More than eight months after his death, the remains of former Zambian President Edgar Lungu have remained unburied in South Africa as his family’s wishes for his funeral collide with the plans of the president who succeeded him. The Associated Press reported Feb. 20 that Lungu’s body has been held in a South African funeral home while Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, has a prepared burial site that still lacks the corpse.
A central element of the public dispute is an unfilled, coffin-size hole in the cemetery in Lusaka where President Hichilema had hoped Lungu would be buried in a state funeral. According to the report, Lungu—during his final days—told his family members that even as a mourner, Hichilema should never go near his body, and his family has continued to press for burial terms that keep Hichilema from involvement.
The standoff has also grown into a broader clash of political rivalry and spiritual belief, with scholars and religious leaders telling the Associated Press that the fight has shifted beyond the physical and into the spiritual. Bishop Anthony Kaluba of the Life of Christ congregation in Lusaka said, “It has shifted from the physical, it has shifted from politics, and it is now a spiritual battle.”
Supporters of Hichilema have framed the dispute in spiritual terms as well, with the report describing their views that Lungu’s will amounts to casting a curse. Religious leaders and academics interviewed for the story said that in parts of Zambia, curses are widely feared and can be understood as spiritually enforceable, including in ways that shape political fears among leaders.
Chammah J. Kaunda, a Zambian professor of African Pentecostal theology who serves as academic dean of the Oxford Center for Mission Studies, told the Associated Press that across Africa, last words can act as a “vital force” to enhance life or block it. Kaunda said such curses can “acquire a life of their own,” reflecting a theology that allows spiritual force to persist beyond a person’s death.
The case has landed in courts after negotiations over a state funeral and custody of Lungu’s remains proved impossible, the report said. To organize a state funeral, Zambia’s authorities would need custody of the remains until interment, but Lungu’s family resisted Hichilema’s plans and preferred to move the corpse by private charter and keep it at Lungu’s residence at night, while preparing for a state funeral that did not happen.
When that plan faltered, Lungu’s family chose a private funeral in South Africa. The Associated Press reported that they moved ahead with the ceremony when they learned that Zambian authorities had blocked it, prompting a legal fight that stretched across borders and ended with a South African court ruling in August allowing Zambian authorities to take Lungu’s body home for burial.
The report said that Bertha Lungu, the former president’s sister, was inconsolable in court after the ruling, wailing and cursing at Mulilo Kabesha, Zambia’s attorney general, who said it was time to take the corpse home. The report also said she asserted that Hichilema wanted the corpse for ritual purposes, while Hichilema denied malice toward Lungu and said his Christian faith forbids belief in traditional religion.
Lungu’s burial dispute has unfolded against a backdrop of a long-running rivalry between two former presidents and their political worlds, with the Associated Press tracing how Lungu rose to power after Michael Sata’s death in 2014 and how Hichilema later defeated him in subsequent elections. The report said Lungu won an election by under 28,000 votes over Hichilema, later faced treason charges that resulted in a four-month jail term for allegedly failing to yield to the presidential motorcade, and that Lungu later changed course and returned to politics in 2023.
By Feb. 20, the AP report said the remains were still in South Africa while Zambia waited, in a country where it is taboo to fail to bury the dead promptly and with dignity. A cemetery caretaker in Lusaka, Allen Banda, told the AP that the burial spot had been dug and built before it was known that Lungu’s family objected, and he warned that a tomb without a corpse is like digging “your own grave.”
The dispute’s public visibility has reinforced those who interpret the episode as spiritual conflict between the living president and a dead rival, while others see it as a political contest reflected in burial rituals. Emmanuel Mwamba, a Zambian diplomat who speaks for Lungu’s party, told the Associated Press that Lungu is “still influencing our politics from the grave,” adding that “his issues remain” and that the way Lungu was treated in life and in death continues to matter to supporters.