On Saturday Mugabe’s sister Regina Gata praised his widow Grace for “standing her ground and defending the body so that it would not be defiled”.
While she did not name anyone, she said there were people who had wanted to carry out traditional rituals, but “we stood firm because Mugabe was a Christian”.
Nevertheless, one family member has said that hours before the body was brought out of the house for burial, Grace, a traditional chief and a few other relatives had shut themselves in the room where the Mugabe’s body lay in state.
“We don’t know what they were doing and some family members are suspecting there were some rituals,” said the family source, who asked not to be named.
Fewer than 300 relatives attended the burial, and no top government officials were present, something Leo Mugabe refused to comment on.
But for independent political scientist Richard Mahomva, it was tragic that Mugabe’s legacy was being “privatised”, “trivialised” and “villagised” by having him buried in a private space.
“It erases him from his illustrious contribution to the birth of Zimbabwe, it erases him from being an international political stalwart,” Mahomva said.
There has been a “battle for the corpse of Mugabe” between the state and Mugabe’s political allies, he said.
“The state also had interest in the corpse of Mugabe because the state needed legitimacy” following the 2017 coup, he added.
“It was not just a corpse…, it was a corpse that was engraved with so much political access for anyone who is interested in legitimising their political stand.”
The ruling ZANU-PF said in a statement that it respected the family’s wishes to bury him wherever they wanted to.
But it added that it was “saddened when manoeuvres that border on political gimmicks begin to unfold on an issue concerning an illustrious liberation icon”.- Digital Journal
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