Jan Vansina is correct in his foreword to this volume, funerals are ‘good to think’. This book is about African funerals as an arena for many stakeholders, a meeting ground of past and present, and a node of communication between various religious systems. The editors of this collection provide an overview of the essays, while the first chapter, ‘African Funerals and Social Change’, provides the outline of the dynamics of African funerals, continent-wide and across time. Crucial to this exposition are the many ways Africans organize themselves in associations to take care of their dead. Technological developments strongly influence the culture of death, generating a funeral industry with a distinctly African flavor. Within this framework, the remainder of the volume focuses more closely on the interaction between the many Christianities that Africa harbors, in one chapter including Islam as well. Throughout, the collection could have done with stronger theoretical foundations and I wonder why the editors have eschewed any theoretical discussion; the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Bruce Whitehouse could have been particularly informative. On the other hand, a strength of the collection is Michael Jindra and Joël Noret's highly commendable unification of francophone and anglophone studies on Africa.
The first descriptive chapter is a historic one by Terence Ranger. In ‘A Decent Death: Changes in Funerary Rites in Bulawayo’, he shows the intricate dynamics of funeral culture in the township of Bulawayo. This well-grounded piece leads us into the ‘funeral politics’ of people far removed from their homelands, for whom a dignified death is highly valued but difficult to obtain. What exactly constitutes a decent death at any moment depends on the historical genesis of the Bulawayo location, on the specific culture of origin, and on the involvement with the various Christian denominations.
A pair of articles by Yvan Droz and Mark Lamont focus on funerals among the Kikuyu and Meru in Central Kenya. The seemingly complete neglect of the corpse here appears to operate as a balance between respect for a dead person and protection of the living, death being the ultimate pollution. The two pieces deal extensively with the colonial abhorrence of this custom. Droz notes how burial and land became closely interconnected, while Lamont traces the changes in the pollution complex through the mandatory burial the colonials imposed. The traditional way of handling corpses was destined to fall away with population increase, changes in land tenure, and modernization.
In the Cameroonian Grassfields the ‘death celebrations’, held long after the actual burial, represent a form of invented tradition, though editor Jindra does not say so. The extensive and expensive celebrations are considered ‘tradition’ in anglophone Cameroon, but they are nevertheless twentieth-century developments. The decrease of chiefly power and the emergence of a new elite transformed a culture based on hierarchy into a system reliant on costly performances to redistribute wealth.
Katrin Langewiesche's chapter, ‘Funerals and religious pluralism in Burkina Faso’, is a study in accommodation between three religious lines: traditional, Catholic, and Muslim. Her analysis of this interplay is interesting because of the Catholic efforts at accommodation after Vatican II. Individual funeral politics are at play in the background of the ‘conversation’ between religious systems, suggesting that a proper burial is in itself a good reason for conversion. I would have liked to see the important evangelical groups taken into account as well.
Editor Noret describes funerals among the Celestial Church of Christ, a major independent church in Benin. Their funerals have to contend with what Noret calls ‘lineage rites’, entailing specific claims on the corpse made by lineage authorities, giving rise to a sometimes-amusing tug-of-war over the fingernails and hairs of the corpse. Doctrinal education for converts is scant, making the death rites the main teaching venue for this church.
The volume closes with a pair of articles by Marleen de Witte and Jonathan Roberts focusing on funeral exuberance in Ghana. De Witte vividly describes the role of body imagery in Asante funerals, where the corpse is put on a very public display in a performance of grief that contrasts deeply with the neglect for the same people at the end of their lives. Here the technology of the funeral industry stimulates a surprisingly conspicuous form of remembering. From there Roberts focuses on an occult practice of interment of terracotta figurines, part of a constellation of practices related to harmful magic well-represented in the urban space. Though his use of the outdated term ‘fetish’ harms his presentation and analysis, as an ethnography of magic, this is a convincing piece.
Overall this is a successful book that will be important for all who ‘dabble in death’ in Africa.
