Kinship and Hauntings in Post-Apartheid KwaNdebele, South Africa

In former KwaNdebele, stories abound about vagabond spirits that have drifted away from home and wander the road, distracting traffic and causing fatalities. To prevent these hauntings, it is believed that the living must perform the ritual incantations of ‘fetching’ the spirits of the dead where they died and return them to a mediated network of dead and living kin, a practice many fear is quickly diminishing. This has led some to call for a return to ‘tradition’ in order to pacify and domesticate the spirits. Using ethnographic data gathered between 2015 and 2016 in the former ‘homeland’ of KwaNdebele, I argue that although these stories speak to the perils of the road, they also extend beyond to express concerns over what increased mobility and migration to the city mean to Ndebele families. Drawing on a variety of scholarly sources, I further argue that the call for a return to ‘tradition’ (a motif in the haunting stories) does not suggest a nostalgia for an idyllic past but rather a past born of servitude or indentured labour in white-owned farms where security of tenure depended on tightly knit kinship networks. The realities of post-apartheid KwaNdebele necessitate a return to similar strategies of pacification in order to circumvent a crisis of social reproduction.