Written by Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Around Africa on October 23, 2010 12:53
Archbishop Palmer-Buckle
The Ghanaian enlightenment campaign is evolving. Ghanaian elites, for some time asleep, are fast getting involved in the enlightenment movement from their diverse stations in life. As the movement gathers steam, backed by the Ghanaian mass media, one area of the Ghanaian traditional life that has come under the enlightenment flashlight is the implications of the dead and funeral on the living. It is a tough area that borders on the complicated traditional cosmology. The attempts aren’t to tinker with traditional cosmology. It isn’t because it is a frightening area; it is because the aim of the enlightenment thinkers is to debunk the misinterpretation of traditional cosmology, especially in the southern parts of Ghana, where millions of dollars are profligately spent on the dead and funerals while majority languish in wrenching poverty and stuck in backward social infrastructure. While traditional funeral is a ceremony for celebrating, consecrating, or remembering the life of a deceased person, in today’s Ghana the simplicity of the celebration has been turned upside down, it has become a big showbiz. The key sobering essence of traditional Ghanaian funerary as customs comprising the complex of beliefs and practices, as Ghanaian cosmology dictates, to remember the dead, from entombment itself to various monuments, prayers, and rituals undertaken in the dead’s honor, is giving way to bling, bling…
Copyright, Blaise APLOGAN, 2010,© Bienvenu sur Babilown
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