Investigating State killings in Africa: Analytical Framework: Necropolitics, Memory, and Theology

Chapter 4

Emmanuel Mihiingo Kaija

Published in Ghana

Abstract:

This chapter constructs a multidimensional analytical framework to examine Africa’s intertwined crises of death, displacement, erasure, and spiritual resilience. Centered on the triad of necropolitics, memory, and theology, the chapter investigates how sovereign violence orchestrates life and death, how communities preserve memory against erasure, and how theological reflection transforms despair into ethical witness and hope. Drawing from Rwanda’s genocide, Uganda’s LRA insurgency, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s resource-fueled conflicts, Nigeria’s Boko Haram abductions, Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado insurgency, and South Sudan’s civil violence, the chapter integrates biology, health sciences, epidemiology, environmental chemistry, geography, history, economics, literature, and comparative theology. African proverbs, oral histories, memorial practices, and ritualized remembrance are foregrounded, providing both empirical and ethical lenses. By combining scientific, historical, and theological perspectives, this chapter positions the triad not only as an analytic tool but as a framework for moral and scholarly witness, offering both diagnostic insight and prophetic engagement with Africa’s death-worlds.

Introduction: Africa as a Living Archive

Africa is not merely a continent; it is a palimpsest of memory and violence, a living archive where rivers, soils, and skies bear witness to the cycles of life, death, and survival. Across its vast landscapes—from the volcanic highlands of Rwanda to the mineral-rich forests of the Congo, the arid Sahel, the floodplains of Uganda’s north, and the gas-rich coasts of Mozambique—life and death have been distributed with a capriciousness that defies simple moral calculus. Geographically, the unevenness of rainfall, the fertility of soils, and the location of mineral deposits have historically determined patterns of settlement, conflict, and economic exploitation. For instance, in the Congo Basin, dense forests have simultaneously shielded communities from colonial conquest and concealed mineral wealth that would later fuel armed conflicts; in the Sahel, desertification and erratic rainfall have exacerbated famine cycles, making death both environmental and political. Physics and environmental chemistry remind us that these landscapes are not inert backdrops: climate change accelerates soil erosion, contaminates water systems with heavy metals from mining, and exacerbates disease vectors like malaria, cholera, and bilharzia. Biology illuminates the toll: malnutrition, epidemics, and endemic diseases do not strike evenly; immunological resilience is often undermined by displacement, trauma, and starvation, creating death-worlds where life expectancy drops sharply, and infant mortality can exceed 120 per 1,000 live births in conflict zones.

Mathematics and epidemiology allow us to model the scale of suffering quantitatively: in northern Uganda’s IDP camps during the LRA conflict, weekly mortality estimates reached 1,000 individuals, a figure that is not merely statistical but a measurable footprint of necropolitical neglect. In the eastern DRC, complex network models reveal how militias, multinational corporations, and local authorities interact in resource extraction chains, creating what can be described as a topology of death, where the probability of child labor, forced recruitment, and fatal injury can be statistically inferred from geographic proximity to mines and armed checkpoints. Economics and history together demonstrate the structural dimensions: mineral wealth—coltan, cobalt, gold—has made eastern Congo both globally indispensable and locally expendable, a paradox where the global North consumes convenience and luxury at the expense of African bodies, echoing the logic of structural violence articulated by Johan Galtung. Price indices of global cobalt and coltan exports correlate directly with spikes in militia activity, revealing a cruel intersection between global markets and local mortality.

Literature and oral histories offer the human texture that statistics cannot. Survivors’ laments in Rwanda, sung in Kinyarwanda over hills where thousands perished, are living archives. Acholi oral poets in Uganda encode abduction and famine into rhythm and metaphor, turning memory into a social scaffold for moral reckoning. In Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado, displaced communities recite histories of villages burned and families decimated while walking along coastlines mapped by natural gas concessions—a tragic overlay of human suffering and economic extraction. Comparative theology situates these empirical realities within moral and spiritual reflection: African cosmologies, Christian theology, and Islamic ethical frameworks converge to recognize that death is never neutral. A Ganda proverb reminds us—a thing without kinship or memory has no authority; to forget death is to consent to necropolitical erasure.

Furthermore, chemistry and biology reveal the intergenerational consequences of these necropolitical geographies. Heavy metals leached from mines into rivers alter endocrine function, increase congenital malformations, and reduce agricultural yield, creating a cascade where ecological violence becomes social and biological violence. Food insecurity, compounded by erratic rainfall patterns and soil depletion, creates an intricate feedback loop in which scarcity exacerbates conflict, and conflict intensifies scarcity—a cyclical catastrophe where mathematics, environmental science, and economics converge to explain why death proliferates unevenly across space and time.

In this interdisciplinary lens, Africa’s landscapes, rivers, and forests are living witnesses, each element—from the microcosm of the microbiome to the macrocosm of mineral economies—telling a story of orchestrated death, survival, and memory. Memory, theology, and necropolitics are therefore not abstract constructs but analytic tools rooted in lived, measurable, and spiritually legible realities. To understand Africa without integrating physics, biology, history, literature, and theology is to see only part of the map; to see the whole map is to confront the full weight of suffering and resilience, to trace the algebra of life and death, and to recognize the ethical responsibility that such knowledge demands.

Necropolitics: The Cartography of Death

Necropolitics, as articulated by Achille Mbembe (2003, 2017), expands Foucault’s biopolitics by revealing how sovereign power is often exercised not only through life but through orchestrated death. In Africa, necropolitics manifests in layered, spatially-distributed, and temporally-extended forms—ranging from genocides and armed conflicts to displacement, forced labor, ecological devastation, and systemic neglect. It is simultaneously geographic, biological, economic, and ethical, a phenomenon that can be studied empirically and experienced spiritually.

In Rwanda (1994), nearly 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were exterminated in 100 days. Physics and chemistry illuminate the mechanisms of destruction: grenades, machetes, and firearms convert chemical energy into lethal force, shaping the topography of mass death. Epidemiology and biology reveal the cascading effects of trauma, malnutrition, and disease, which continued to kill survivors long after the genocide ended. Radio transmissions by RTLM reduced human beings to vermin—inyenzi (cockroaches)—showing how language, semiotics, and mass communication become vectors in necropolitical operations. History and economics converge here: the genocide was fueled not only by ideology but also by colonial legacies of land allocation, identity registration, and resource scarcity. A Ganda proverb captures this logic—the city that consumes a man does not do so in a single day. Necropolitics is thus both instantaneous and cumulative, blending immediate violence with long-term deprivation.

Northern Uganda’s LRA insurgency illustrates necropolitics in slow motion. Over 60,000 children were abducted, forced into combat, sexual slavery, or coerced servitude. Geography intersects with biology: displacement into IDP camps created environments conducive to cholera, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. Nutritional deficits compounded immunological vulnerability, while epidemiological studies reveal mortality rates in some camps rivaling those in war zones—over 1,000 deaths weekly in 2005. Mathematics, through survival analysis, allows quantification of these long-term mortality effects, revealing patterns of vulnerability across age, sex, and geographic location. Economics explains the structural underpinnings: reliance on subsistence farming in ecologically degraded areas, dependence on humanitarian aid, and the systemic marginalization of Acholi laborers created a death economy where survival became probabilistic, conditional on food distribution, water access, and medical availability. Literature and oral poetry preserve lived experience: Acholi poets encode trauma and survival strategies in metrical form, ensuring memory persists even when formal institutions fail.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, necropolitics is globalized. Eastern provinces—North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri—host vast mineral reserves (coltan, cobalt, gold, tantalum) critical to global electronics and renewable energy industries. Physics and chemistry reveal the extraction hazards: cyanide leaching, mercury contamination, and heavy metal exposure compromise ecosystems and human health, increasing congenital malformations and chronic diseases. Biological studies show how children working in mines suffer musculoskeletal injuries, chemical poisoning, and stunted growth. Economic analysis exposes the paradox: global demand drives local death, with multinational corporations benefiting from child labor and militia enforcement while external consumers enjoy safety and convenience. Geographic mapping combined with conflict studies shows spatial clustering of violence around mineral-rich zones, creating “necropolitical corridors” where probability models can predict forced labor, abduction, and violent mortality. Comparative theology contextualizes this suffering: Congolese Christian and Indigenous traditions assert that ancestors, the living-dead, remain present in violated landscapes, bearing witness against systemic injustice. A Shona proverb emphasizes this moral imperative—death acknowledges its rightful owner. Necropolitics here is both scientific and sacred, measured by bone, blood, and spiritual testimony.

Nigeria’s northeast highlights necropolitics through Boko Haram’s abduction of Chibok girls (2014), continuing into insurgency across Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa. Mathematics and network theory illuminate kidnapping and ransom patterns, showing how violence spreads through weak nodes of state control. Epidemiology demonstrates that forced displacement worsens malnutrition, mental health disorders, and disease susceptibility. Literary testimonies—novels, poetry, social media narratives—encode resistance, lamentation, and ethical critique. Memory functions as a form of counter-necropolitics: monthly vigils and storytelling ensure that missing lives are counted and grievable. Theology situates this struggle within moral cosmology: naming the abducted is a sacramental act, a declaration that human dignity cannot be extinguished even amidst the orchestration of death.

Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado region further illustrates necropolitics entangled with global economics and ecology. Insurgency since 2017 has killed over 4,000 people and displaced more than one million. Coastal geographies overlap with natural gas concessions worth billions, demonstrating how global energy markets create local death zones. Chemistry and biology intersect: displaced populations face malnutrition, water-borne diseases, and psychological trauma. Historical analysis shows legacies of colonial exploitation and post-independence state neglect, while literary ethnographies capture survivors’ voices, blending spiritual lamentation with sociopolitical critique. Comparative theology here emphasizes that divine justice is witnessed not only through institutional ritual but also through community survival, lament, and ethical memory.

Even South Sudan and Sudan provide macro-level necropolitical analysis. Nile tributaries, oil fields, and desertification converge to produce mortality landscapes where ethnic conflict, famine, and state failure intersect. Remote sensing (geography) tracks burned villages, refugee flows, and environmental degradation, while epidemiological models estimate excess deaths from preventable diseases. History, economics, and politics explain structural vulnerability: colonial boundary-making, oil revenue exploitation, and corruption converge to render life probabilistically precarious. African proverbs remind us that this is neither accidental nor inexplicable—the hyena consumes the unprotected seed—a metaphor for how sovereignty, absence of protection, and neglect generate necropolitical vulnerability.

Memory: The Stubborn Guest

If necropolitics is the machinery of death, memory is the stubborn guest who refuses eviction, the defiant force that insists the past—and those lost to it—remain present. Memory in Africa operates across multiple registers: biological, as encoded in trauma and epigenetics; geographical, embedded in landscapes, memorials, and abandoned villages; mathematical, expressed through population counts, missing-person statistics, and demographic modeling; literary, preserved in oral poetry, novels, and testimonies; economic, inscribed in the loss of labor, livelihoods, and generational wealth; and theological, mediated through ritual, lament, and invocation of the ancestors.

In Rwanda, memorialization transcends mere record-keeping. Sites like Gisozi, Murambi, Nyamata, and Ntarama are simultaneously spatial archives, ethical instruments, and biological testimonies. Anthropologists and forensic scientists note that the preservation of skeletal remains provides insight into malnutrition, disease, and trauma prior to death, while chemists analyzing bone isotopes reconstruct diets and exposure to toxins. Mathematics quantifies the scale of loss: mortality ratios, age distributions, and sex ratios offer models of genocide’s demographic impact. Economically, the genocide erased skilled populations, destroyed markets, and reset the labor economy, leaving scars that persist in GDP trajectories and development indices. Literary memory thrives alongside these measurable effects: poems by survivors’ children, narratives embedded in kinyarwanda songs, and novels like Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile encode individual and communal memory, blending historical record with aesthetic testimony. Comparative theology reminds us that in these spaces, the dead are not absent: Christian liturgies, indigenous rituals, and ancestral veneration intertwine, ensuring that bones are more than remnants—they are witnesses, petitioners, and interlocutors with the living.

Northern Uganda’s Acholi region demonstrates memory as both resistance and reconstruction. Mass graves in Atiak, Abok, and Pajule, often unmarked by official records, are remembered through oral poetry, storytelling circles, and annual commemorations. Epigenetic studies suggest that trauma leaves biological traces: children of abducted mothers exhibit altered stress responses, revealing memory encoded in physiology as well as culture. Geography informs the political memory: displacement into swampy IDP camps altered settlement patterns, erasing old village networks yet creating new loci of collective memory. Mathematics enables tracking patterns of abduction, disease, and mortality, while economics illuminates lost subsistence and social capital. Literature and song transmit moral truths: Acholi laments, or ajwaka, narrate both individual pain and communal resilience. Theology underlines ethical responsibility: in Acholi Christian traditions and indigenous cosmologies, forgetting the dead invites continued spiritual imbalance. A proverb encapsulates this insistence—he who protects himself does not forget—underscoring memory as an act of both survival and moral accountability.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, memory must navigate fragmentation, displacement, and global indifference. Women in Bukavu carry photographs of abducted children; survivors tattoo or scar their bodies with symbols of loss. Chemistry and biology reveal how exposure to warfare, malnutrition, and toxic mining residues alters health trajectories, embedding memory in physiology. Geographic displacement spreads oral histories across villages, refugee camps, and diasporic communities. Economists calculate staggering opportunity costs of lost labor, disrupted markets, and destroyed infrastructure. Literature functions as a mnemonic tool: novels, plays, and songs recount violence, survival, and resistance, creating narrative cartographies of trauma. Comparative theology situates these memories in sacred contexts: Catholic, Protestant, and Indigenous rituals honor victims while asserting divine presence amidst absence. A Congolese proverb—the child who is cautious is not easily bitten by the snake—serves as a metaphor for how memory guides survival strategies and ethical reflection.

Nigeria’s Chibok tragedy illustrates memory as liturgical and civic action. Monthly vigils, social media campaigns, and educational projects function as dynamic memorials. Biological studies on trauma reveal cortisol spikes and anxiety disorders in both survivors and families, indicating embodied memory. Mathematics models missing children and population vulnerabilities in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa, while geography tracks displacement, refugee routes, and insurgency zones. Literature—poems, novels, and essays—preserves stories that the media often ignores, translating trauma into testimony. Comparative theology is evident: naming each missing child is a sacred act, a ritual insistence that their humanity remains recognized, aligning ethical responsibility with spiritual presence. The Hausa proverb—death does not erase a name—permeates all forms of memorialization, framing memory as resistance against necropolitical erasure.

Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado and Sudan’s Darfur present memory as mobile, transnational, and adaptive. Displacement scatters populations across borders, yet songs, dances, and storytelling maintain cohesion. Geography and ecology matter: burned villages, mined rivers, and deforested lands encode memory in topography. Biology and chemistry show how environmental toxins, malnutrition, and disease during displacement leave traces on human and animal populations, creating a living archive of suffering. Economically, famine and destroyed markets exacerbate trauma, embedding loss in the material infrastructure of survival. Literature, oral traditions, and social media form layered mnemonic systems, while theology ensures ritual, prayer, and ancestral invocation sustain ethical and spiritual memory.

Across Africa, memory resists time, entropy, and the machinery of necropolitics. Mathematics, through demographic reconstructions, epidemiology, and statistical modeling, measures what death cannot fully erase. Science and literature converge: chemistry, biology, and physics document the corporeal traces of trauma, while oral poetry, novels, and ritual preserve narrative and moral memory. Comparative theology situates these traces within sacred cosmologies: the dead are witnesses, ancestors are interlocutors, and lament is a form of divine conversation. African proverbs provide ethical anchors—a person does not starve at the day of death, yet in memory, the deceased demand sustenance of remembrance, justice, and ritual. Memory is not passive; it is interdisciplinary, sacred, and strategic, a tool to contest erasure, reclaim dignity, and sustain hope in landscapes of death.

Theology: The Lamenting Fire

Theology in Africa does not emerge as abstract speculation but as a living engagement with death, memory, and resistance. It is a lens through which necropolitics and memory are transfigured into ethical, spiritual, and prophetic insight. Across the continent, theology addresses the stark realities of life and death—genocide, slavery, abduction, famine, resource exploitation—while interrogating the sacred frameworks within which communities endure, interpret, and resist violence. Theology, in this sense, is at once comparative, interdisciplinary, and deeply contextual, drawing from African indigenous cosmologies, Christianity, Islam, and African diaspora spiritualities, and intersecting with biology, geography, literature, and even economics.

Historically, theology has always confronted necropolitics. The Old Testament, for example, recounts Pharaoh’s drowning of Hebrew infants, Nebuchadnezzar’s deportation of Jews, and the Assyrian destruction of Israel—stories that map power, sovereignty, and death. New Testament narratives, such as the crucifixion under Roman occupation, dramatize the tension between life, death, and divine justice. African theology internalizes these narratives and situates them in geographical and socio-political contexts. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, Christian liturgies are performed amidst cobalt mines and conflict zones, asserting the sacred even as bodies are exploited. Rituals of lamentation are simultaneously scientifically observable: the stress responses of participants reflect heightened cortisol levels, indicating the embodiment of collective grief; anthropologists note that ceremonial rhythms regulate community psychology, offering coping mechanisms for intergenerational trauma.

In Uganda, theology interacts dynamically with oral literature and mathematics. Acholi Christians and indigenous spiritual practitioners combine laments, storytelling, and hymnody to encode ethical memory. The numerical patterns in rituals—such as the cadence of laments performed for 7, 14, or 21 days—demonstrate an indigenous mathematical consciousness, reflecting cycles of mourning, spiritual purification, and prophetic declaration. Literature, such as local epic narratives and modern Acholi novels, transforms memory into theological meditation, where missing children and war survivors are both moral agents and witnesses to God’s presence amidst suffering.

Congo’s Eastern provinces demonstrate the intersection of theology and economics. The displacement caused by globalized mineral extraction creates death-worlds, yet theology frames economic suffering as an ethical terrain. Catholic, Protestant, and Indigenous rituals honor victims, challenge exploitative labor systems, and call for global moral accountability. Literature functions as theology too: poems, plays, and songs narrate trauma, ritualize memory, and demand justice. African proverbs underscore these ethical imperatives(Shona)—death recognizes its rightful owner—suggesting that theology is an ethical contract with the dead, with nature, and with justice.

In Nigeria, theology mediates civic action and spiritual witness. Vigils for the Chibok girls integrate prayer, social activism, and political protest. Comparative theology allows an intersection of Christian liturgy, Islamic du’a, and indigenous rituals, demonstrating interfaith ethical praxis. Geography shapes these acts: urban spaces such as Abuja, Maiduguri, and Lagos become sacred stages where bodies, words, and prayers contest necropolitical erasure. Biology and psychology reveal that repeated communal rituals foster resilience, strengthen social cohesion, and transmit moral memory intergenerationally.

Mozambique, Cabo Delgado, and Sudan’s Darfur region provide further insight. Here, theology must contend with mobile, dispersed populations, environmental degradation, and climate-induced famine. Environmental theology emerges, linking ecological destruction to moral accountability. Chemistry and physics highlight the material consequences of warfare: contaminated water, soil degradation, and air pollution compound human suffering. Theology transforms these observations into moral imperatives: to care for the land is to care for the living, the dead, and the unborn. Indigenous African cosmologies assert that displaced and murdered ancestors inhabit these altered landscapes, creating a moral geography where theology is ecologically and socially embedded.

Literature and mathematics converge in African theological reflection. Novels, epics, and oral poetry encode moral dilemmas, historical trauma, and prophetic visions, while numerical patterns, calendrical rituals, and demographic analyses contextualize these narratives. Comparative theology allows cross-cultural reflection: lessons from Jewish mourning practices, Islamic teachings on justice, and Christian notions of resurrection inform African responses, producing a synthesized theological lens that is both local and globally conversant.

African proverbs crystallize this theology into ethical imperatives:

(Ganda)—the dead do not hunger, yet they demand ritual, remembrance, and justice.

(Luhya)—the dead depart but remain embodied in the living, encoded in collective memory and communal responsibility.

(Shona)—the soul is air; even when invisible, it circulates, influencing life, justice, and moral action.

Theology here is not static but living, interdisciplinary, and action-oriented. It interprets biology, chemistry, and epidemiology to understand trauma and survival; geography and economics to comprehend displacement and structural violence; mathematics to model demographic loss and risk; literature to transmit narrative memory; and comparative theology to situate African ethical and spiritual wisdom within a global moral landscape. It transforms death into testimony, silence into song, and graves into spaces of prophetic dialogue. The lamenting fire of African theology insists that God, justice, and moral memory persist even amidst the machinery of death, and that human communities bear ethical responsibility to the living and the dead alike.

Conclusion: A Triadic Framework of Witness

Africa’s landscapes, rivers, forests, deserts, and urban sprawls are etched with the scars of human and structural violence, from genocide and insurgency to forced migration, ecological collapse, and globalized extraction. To analyze these phenomena requires a framework that is both diagnostic and prophetic, empirical and spiritual, historical and forward-looking. The triad of Necropolitics, Memory, and Theology offers this analytical scaffolding, interweaving insights from biology, physics, chemistry, economics, geography, literature, mathematics, history, and comparative theology into a unified yet flexible lens.

Necropolitics exposes the machinery of death across scales and disciplines. Biologically, the cumulative effects of war, famine, and disease demonstrate systemic mortality patterns: cholera outbreaks in northern Uganda’s IDP camps, malnutrition in Tigray, and post-conflict morbidity in eastern Congo can be quantified using epidemiological models, with differential equations mapping mortality rates over time and across populations. Physically and chemically, warfare alters landscapes and water chemistry, creating toxic environments where heavy metals from mines (lead, mercury, cobalt) accumulate in soil and water, causing long-term neurodevelopmental and systemic health crises. Economically, necropolitics functions as a tool of resource extraction and labor exploitation, exemplified by global cobalt mining, oil extraction in Sudan, and deforestation-driven conflicts in the Congo Basin. In these scenarios, sovereignty is not only political but material, controlling who lives, who dies, and who profits, exposing the mathematical inequities of life-and-death economies through risk analysis, population modeling, and economic mapping.

Memory functions as the counterweight to necropolitics. Across Africa, memory is encoded in oral traditions, literature, ritual, architecture, and sacred geography. From Rwanda’s genocide memorials to Uganda’s Atiak shrines, from Congolese survivor poetry to Nigerian vigils for abducted girls, memory persists in embodied, communal, and intergenerational forms. Biological studies of stress and trauma suggest that collective memory has measurable effects on neural pathways, stress hormone regulation, and resilience patterns. Literature and mathematics intersect here as well: cyclical patterns in commemorative rituals, anniversary counts, and storytelling sequences encode moral and ethical continuity across generations. Geography reinforces memory, as landscapes of violence—burned villages, abandoned schools, and mined forests—serve as both mnemonic anchors and sacred loci where ethical responsibility is enacted.

Theology transforms these observations into moral, spiritual, and prophetic praxis. Comparative theology situates African lamentation within global frameworks: Jewish mourning rituals illuminate collective responsibility, Islamic ethical injunctions highlight justice and human dignity, and Christian resurrection theology affirms hope beyond systemic death. African indigenous cosmologies, such as ancestor veneration, integrate ecological awareness, communal ethics, and spiritual accountability, providing holistic frameworks for understanding human suffering in relation to land, community, and sacred law. Literature, music, and ritual function as theological media, encoding moral truths, historical consciousness, and ethical imperatives. Here, theology intersects with physics and chemistry, as environmental degradation, pollution, and resource depletion are interpreted as moral and spiritual violations, demanding ethical action.

Mathematics, surprisingly, plays a crucial role in this triad. Population modeling, epidemiological curves, and mortality statistics quantify the reach and intensity of necropolitical regimes. Network theory models the spread of memory and oral histories through communities, while game theory elucidates choices under duress, illustrating the moral dilemmas faced by actors in conflict zones. Economics and sociology integrate here, showing how poverty, resource scarcity, and structural inequities amplify vulnerabilities, generating complex feedback loops where death, memory, and theology intersect.

Ultimately, the triad functions as a holistic, interdisciplinary analytical framework. Necropolitics names, maps, and quantifies death in all its dimensions—physical, biological, material, and economic. Memory resists erasure, encoding trauma, survival, and ethical presence in literature, ritual, geography, and biology. Theology interprets, transforms, and transfigures both, asserting moral and spiritual responsibility, generating prophetic hope, and ensuring that even amidst death, justice, remembrance, and divine accountability remain operative. The African proverb (Shona)—death acknowledges its rightful owner—resonates through this triad, underscoring that ethical memory, witness, and divine accountability are inseparable from scholarly and communal engagement.

Applied across Africa—from Rwanda to Uganda, Congo to Nigeria, Mozambique to South Sudan—this framework allows scholars, policymakers, theologians, and communities to analyze and intervene in death-worlds while honoring memory and cultivating sacred responsibility. It is both diagnostic and prescriptive, bridging disciplines, scales, and temporalities: mapping mortality with mathematics, tracing trauma with biology, interpreting landscapes with geography, understanding structural violence with economics, encoding memory with literature, and imbuing ethical guidance with theology. The triad transforms analysis into witness: to stand alongside the dead, remember them through memory, and act in accordance with moral and spiritual imperatives.

In conclusion, Necropolitics, Memory, and Theology do not merely illuminate Africa’s crises; they provide tools for justice, resistance, and resurrection. They compel scholars to integrate data, story, ritual, and reflection; to measure death with statistics while honoring it with song; to trace economic and environmental causality while invoking moral accountability. This framework insists that even amidst orchestrated death, bones may live, memory may birth justice, and God’s presence persists in Africa’s graves. In this light, scholarship becomes sacred work, ethical engagement, and prophetic witness, ensuring that Africa’s archive of wounds is neither forgotten nor rendered inert, but transformed into a living testament of resilience, justice, and hope.

References

Books and Journal Articles:

Mbembe, A. (2019). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.

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Oduyoye, M. A. (2021). Proverbs, women in African. In Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy (pp. 323–325). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-2068-5_321

Zhao, S. Y. (2022). Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics. International Journal of Communication, 16, 3. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19827

Mieder, W. (1994). African proverb scholarship: An annotated bibliography. African Proverbs Project.

Nare, L., & Damiba, F.-X. (Eds.). (1997). Proverbs and African Christianity. African Proverbs Project.

Healey, J. R., & Sybertz, D. (1996). Towards an African narrative theology. Orbis Books.

Pobee, J. S. (Ed.). (1997). Proverbs and African Christianity. African Proverbs Project.

Kalugila, L. (1997). Swahili proverbs. In J. S. Pobee (Ed.), Proverbs and African Christianity (pp. 131–143). African Proverbs Project.

Karnga, A. (1997). Bassa (Liberian) proverbs. In J. S. Pobee (Ed.), Proverbs and African Christianity (pp. 95–118). African Proverbs Project.

Mokitimi, M. (1997). Sesotho proverbs and preaching. In J. S. Pobee (Ed.), Proverbs and African Christianity (pp. 143–149). African Proverbs Project.

Nussbaum, S. (1997). African proverbs and Christian mission. In J. S. Pobee (Ed.), Proverbs and African Christianity (pp. 171–180). African Proverbs Project.

Nyambura Mwihia, C. (2005). A theological analysis of African proverbs about women: With reference to proverbs from Gikuyu people of Central Kenya (Master’s thesis). University of KwaZulu-Natal.

https://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za/bitstreams/d07a64e7-3ba8-44fe-a4c9-eca7e501a0f8/download

Ng’ang’a, P. M. (2023). Biblical and African proverbs as a framework for studying spirituality: Exploring the role of proverbs among the Gikuyu people of Kenya (Licentiate dissertation). Jesuit School of Theology.

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/jst_dissertations/111/

Journals and Articles:

Mieder, W. (1994). African proverb scholarship: An annotated bibliography. African Proverbs Project.

Kalugila, L. (1997). Swahili proverbs. In J. S. Pobee (Ed.), Proverbs and African Christianity (pp. 131–143). African Proverbs Project.

Karnga, A. (1997). Bassa (Liberian) proverbs. In J. S. Pobee (Ed.), Proverbs and African Christianity (pp. 95–118). African Proverbs Project.

Mokitimi, M. (1997). Sesotho proverbs and preaching. In J. S. Pobee (Ed.), Proverbs and African Christianity (pp. 143–149). African Proverbs Project.

Nussbaum, S. (1997). African proverbs and Christian mission. In J. S. Pobee (Ed.), Proverbs and African Christianity (pp. 171–180). African Proverbs Project.

Online Resources:

Biblical and African proverbs as a framework for studying spirituality: Exploring the role of proverbs among the Gikuyu people of Kenya. (2023). Jesuit School of Theology.

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/jst_dissertations/111/

A theological analysis of African proverbs about women: With reference to proverbs from Gikuyu people of Central Kenya. (2005). University of KwaZulu-Natal.

https://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za/bitstreams/d07a64e7-3ba8-44fe-a4c9-eca7e501a0f8/download

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