The traffic in heads: bodies, borders and the articulation of regional histories

This article is about stories of chiefs’ and childrens’ heads that circulate in and out of southern Africa. It argues that rather than trivialising or exoticising African experiences, stories about heads that cross political and conceptual boundaries, and how long they stay there, and whose spirit is aggrieved — and where it is aggrieved — while the heads are gone, reveal the physicality with which colonial and postcolonial violence has been experienced by Africans. Considered alongside stories of other travelling body parts such as Saartje Bartman's remains or organ transplants, stories of chiefs’ and childrens’ heads can link the history of cosmology with that of politics. Official demands for the return of some body parts, and unofficial acquiescence to the loss of other body parts, remind us of the various ways that the contradictions of colonial and postcolonial regimes have been experienced and articulated. The variety of head stories cannot be forged into a neat historical narrative, however; they are in tension with each other, and thus depict the history of the region that produced them.