledged that Europe’s policies towards migration can be summarized by the word ‘deterrence’. The European Union as well as its individual member states, perhaps with the exception of Germany, seem united in their determined aggression in seeking to expose and render as visible as possible the cases of failed migration that result in tragic and horrifying death by drowning when crossing the Mediterranean Sea or being stuck in a horrific limbo in refugee camps such as Moria. In these camps, refugees seem to have the same function as the shrivelled human heads on stakes that used to decorate the walls of medieval European cities to deter vagabonds from passing through the gates. The purpose of these efforts is similarly to deter would-be migrants from trying to reach Europe. Nonetheless, there are always a number of people who manage to slip through the cracks of the system and are granted asylum, and so the hope-generating machine continues to churn out hope, fed by ‘success stories’.

For a long time, I thought maintaining the appearance of a just system of asylum was a concession to the many Europeans who are supportive of refugees. In the Netherlands, for example, the government insists that there is no social support base for migrants. This, however, is far from the truth. Recent research[5] from the University of Groningen found that, although the support base for migration is shrinking in the Netherlands, 45% of the population still supports government assistance to refugees. Another 25% of the population is willing to support such assistance to refugees provided that strict measures are taken to protect society from asylum seekers who ‘misbehave’. Thirty Dutch municipalities have declared their willingness to receive refugees from Moria.

The bold statement of the right-wing Dutch government that there is no support base for refugees is no more than a malicious manipulation of the truth by a government that plays to the populist far right, where it fears it is losing votes. I always assumed that the small numbers of successful asylum cases in Europe were a triumph of the countless refugee-friendly lawyers, volunteers, and left-wing politicians making noise on behalf of refugees. I assumed that they occasionally managed to beat the system.

Upon closer inspection, and after rereading Power, Community and the State, I realize more clearly that those asylum seekers who successfully slip through the system are not a mistake or a failure of the deterrence machine. It is much more likely that the machine is built in such a way that, once in a while, a lucky individual comes out with a residence permit. Thus, refugees that slip through the cracks, and are granted a residence permit to continue their life in Europe—are also the symbols of hope that keep inspiring migrants to bet on obtaining a residence permit. .

It may very well be that the machine is designed in this way to discipline the migrants in Moria and other places where they are living a non-life.

When stuck in these camps, they continue to hope that they can eventually ‘move on’ and start the asylum procedure, and so they continue to wait, and to hope. And those that reach a country where their asylum procedures are started are told by their friendly lawyers to keep their heads down, behave well, and do whatever they can to enhance their chances of being granted a residence permit. Knowing one or two people who succeeded before you further feeds that hope. And as long as migrants have this hope, they are prevented from being united to fight the cruel reception they get in Europe.

[1] Nuijten, M. C. M. (2003). Power, Community and the State: The Political Anthropology of Organisation in Mexico. London, UK and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.

[2] Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[3] Henk van Houtum & Rodrigo Bueno Lacy (2020) The Autoimmunity of the EU’s Deadly B/ordering Regime; Overcoming its Paradoxical Paper, Iron and Camp Borders, Geopolitics, 25:3, 706-733, DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1728743

[4] Linda Polman Tegen Elke Prijs. Essay Vluchtelingen en Europa. Groene Amsterdammer, 01-10-2020.

[5] Toon Kuppens et al. (2019). Ongenoegen, migratie, gastvrijheid en maatschappelijke onrust. Onderzoek Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, in opdracht van het Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek- en Documentatiecentrum. https://www.wodc.nl/binaries/2742%20Volledige%20Tekst_tcm28-425017.pdf

About the author:

Thea Hilhorst

Dorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam.

This article is based on a contribution of the author to the Liber Amicorum for Monique Nuijten of Wageningen University.

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