Funerals Without Remains: The Families Still Searching After Tanzania’s Election Violence
By Adonis Byemelwa
Dar es Salaam: The first instinct was not to protest or accuse. It was simple to go to the hospital. That is where people are taken when they are hurt. That is where families expect answers, however painful. So when gunfire cracked through neighbourhoods on October 29, and the days that followed, when sons and fathers did not come home, families across Dar es Salaam followed the same fragile trail: phone calls from strangers, hurried directions shouted over the noise of unrest, the hope that even if life were gone, the body would still be there.
For many, it was at least at first. Nearly three months later, those moments have become the centre of testimony before a presidential commission established to examine the violence that followed Tanzania’s disputed elections.
One by one, families have stood before commissioners and described not only how their relatives were killed, but something more challenging to articulate and perhaps more unsettling: how they saw the bodies with their own eyes, identified them, and were told to return, only to find that the bodies had disappeared.
What has emerged from the hearings is not a single story but a rhythm that repeats with slight variations. A shooting. A hospital. Instructions to wait. A transfer to another facility. Then silence. Furthermore, finally, the long, exhausting realisation that the dead have become untraceable.
Salum Mwinyimangala remembers the day with a precision that has not dulled. His son was walking home in Buguruni kwa Mnyamani when clashes erupted nearby. Police officers had been deployed on elevated ground, he told commissioners, and shots were fired into the streets below. One bullet struck his son in the head.
Bystanders carried the young man to the Plan hospital. Mr Mwinyimangala followed as soon as he was notified, his path marked by blood on the road. At the hospital, he identified the body. He closed his son’s eyes himself. Staff took his statement and told him to return the following day to collect the body.
Before leaving, the family did what families do when they fear disorder: they took precautions. His son’s brother tied a plaster band around the arm, wrote down a name and phone numbers, a small safeguard against confusion in an overcrowded system.
The next day, the body was gone. Hospital staff told the family it had been transferred to Amana Hospital, a central public facility across the city. When they arrived there, they were stopped at the gate. Government instructions were pending, they were told. They returned the following day. The body could not be found. Nor the next day. Nor after visits to other hospitals.
“To this day,” Mr Mwinyimangala said, “my child’s body has never been found.” His testimony did not stand alone. As the commission sessions continued, other families described nearly identical journeys through the city’s hospitals, each one marked by the same disorienting shift, from certainty to absence.
Judith Barnabas spoke of her father, who left home on the morning of October 30 to buy food while unrest simmered outside. The family stayed indoors, listening to the city’s sounds change. When he did not return, her mother called his phone repeatedly. On the fourth attempt, someone else answered. The voice on the line told them to go to Amana Hospital. He had been shot in the chest.
Because the streets were still volatile, the family could not go immediately. An older relative went on their behalf and confirmed seeing the body. Hospital staff told him it could not be released until order was restored. By the time the family returned together days later, having already prepared for burial, the body was gone.
They searched anyway. From Amana to Muhimbili, from Temeke to Kivule, they moved through wards and corridors, asking the same questions, hearing the same replies. Eventually, with nothing left to pursue, they returned to Musoma, their home region, carrying grief that had nowhere to settle.
Her father has not been found. Another woman, Patrisia Mbadala, told commissioners about her brother Baraka, killed on October 30 in Ukonga Mazizini. Witnesses told the family that police officers had removed his body from the scene in a Defender vehicle. Hospitals had no record of him. Days passed. Then weeks.
With pressure mounting from relatives to observe burial rites, the family made a choice that would have seemed unthinkable months earlier: they buried his clothes. Across the hearings, commissioners heard from families who had reached the same impasse. Some had death certificates without bodies. Others had eyewitnesses without paperwork. Many had nothing but memory.
While no official count has been released, legal aid organisations and faith groups estimate that dozens, possibly far more, families are still searching for missing relatives. Human rights advocates note that disappearances following political unrest are not new in Tanzania, but say the scale and consistency of the current accounts point to a broader pattern.
The government has disputed civil society estimates that place the death toll between 3,000 and 10,000 people nationwide. The Prime Minister has rejected the higher figures and warned against independent tallies, arguing that they risk inflaming tensions. Officials say security forces acted to restore order and deny any policy of concealing deaths.
Requests for comment from police authorities and hospital administrators about the alleged removal and transfer of bodies have largely gone unanswered. Some hospital officials cited confidentiality rules; others referred inquiries back to government spokespeople. No clear explanation has been offered for why families were instructed to return for bodies that were later no longer present.
The commission itself has drawn scrutiny. Appointed by the president in December, it has been presented as a step toward accountability and reconciliation. Critics, including opposition figures and civil society groups, question its independence and note that previous commissions have produced recommendations that were never enforced. Its findings, expected later this year, are not legally binding.
Still, for families who have spent months navigating locked gates and unanswered phones, the hearings marked the first time their stories were recorded in an official forum.
Outside the hearing room, the atmosphere was subdued. Families waited on benches, some clutching photographs, others holding thick folders filled with hospital slips, handwritten notes, and photocopied identification cards, evidence of lives that once moved freely through the city. Conversations drifted easily from testimony to memory, from logistics to loss.
As accounts of missing bodies spread, religious institutions began to speak more openly. The Catholic Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania issued statements calling on authorities to release bodies to families for burial, framing the issue not only as a legal matter but a moral one. Several diplomatic missions have privately raised concerns, urging transparency and access for independent observers, according to officials familiar with the discussions.
For many Tanzanians, the disappearance of bodies has come to symbolise something larger than the violence itself. Death, while devastating, is a known passage. But uncertainty corrodes. It suspends grief, leaving families trapped between hope and despair, unable to perform rituals that give loss its shape.
What the families asked for before the commission was straightforward. Not retribution. Not compensation. Not even public apologies. “Just give us the bodies,” one woman said quietly after her testimony. “So we can bury our people.”
Whether the commission will deliver answers remains uncertain. What is already clear is that October 29 did not end when the streets emptied. For families still searching, the unrest has stretched into months of waiting, of unanswered questions, of funerals held without remains. In that silence, grief has learned a new form, one defined not only by who was lost, but by what was taken away with them: the right to say goodbye.
