In studies of Southern Africa, ancestors and possessing spirits have received far greater attention than ghosts. It is only in recent years that fragmentary references to ghosts have begun to appear in the ethnographic record. In this article, I seek to redress this imbalance by documenting stories and accounts of encounters with ghosts in the South African lowveld. I turn to studies of ghosts in Asia and elsewhere as an analytical starting point for interpreting their social and cosmological significance. A widespread theory in this literature is that narratives of ghosts are a means of emplacement, connecting people to places. But the theory does not capture the way in which narratives in the South African lowveld depict ghosts as essentially mobile beings. This is most evident in accounts of vanishing hitchhikers on the highways and of a ghost called sauwe, which captures people’s minds and forces them to walk in the direction of graveyards. These narratives speak of displacement, of spectral journeys and of routes rather than stable locations. The apparitions serve as reminders of the failure to take care of the spirits of those who suffered violent deaths and bring them home. But we can also see them as traces of past injustices and of violence in a haunted landscape, and as mirrors of villagers’ own historical experiences of displacement, experiences that were a hallmark of forced removals and of the migrant labour system during the apartheid era.

在对南部非洲的研究中，祖先和附身的灵魂比鬼魂受到的关注要多得多。只是在最近几年，民族志记录中才开始出现对鬼魂的零星提及。在这篇文章中，我试图通过记录在南非低地与鬼魂相遇的故事和叙述来纠正这种不平衡。我转向对亚洲和其他地方的鬼魂的研究，作为解释它们的社会和宇宙学意义的分析起点。该文献中的一个广泛理论是，鬼魂的叙述是一种安置方式，将人与地方联系起来。但该理论并没有捕捉到南非低地的叙述将鬼魂描述为本质上是移动的生物的方式。sauwe，它抓住了人们的思想并迫使他们走向墓地的方向。这些叙述谈论的是流离失所、幽灵般的旅程和路线，而不是稳定的位置。这些幻影提醒人们未能照顾那些遭受暴力死亡的人的灵魂并将他们带回家。但我们也可以将它们视为过去不公正和暴力的痕迹，反映出村民自己流离失所的历史经历，这些经历是种族隔离时期强制搬迁和农民工制度的标志。