A Review of Dying for Freedom: Political Martyrdom in South Africa by Jacob Dlamini (Polity Press, 2024).

Abstract

Dlamini’s latest book delivers an incisive review of necropolitics in the history of South Africa’s political life. According to Achille Mbembe (Necropolitics 2019), necropolitics is the use of both political and social power to dictate how one must live and how one must die. The history of South African politics evinces how dying for freedom was considered the pinnacle of heroism. Championed by the ideas of political activists like Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, political deaths during apartheid were interpreted as one’s passport to a heroic legacy, an experience one had to look forward to. Following this, it is clear why Dlamini decides to explore necropolitics through the notion of political martyrdom in critiquing South Africa’s racialised perspective of the sacrifices made by most South Africans during apartheid. In the light of the failure of most South Africans to follow the ways in which they were expected to live and to die, they found themselves stripped of their heroic legacy and some stifled into oblivion as discussed in Dlamini’s book.