A new Africa seems to have arrived – one where the dead, if they happen to be former State Presidents or business tycoons, don’t simply rest. Instead, they spark unseemly wrangles between grieving families and governments, or pit loved ones against one another, causing more drama in the hereafter than they ever did in life.

Let’s start with the State President in this narrative – Edgar Chagwa Lungu, who led Zambia from January 2015 until his August 2021 electoral defeat by a rival he had repeatedly jailed while in power. Once he was part of the hoi polloi again – well, that’s an exaggeration, as he continued to receive many privileges as a former head of State – his family members found themselves in legal trouble, charged with corruption allegedly perpetrated during his tenure. When he announced plans to run in next year’s elections, his retirement benefits were withdrawn on the grounds that he was no longer a retiree but an active politician.

Needless to say, owing to his family’s legal woes and his own treatment by the Zambian government, there was absolutely no love lost between him and his family on the one hand and his successor – President Hakainde Hichilema, HH to his supporters – on the other. By the time he died in a South African hospital on June 5, aged 68, relations between the two sides were deeply strained.

Allegedly, Lungu’s dying wish was: “Just don’t let Hichilema near my dead body.”

Days after his death, as the Zambian government prepared to fly his remains home for burial at a site reserved for former Presidents, his family sprang a surprise: he had wished to be buried in South Africa. HH’s government wasn’t having it. It promptly dispatched the country’s attorney-general to Pretoria to apply for a court interdict. In a verdict handed down on August 8, the judges sided with the Zambian government.

More drama was to follow. Lungu’s family has now gone to South Africa’s Constitutional Court, seeking leave to appeal the High Court judgment paving the way for his body’s repatriation.

So, nearly three months on, his body still lies in a morgue, with no end in sight to the unfolding drama.

If you think remaining unburied three months after death is bad, spare a thought for a British tycoon who died in Kenya in 2013. Although initially buried within a reasonable timeframe, his body was exhumed a year later and has spent the past 11 years in a mortuary, pending the conclusion of an inquest into his death.

This drama was sparked by wrangling between Harry Roy Veerers’ children – two sons from his first marriage and two daughters from the second – with accusations of murder by poisoning flying around. It seemed to end last week when a Nairobi magistrate found that, owing to the body’s level of decomposition, it was impossible to determine the cause of death. He then ordered the corpse to be released to the family for burial at a place of their choice. I don’t see how that’s going to work, given the family is split down the middle.

But this isn’t a uniquely Zambian or Kenyan phenomenon. Across the continent, the bodies of powerful men have often refused to rest quietly. When former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe died in 2019, a posthumous power struggle erupted between his family, who wanted him buried at his rural birthplace, and the Zimbabwean government, which insisted he be interred at the Heroes Acre in Harare, where he had laid to rest scores of his independence war comrades during his 37-year reign. Despite legal challenges, the family prevailed.

Over in Angola, the family of former President José Eduardo dos Santos, who died in 2022, wasn’t so lucky. They had wanted him buried in Spain, fearing some of his children, embroiled in legal trouble, would not be able to travel to Angola for his burial or to visit his grave. Angola became his final resting place.

We can only hope our bodies don’t become pawns is some posthumous chess game. But for now, with our leaders and tycoons, death is just the beginning of the plot.