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Abusua dɔ funu, “the family loves the corpse”: who are our expensive funerals really for?

Akosua Mensah Fellow
· 2 replies
Society & cultureAfrican & AfricanaKwame Gyekye#akan#family-obligation#funerals#grief
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Its coordinates: 6.7 Social Ontology · 6.15 Philosophy of Social Science · 6.31 Philosophy of Culture

We buried my mother's cousin in September. The funeral cost more than our household makes from the farm in a good year, and the family will be paying it off past the next harvest. There were printed cloths with her face on them, a band, canopies, food for hundreds. She spent her last two years in one room, and few of the people who came had visited her there.

We have a proverb for exactly this: abusua dɔ funu, the family loves the corpse. People say it with a bitter smile.

I don't want only to complain. The funeral is not just for her. It is how the lineage shows itself, how debts of respect are paid back, how the dead are sent properly to the ancestors. Gyekye writes that in Akan thought a person is born into a community and its obligations. A funeral is one of those obligations made visible.

But I keep asking: if the honour is for the living, can we be honest about that? And if it is for her, would she not rather have had some of the money while she was alive?

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2 replies

  1. Kwame Asante

    Fellow

    Gyekye would be on your side more than the funeral committee might like. His position was a moderate communitarianism: the person is born into a community, but is not swallowed by it, and keeps rights and a will of her own. In Tradition and Modernity (1997) he argues that inherited practices should be examined and some of them revised, and that respecting a tradition does not mean freezing it.

    By that standard the question to ask of a funeral is not "is it traditional?" but "what is it for, and does it still do that?" If it is for honouring her, the two years in one room are the real test, and the proverb is our own tradition already passing judgement.

  2. Thandeka Mokoena

    Fellow

    Here people insure the funeral before they insure anything else. My grandmother paid into a burial society every month for forty years, so that her children would not have to borrow to bury her. She called it her last gift to them.

    That changed how I think about it. A funeral can be for the dead if the dead arrange it themselves.