The Funeral of the Chief

In America when you hear a funeral you can pretty much assume people will gather to mourn together in a half day event where some sort of ceremony will be performed and then the body will be put in the ground. After that, you pretty much call it a day.

When I think of a funeral I might think of grieving, sadness and people mingling together catching up with others. In Ghana you have guns, dancing and drummers.

In America a funeral generally occurs in the same week the person died. My late chief died on May, 5 2007. When chiefs die in Ghana they are buried in the night so no one knows they have died, and as you might guess the funeral is much, much later. Why? I don’t know the answer to that quite yet.

The funeral was a weeklong festivity.  As already stated, there were plenty of guns being fired, there was drumming and dancing. Drummers would follow you until you danced or gave them money. Per usual I was running around like mad taking pictures. I would have old women pushing me forward so I had a better vantage point. Whenever one of my guy friends was involved I would take as many pictures of them as my memory card would allow. There will only be one funeral this big in my village while I’m here, and I had to insure I had proper documentation.

Traditional dances were performed by women and men. There were some dances that occurred during the day and others late into the night. There was a night where the dance started at 9pm, and continued past when I went to bed at 5am.

During this week my village of about 800 people was popping at the seams, there were hundreds upon hundreds of guests. There were family members of the late chief, chiefs there to show respect to our current chief, people from neighboring villages, and more.

One thing I have started getting used to is the first thing a guy might ask me is to marry him. I have learned to quickly say, “Ii, n je yidana” or “No, I don’t want husband”. At the funeral I was not quite sure what to say when it was a visiting chief asking to marry me. Or I had a women tell me to become her husband’s third wife. She was saying that I would love it. The first wife would do the washing, she would do the cooking and I would have to do nothing. I was quick to turn her proposal down, but true to most other proposals I have received she did not back down easily. She introduced me to first wife thinking that would help her argument. It did not.

I made friends with a girl who was there for the funeral. She had me quite confused for a bit. She was related to the late chief, that much was clear. She told me he was her father, but then while we were together she introduced me to three men she said was her father. Then she told me the current chief was her brother, and that she had two brothers. Well, I met her two brothers while we were sitting under the tree. I asked if her father had more than one wife, which might help explain something. She said her father had only one wife. It ended up coming out of the wood work that the late chief was her father’s oldest brother and the current chief was his first son. I pieced it together, but it took some time. In a culture where your moms sisters kids are generally called your brothers and sisters, and your dads other wives children are your siblings, things can get confusing.  In our first week we learned sometimes you have to ask, “Same mother, same father?” and now I know exactly why you need to ask such a clarifying question.