School of Social and Political Science

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Abstract: Postcolonial Pathologies: The Art in the Science of Autopsies
Joyce Nyairo

This paper is concerned with the socio-political rites performed on and over the body whenever the words “foreign experts” and “further tests abroad” are pronounced in Kenya’s theatre of high-profile deaths. More generally, I am concerned with the place of autopsies in the country’s social imaginary.

In the 1990s, relations between the Moi government and Britain’s Scotland Yard dramatized the (alter)native meaning of the state’s well-worn phrase, “we shall leave no stone unturned.” This grammar of denial, deceit and obfuscation framed by a raft of (post)colonial pathologies has since been conflated with other death rituals in ways that now shape the work, function, and meaning(s) of post-mortems.

My point is not to pit culture against science, but rather to demonstrate how these emergent ways of negating death, questioning the science of it, contribute to a national funerary practice that not only leads to a romanticizing of the dead, it also wins over death itself by building performative narratives that triumph over the mundane.

Dr Nyairo is a 2022/2023 Fellow at the Wissenshaftskolleg zu Berlin