Let us suppose, for a moment, that the dead have rights. It is a quaint notion, one that would have struck a Victorian coroner as morbid poppycock. Yet here we are, in the year of our Lord 2024, watching the British Foreign Office wade into a Zambian morgue to adjudicate the fate of a corpse. The body in question belongs to Rupiah Banda, Zambia’s fourth president, who died in 2022. His family, backed by the UK, wants him exhumed from a grave in Lusaka and reburied in his rural home district. Zambia’s government, citing security concerns and a lack of proper paperwork, has said no. And so the Commonwealth, that ramshackle club of former imperial subjects, finds itself entangled in a macabre legal drama that would make a Gothic novelist blush.
This is not merely a family squabble over funeral arrangements. It is a test, I suspect, of the Commonwealth’s judicial architecture. The organisation, after all, is built on a shared heritage of English common law, a system that prizes precedent and procedure. But what happens when a member state’s domestic courts issue contradictory rulings, as Zambian courts have done in this case? One judge orders the exhumation; another stays it. The UK, ever the meddling stepmother, threatens to escalate the matter to the International Court of Justice. This is the sort of legal muddle that would have driven Lord Denning to an early grave.
Consider the deeper rot. The Commonwealth, once a vehicle for a dying empire to project influence, is now a body without a spine. It can issue statements, hold summits, and produce glossy reports on human rights, but it cannot enforce a damn thing. The Banda affair exposes this impotence. Zambia, a sovereign state, is being told by its former colonial master how to handle a former head of state’s remains. Where is the reciprocity? Where is the respect for local tradition? The British, who have their own Queen (now King) buried in a chapel with more ceremony than a coroner’s inquest, have no business lecturing Africans on death rituals.
I am reminded of the Great Funeral Controversy of 1881, when the British refused to return the body of the Zulu king Cetshwayo to his homeland, fearing his grave would become a shrine for rebellion. How far we have not come. The Banda case is a modern echo, a battle over symbolism and sovereignty. The family, with the UK’s backing, accuses the Zambian government of political interference. The government, in turn, accuses the family of being pawns of foreign interests. Both sides may be right.
What does this mean for the Commonwealth? It means that the pretence of a “family of nations” is threadbare. The organisation cannot police its own members’ legal systems, and when a dispute like this arises, the only card it can play is shame. But shame requires a shared moral framework, and that framework is crumbling. The UK, having hollowed out its own legal traditions with human rights legislation and European court rulings, now presumes to export that confusion to Africa. It is a farce.
If I were Zambia, I would tell London to mind its own dead. The country has more pressing issues: a debt crisis, high unemployment, and a cholera outbreak. But no, we must spend taxpayer money and diplomatic capital on a corpse. This is what decadence looks like: a former empire so bored with its own decline that it picks fights over cemeteries in Lusaka.
The resolution, if there is one, will be messy. The Commonwealth might mediate, or the ICJ might rule, but the real damage is already done. The myth of a coherent legal order has been shattered. We are left with competing jurisdictions, bitter families, and a body that cannot rest. It is, in short, a perfect metaphor for our times: the dead cling to us, and we cannot let them go.
