June 17, 2007	Sunday	Jumadi-us-Sani 01, 1428

TESHIE (Ghana): While families elsewhere in the world mourn the deceased, in many countries in Africa people say the dead don’t die — they watch the living and require tender loving after-care.

From Kenya to Senegal to Madagascar, many feed and protect the dead from the cold, investing heaps of savings and generous goodwill for the best possible of after-lives.

“The dead are not dead,” said Senegalese historian Ibrahima Thiaw. “They must be cared for, when you have problems you return to their graves to pay respect.” “Death is a celebration, not an end,” he added, recounting funeral rites in the country’s Christian and animist Serere region. Interestingly, the word in Senegal’s Wolof language for “luck” (“weurseuk”) literally means “going around the cemeteries”.

While some cultures bury the dead with objects they might need in the after-life, Ghana’s Ga people design fantasy coffins celebrating the loved one’s life on earth.

At the Kane Kwei coffin workshop in the coastal village of Teshie, just outside the capital Accra, relatives can choose a coffin fashioned after the deceased’s job, passions, or even vices.

An airline pilot can be buried within a gleaming 747 complete with wheels for taxiing down the celestial runway, a fisherman inside a fish with elaborate white fins, the proprietor of a Mercedes inside the same vehicle, and a man who enjoyed beer inside a giant Guiness bottle.

“The man whose family ordered a coffin in the shape of a tortoise was someone who took his time to solve problems,” said Eric Anang, grandson of the late Kane Kwei, coffin-maker extraordinaire.

“Our most recent delivery was an armoured car. The military wouldn’t let us copy a real one and so we had to take the design off internet. The people who ordered it had seen a gun we made, but wanted something original for their father, who was an officer,” Anang recounted.

Some coffins, most notably cockerels, two of them standing proudly on display, are reserved for chiefs, unless shipped abroad in which case the rule is overlooked.

Sometimes the deceased stays at the morgue for months on end while relatives quibble about what coffin would be appropriate and who will pay for what, said Anang, watching his craftsmen sand down a bible coffin.

Elsewhere across Africa corpses are sung to, danced with, and, in Madagascar, exhumed and turned over several years after death to give the dead a new shroud as well as gifts of tobacco, honey or alcohol before reburial.

In Gbadolite in the Equateur region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), any self-respecting family will bury its dead in a plot in front of the home so the living can remain in close contact with their late ancestors.

But some of the old customs are irritating the young.

For years members of the Balunda tribe in northern Kenya have been quarrelling over a tradition of burying the dead sitting up in a cupboard-style coffin, allowing the head and shoulders of the deceased to remain visible as it is lowered into the ground.Local people say the idea is to rise more easily to God when summoned.

Old-timers want the government to recognise the rite as part of the country’s special heritage but Jairus Khaemba, 45, describes it as “backward and irreligious.” “I will be buried lying down,” he said.

Whatever the beliefs, Africa’s poor and not so poor traditionally spare no costs on deaths.

In the DRC, where three-quarters of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, the average family will spend around $500 on a funeral, and the rich 20 times that amount.

While baptisms were dropped in the economic recession years in the 80s, burials are vital in the Bantu tradition and also show social rank, with some funerals bringing together more than 1,000 people.

“My mother died when she was 115, so the entire family had to get together to pay her a tribute,” said 62-year-old Sophie Noma. The 40-day wake cost almost $10,000, said the school headmistress.

If many of these traditions remain specific to one region or one tribe, the coffins of the Ga people are catching on with Africa’s well-to-do as a way of customising a funeral and proving one’s social status.

Ebony, a company based in South Africa, now proposes, under the “Exit in Style” section on its website, to ship fantasy coffins anywhere in Africa.—AFP