For a Ghanaian the most significant cost to incur in life is not going to be for one’s wedding; it’s going to be for one’s funeral.
Spending extravagantly on funerals is not a new practice in the country; it flows like a legacy from generations to generations. This has given rise to a new generation of funeral contractors all over the country, especially in Kumasi, Ghana’s funeral capital.
Funeral rites could span an average of 40 days making Ghana a classical example of committing so much to funerals to the extent that some take loans for funerals just to give an impression of affluence whilst leaving bereaved families with mountains of debt.
An average funeral costs between $15,000-$20,000 says an Accra-based funeral planner.
This includes the obligatory giant, colorful billboards that announce funeral arrangements. The billboards, which may cost from nearly $600 to $3,000, are placed at strategic spots for everybody to see, often dotting the cities’ skylines.
Most funerals are held on the weekends, most frequently on Saturdays. Mourners, usually dressed in black or black and red traditional funeral clothing, may travel to other towns or villages, and in turn they expect the bereaved families to provide food, drinks, music and dance.
The extravagance also extends to the caskets.
Coffins have become a statement in Ghana. They are usually brightly colored and elaborate.
Called fantasy coffins, they may have fanciful shapes that resemble the dead’s favourite objects, or represent their profession. Thus, a carpenter may have a coffin shaped like a hammer, or a shoe for a shoemaker. There are also caskets shaped like Coca-Cola bottles and airplanes.
Other fantasy coffins are created in the form of fish, animals, cars, bottles, Bibles, and any other object requested. A fisherman may get a fish coffin; a carpenter, a hammer; or a photographer, a camera. Someone devout may choose a Bible. Vices like beer bottles and cigarettes are also used.
There are also different distinguishing postures of laying a corpse. Some are laid to indicate the kind of work they did before their death, including standing with a hand on sewing machine to indicate that the person was a seamstress or tailor.
Some are laid to stand beside a table, holding tools of a carpenter; sit down near an old gear box indicating that the deceased was a mechanic; sit on a chair holding an impoverished steering wheel, indicating that he was a driver before death.
While all Ghanaian tribes are united in having lavish funerals, however, it is only the Ga tribe who create the extraordinary fantasy coffins for such occasions.
Called Abebuu Adekai, or ‘boxes of proverbs’, the fantasy coffins are made by carpenters mostly around the Teshie area of Ga land.
Their costs range anywhere from $500 USD for a local coffin to $3,000 USD for a coffin for export. The costs differ according to the type of wood used as well as the difficulty of the design. Light wood such as wawa wawa (white wood) or emien is used for the coffins intended for funerals. Those for export as artworks are made from harder and more expensive wood such as limba or mahogany.
These coffins typically take about three months to carve. When there is an unexpected death, some coffins can be finished in two weeks if there is inducement for an expedited job.
There are about 10 such workshops in the Ga area of Ghana. Most of these workshops are located near La Beach, but there are a few scattered workshops in other areas as well.
Of these workshops, it is the Kane Kwei workshop that is most famous and is regarded as the birthplace of this tradition.
These unique crafts have been featured at exhibitions in the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle in Paris, the New Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as exhibitions in Belgium and Spain.
Deliberations on the date and location of a ceremony and the subsequent preparations mean that bodies spend an average of two months in a mortuary, as dressers in scrubs apply makeup and cotton wool to corpses on cement slabs. Outside, groups drum and wail while relatives wait to retrieve the bodies.
And, with the arrival of refrigerated morgues, even the body’s length of stay has become an indicator of a family’s wealth. The cost of storing a body is about $150 a month.
In most tribes, funeral events are held each week. These go with lavish spending on ambulances, food, drinks, and the hiring of loud speakers; expensive clothes of different kinds are also displayed at the funeral to show-off.
While relatives have traditionally contributed to meet funeral costs, those donations are no longer enough. And when the burden to finance funerals became so high people resort to taking out all kinds of loans.
Consequently, the country’s biggest insurers, including Enterprise Life Assurance and SIC Insurance, have seen funeral coverage become a major source of business.
For Enterprise Life specifically, the funeral insurance policy is the company’s flagship product, accounting for more than 65 percent of revenue, says C.C. Bruce, the company’s executive director. Lump sums of as much as $3,000 are paid out. Enterprise’s shares, which more than tripled this year, posted the second-best performance on the Ghana Stock Exchange Composite Index, which has gained 65 percent.
Echoing Bruce, Anastacia Arko, an analyst at the Accra-based Databank Financial Services says people are becoming sensitised to take up policies in lieu of funerals.
Stanbic Bank, the Ghanaian unit of South Africa’s Standard Bank Group introduced funeral insurance plans last year, offering a sum of $500 cedis at monthly premiums of as low as $1. Also Ghana’s biggest insurer, SIC Insurance, plans to further increase the maximum payout of its funeral policy as customers complain of rising expenses, says Alfred Ankrah, SIC’s funeral policy manager. Presently SIC has a policy targeting the upper class that pays out $8,000. Still patrons say it’s not enough, said Ankrah, noting that though segments of the Ghanaian society is increasingly frowning against expensive funerals, yet most people want to make sure that the person they lost sleeps in peace.
Fuelling the fast-growing spending on funerals is an oil-production boom that boosted Ghana’s yearly economic growth rate to 15.9 per cent in 2011, from 3.1 per cent in 2007, and increased gross national income per capita almost fivefold, to $1,550 in the last decade.
However, to those who think spending extravagantly on the dead is a misplacement of priorities, especially in a developing country like Ghana, these funeral rituals have become a great cause for concern.
So too for those who do not have the necessary means to commit to such costly funerals. To them, the trend has become nightmarish as they are forced to take loans just to create an illusion of affluence.
To curb costs, tribal chiefs have issued funeral guidelines ranging from prohibiting all-night wakes to restricting the number of drummers.
Charles Gabriel Palmer-Buckle, the Catholic archbishop of Accra, similarly admonished that the surest way to remember the dead is not the type of coffins used to bury them nor the type of cloth or T-shirt won during their funerals, but doing something positive for the dead which would benefit the living.
But their pleas have not been heeded.
Whilst in other parts of the world people are busy working hard sometimes seven days in a week, some people in Ghana spend time on the non-essentials celebrating one-week celebrations, final funeral rites, and 40day celebration of the dead.
And, contrary to expectation that a traditional ritual centered around the extended family and beliefs about death and ancestorship should reduce in importance under the influence of individualisation, urbanisation, the market economy, and Christianity, however, the opposite scenario is taking place in Ghana.
Indeed, as one Accra-based pall-bearer aptly put it, ‘Just die and you will see how many loved ones you have.’