Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead

How funerals keep Africa poor

Why the poorest people in the world spend fortunes burying their dead

Consider, for a moment, a funeral in Ghana.

Suppose you’re an elderly Ghanaian—let’s say you’re Kofi, age 74, an Akan. One day, you do as all humans must and die. Perhaps you die at your modest bungalow in a northern suburb of Accra, Ghana’s capital. What happens next?

A few things. First, your immediate family will discover that you’re dead; and, in order to deal with the logistics of your death, they call the head of your extended family: the abusuapanyin. This is not your closest surviving relative. The Akan are matrilineal, and the maternal line “owns” the body, so the abusuapanyin is the most senior male on your mother’s side. And he’s the one who will take charge of the arrangements from this point forward. In consultation with him, your body is taken to the nearest hospital mortuary, where it’s embalmed and placed in a refrigerated unit.

Your body is going to remain in that refrigerated unit for a long time. Typically it will be weeks or months; sometimes bodies can stay refrigerated for an entire year. Why so long? Because the longer that the body stays in the mortuary, the more time the family has to raise funds for a funeral truly befitting your status. And, since the hospital charges escalating fees for each additional week that your body is stored there, keeping your body refrigerated for a long time is itself a mark of prestige.

Eventually, your family decides that they’ve raised the funds they’re going to raise. So they pick a Saturday—the funerals of Christian Ghanaians are always held on Saturdays—and plan a lavish event that will, in fact, stretch across three days. They hire a graphic designer to produce large colorful banners bearing your name, your photograph, your dates of birth and death, and the time and place of your funeral: these are hung on walls and fences at intersections around the city. They rent a venue, hire a large staff—caterers, a DJ or live band, a photographer, maybe also a videographer—and choose a funeral cloth for the family to wear. And if your family can afford it, or wants the community to believe that they can, they commission a craftsman to carve you a “fantasy coffin” shaped like something you enjoyed or admired in life: perhaps a cocoa pod, a school building, a crab, a paintbrush, or a giant blue teapot.

And, finally, after all this, the big day comes. Your body is retrieved from the mortuary; hundreds of people show up, many of whom never knew you in life; and a great deal of money is spent feeding them, entertaining them, and sending you off in the style that an Akan elder deserves.

This all sounds, you’ll notice, very expensive. And it is.

A modest, mid-level funeral in Ghana costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars; a “befitting” one can easily cost $15,000 or $20,000. And all this in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year. Ghana is known for its particularly ornate funeral culture; but it’s not the only place in sub-Saharan Africa with a culture of exorbitantly expensive funerals. The average household in KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa, for example, spends the equivalent of an adult’s annual income on a single funeral. We see the same tendency for ultra-expensive funerals in a striking number of places: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Benin, Uganda, Cameroon, Mozambique, the Ivory Coast. It’s often observed, in fact, that families will spend more money on burying the dead than on keeping the sick alive: indeed, in the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more money on funerals than on medical care.

So how do people pay for these remarkably expensive events?

Sometimes they’ll have insurance of some kind: funeral insurance, where the payout is earmarked for the funeral costs, is one of the most popular financial products in sub-Saharan Africa—often, in fact, more popular than health insurance. And much of the time, family members will pay for funerals with loans from others. About a quarter of households in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, pay for funerals by going into debt.

And, if it comes to it, families will just cut back on living expenses to cover the funeral costs. In Zimbabwe, households that cannot afford to bury their dead will sell their belongings or even cut back on food. (Zimbabwe has the second-highest rate of death from malnutrition in the world.) This is actually a remarkably common thing. Out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over a period of 25 years, 63 percent cited “heavy expenses related to funerals” as a major cause. And this doesn't seem to be a new thing. As early as 1853, a visitor to coastal West Africa noted that “even the poorest will pawn and enslave themselves to obtain the means of burying a relation decently, according to the ideas of country.”

This all seems very strange.

Those of us who live in the rich world tend to expect that spending follows a sort of Maslovian progression. Poor people spend money on the necessities; as people get richer, they spend on things further and further removed from the logic of survival, until eventually they are willing to allocate resources to things like dog longevity. But with African funeral spending, this pattern is inverted. Why do some of the poorest people in the world bankrupt themselves to pay for extremely lavish funerals?

The standard answer to this is that exorbitant funeral spending is “part of the local culture,” and particularly reflective of a “reverence toward elders.” And indeed that is true. But that only begs the question of why it’s part of the culture—in fact, why it’s part of so many different cultures across Africa. Why is heavy funeral spending such a pronounced part of life? And if this is merely a reflection of “reverence toward elders,” why do so many elderly Africans complain that far more attention is given to their funeral than to their care while alive? (So common is this sentiment that the Akan have a saying: abusua do funu, “the family loves the corpse.”)

The answer, I think, is that the funeral isn’t really about the deceased. Funerals function as a costly signal of kinship group loyalty: and in that context, the expense of the funeral is the point. And, in turn, funerals tell us quite a lot about why so many societies across Africa have had so much trouble achieving economic “takeoff.” Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor.

The kinship tax

African societies, as a broad pattern, have extraordinarily intense kinship ties. Only a few other places—the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan, the mountains of Chechnya and Dagestan, the jungles of New Guinea—exhibit kinship intensity on par with what prevails in much of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a universal pattern across all of Africa—the San people of the Kalahari desert, for example, have relatively flexible social arrangements—but the general tendency is clear: African societies, by and large, are kinship societies.

So what are kinship societies?

You can think of modern societies as large collections of individuals, their lives structured by impersonal institutions like states and corporations. Kinship societies are much older: they are, in fact, the oldest and most durable type of human society. In a kinship society, life is centered on the extended family: the “clan,” the lineage, the tribe—a group that often includes many people who aren’t actually related. These kinship networks don’t act