Funeral Ceremonial Extremities in Ghana: Cultural Dynamics or Absurdity?

It is trite knowledge that death is one of the inevitable rites of passage that every living human being must go through at the end of his or her life here on planet earth. William Shakespeare gives weight or credence to this reality when he asserted in Hamlet that “All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity”. Rites of passage are ceremonies that mark important transitional periods in a person's life, such as birth, puberty, marriage, having children, and death.

Most of these rites for the living usually involve ritual activities and teachings designed to strip individuals of their original roles and prepare them for new roles. Among the Krobo people of Ghana, for example, Dipo is a traditional puberty rite of passage for girls, transitioning them from adolescents to womanhood. This is a lifetime ceremony which typically takes place once a year, usually in the months of March and April.

This article, however, seeks to discuss death as a rite of passage and the extreme practices that the contemporary Ghanaian communities have attached to funerals. Can these funeral extremities be deemed as cultural dynamics or they are funeral absurdities that must be checked?

Funeral Extremities
Culture is dynamic hence it keeps evolving with the passage of generations who have new ways of doing things or due to acculturation. Much as I am not oblivious of cultural dynamics, I dare submit that some communities in Ghana are into certain extreme practices when it comes to funeral rites.

Perhaps it all started with the design of coffins that depict the deceased’s profession or occupation while he or she was alive, through making the corpse assume various postures at the time of lying-in-state, to extreme displays at funeral grounds.

In the cover photo to this article, one may observe that a casket perhaps with the corpse inside was suspended in the air with either a forklift or an excavator at a funeral ground to portray the type of work the deceased was doing. The scary aspect of the picture is that the living is seen sitting on top of the casket as it hangs in the air. Is the mourners' sitting on top of a hanging and dangling casket not an act of irrationality?

With the stylish caskets for example, a food vendor’s coffin depicts an iron cooking pot, car coffin for a driver, areophane coffin for an aviation worker, pen or book coffin for teachers, football or boot coffin for a deceased footballer among so many others. These stylish coffins make some Ghanaians hilariously wonder how the coffin for a prostitute or a gynaecologist should look like.

In the past, widowhood rites in some Ghanaian communities required that the widow must be locked up in a room overnight with the corpse of her deceased husband. Fortunately, this and many other human right abusive widowhood rites evolved positively over time.

Perhaps the most absurd of the Ghanaian funeral extremities I saw on social media quite recently was the fact that some mourners prepared fufu with soup, placed the bowl of fufu on the bed on which the dead body was lying-in-state and they started feasting amidst singing and certain pronouncements to the deceased. If this development is not foreign to Ghanaian culture and, therefore, a funeral absurdity, then I do not know what else it should be called. Feasting right on the funeral bed with the body lying-in-state is to the extreme and does not pass for cultural dynamics, methinks. Of what relevance is such a practice? Or is it an exoteric or cultic directive? Perhaps I have drifted into ethnocentric judgments of the practice. Pardon me if that is my state but I find the whole practice so strange and I had not heard about it anywhere until I saw it recently on Tiktok.

Within the Ghanaian society, our chiefs, traditional priests, clergymen and elders are the custodians of culture so they must not sit aloof while such absurdities go on at funerals in our communities. Such practices give negative signals about our society to foreigners. I am not saying that we should not be proud of the uniqueness and diversity of our culture but we ought to check the extremities.

In my considered view, these funeral ceremonial extremities must be nipped in the bud before they later become the proverbial chickens that will come home to roost harmfully to certain aspects of our culture. Perhaps we should go back for the bitter lessons of the story H.A. Nuamah (1995) encapsulated in his book entitled, “Murder in the Palace at Kibi: An Account of the Kibi Ritual Murder Case”.

To me, that 1944 ritual murder of a whole Odikro of Apedwa during a royal funeral was a bitter and an avoidable funeral extremity which is heartbreaking whenever one reads about it even though it happened about 79 years ago. My cardinal point is that if we do not check the ongoing funeral ceremonial absurdities in our various communities, they may lead to certain calamitous consequences which we will regret.

Conclusion
Indeed, culture is fluid rather than static, which means that culture changes all the time, every day, in subtle and tangible ways. Because humans communicate and express their cultural systems in a variety of ways, it can be hard at times to pinpoint exactly what cultural dynamics are at play.

However, Ghana is not only known for corpse-loving expensive funerals in various communities nationwide but we are also drifting into the realm of engaging in certain absurd or strange funeral ceremonies. Paradoxically, we abandon some of our sick relatives at the public hospitals even though they need our supports. But once they die, we organize flamboyant and expensive funeral ceremonies instead of saving their lives when they were sick. How heartless could we be? Perhaps my August 2019 article entitled, “Families abandon sick relatives admitted at public hospitals” is worth revisiting using this link: https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/Families-abandon-sick-relatives-admitted-at-public-hospitals-773140

~Asante Sana~
Philip Afeti Korto
Hospital Administrator
[email protected]