In Riotous Deathscapes, Hugo ka Canham presents an understanding of life and death based on indigenous and black ways of knowing that he terms Mpondo theory. Focusing on amaMpondo people from rural Mpondoland, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Canham outlines the methodologies that have enabled the community’s resilience and survival. He assembles historical events and a cast of ancestral and living characters, following the tenor of village life, to offer a portrait of how Mpondo people live and die in the face of centuries of abandonment, trauma, antiblackness, and death. Canham shows that Mpondo theory is grounded in and develops in relation to the natural world, where the river and hill are key sites of being and resistance. Central too, is the interface between ancestors and the living, in which life and death become a continuity and a boundlessness that white supremacy and neoliberalism cannot interdict. By charting a course of black life in Mpondoland, Canham tells a story of blackness on the African continent and beyond.

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award Recipient

Hugo ka Canham is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand and coeditor of Black Academic Voices: The South African Experience.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction: Mpondo Orientations  1
1. Watchful Ocean, Observant Mountain  37
2. Fortifying Rivers  68
3. Riotous Spirits—Ukukhuphuka Izizwe  104
4. Levitating Graves and Ancestral Frequencies  139
5. Rioting Hills and Occult Insurrections  173
Fitful Dreamscapes: An Afterword  208
Notes  213
References  231
Index  259