Ghana: Give the bling to the living, not the dead

The Ghanaian enlightenment campaign is evolving. Ghanaian elites, for some time asleep, are fast getting involved in the enlightenment movement from their diverse stations in life. As the movement gathers steam, backed by the Ghanaian mass media, one area of the Ghanaian traditional life that has come under the enlightenment flashlight is the implications of the dead on the living.

It is a tough area that borders on traditional cosmology. The aim of the enlightenment thinkers is to debunk the misinterpretation of traditional cosmology, especially in the southern parts of Ghana, where millions of dollars are spent on the dead while the majority languish in poverty.

While the traditional funeral is a ceremony for celebrating, consecrating, or remembering the life of a deceased person, in today’s Ghana the simplicity of the celebration has been turned upside down and it has become a showbiz event.

The essence of a traditional Ghanaian funeral combines a complex set of beliefs and practices to remember the dead. It includes the entombment itself and various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in the dead’s honour. This has given way to bling.

One of the criticisms against excessive spending on funerals is that it leaves some families debt-ridden and poorer as they try to out-bling others. Another is that the spending takes place within an atmosphere of poverty where proper eating, good sanitation, suitable and more schools, water, rigorous healthcare systems, and generally more durable socio-economic infrastructure are desperately needed.

For instance, a proper modern toilet facility anywhere in Ghana could be built with GH¢ 7,500 (around US$6,919). The amount is the minimum cost of a funeral for an ordinary Ghanaian (Yes, I know this amount is too much to build a toilet but let’s put it that way as per helping the living to live better and still have a simple funeral ceremony at the same time).

Charles Palmer-Buckle, the Archbishop of Accra Catholic Diocese, has thundered that too much money is spent on the dead and funerals that ‘deprive descendants of the deceased the badly needed resources they need…a funeral for an ordinary Ghanaian now costs a minimum of GH¢ 7,500 (around US$6,919)…it is ridiculous to spend such an amount to “celebrate” a deceased person, who left behind a number of children who are yet to find their feet in life.’

Parallels can be drawn between Palmer-Buckle’s deliberations about Ghanaians’ wasteful expenditure on the dead and Pericles’ ‘Funeral Oration’. As Thucydides, the Greek thinker, recorded in book two of his ‘History of the Peloponnesian War’, it was established Athenian practice in the late 5th century to hold a public funeral in honour of the dead in war.

With the remains of the dead left out for three days in a tent and offerings made for the dead, a funeral procession was held and burial undertaken. The last part of the funeral ceremony was a speech delivered by a prominent Athenian citizen. Pericles was picked to give the oration. In the ‘Funeral Oration’, as inscribed by Thucydides, Pericles did praise the dead, but intentionally gave much more praise to Athens’ achievements - which was ‘designed to stir the spirits of a state still at war’.

There is no war in Ghana, but there is a war to be fought on the socio-economic front against poverty and certain erroneous cultural believes that inhibit progress. And that needs Ghanaians to refine the cultural inhibitions that hinder their progress so they can be free to live a better life. Yes, the dead should be praised, as African tradition dictates, but Palmer-Buckle moves beyond that, and proclaims that though the dead should be honoured, the living, too, should be fully taken care of.

Palmer-Buckle takes a look at the abysmal poverty of most Ghanaians and pronounces that the original traditions of funeral ceremonies have now become a competing theatre of ostentation to the detriment of the living. Palmer-Buckle, therefore, punches the ‘lavish spending on funerals’ as ‘an invention of the present generation and never a part of the cherished Ghanaian traditions’.

At issue isn’t the dead itself, or any trouble with traditional cosmology, but how the escalating expenditure on the dead today, against 100 years ago, negatively impacts on the growing population. Most Ghanaians live below the poverty line (around US$1 a day, according to the UN). There is no dilemma between the physical and the metaphysical. The battle of the enlightenment thinkers, as Palmer-Buckle echoes, is to re-wire Ghanaians to go back to their traditional roots where funeral ceremonies were simple, non-ostentatious, and very traditional.

Ghanaians appear entrapped in the brazenness of the funerals, making the funeral business glitzy. One of the leading funeral services proprietors in Ghana, if not the number one, is my junior brother. He is called Kweku Akosah and his funeral business is called Owners Funeral Services. Though based in Kumasi, Ghana’s second largest city, over the years Owners Funeral Services, driven by the sheer obsession with the dead and funerals, has grown so much that it has branches in most parts of Ghana.

Akosah employs over 100 people – wailers and criers, dancers, praise-singers, decorators of the dead, coffin makers, musicians, tailors and seamstresses, promoters, food makers, and servers. As Akosah’s funeral business becomes increasingly sophisticated, he finances certain funerals against the backdrops of agreements of sharing profits with the deceased families. Akosah is on the verge of building a state-of-the-art mortuary in Kumasi.

Such highlights are cast against the unrelenting poverty of Ghanaians. Palmer-Buckle’s funeral oration is ‘designed to stir the spirits’ of the living Ghanaian by making the case that part of the huge sums of money spent on the dead could be appropriated for the living so as to make life comfortable.

Still, Palmer-Buckle and the enlightenment stance is a difficult position because it is misunderstood by many Ghanaian traditionalists as impinging on the sacred area of Ghanaians’ cosmology. But at issue isn’t the cosmology, but the living in terms of better food, shelter, education, water, sanitation, health, roads, and the other comforts of life.

Palmer-Buckle bravely looks more at the living than the dead, and how the living should live better before he/she dies. ‘Instead of spending hugely on the dead, Ghanaians must rather establish an endowment fund in memory of the deceased, which would be used to sponsor education of their relatives to realise their full potential…children would largely remember their great grandfather in whose memory a fund was established to sponsor their education as against their relatives on who much money was spent to bury them and left behind debts.’

In Archbishop Palmer-Buckle’s ‘Funeral Oration’ Ghanaian enlightenment thinkers are wrestling with certain inhibitions within the Ghanaian/African culture that is hampering their progress. And that will need more fearless thinking than they have thought of. And that may need some remarkable tinkering with certain aspects of Ghanaians’ traditional cosmology.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Kofi Akosah-Sarpong is a journalist and academic.
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