Living Coffins and Death Among the Ga of Ghana

Until recently, little attention has been paid to the history of death practices in relation to their ritual objects and even less about the way such objects traverse the differentiated terrains of possession and control. Indeed, there was little analysis into the use of funerary objects such as coffins from a historical and ethnographic standpoint. The present chapter intends to explore the use and circulation of funeral sarcophagi abebu adekai, literally “receptacles of proverbs” and known worldwide as fantasy coffins. They are often constructed in various shapes and are generally painted in luminous enamel colors. These particular coffins are known for their rich and varied iconography; the decorations range from cocoa beans to images of cars, and all manner of imagery in between. Abebu adekai are used primarily by the Ga people who live in Accra, south Ghana. They began to be used on a large scale in the early 1960s, soon after Ghana became independent. What emerged most significantly, however, is how these funeral sarcophagi have largely contributed to both the continuation and re-invention of practices and beliefs surroundings death amongst the Ga. I illustrate these artefacts as a strategy carried out by individuals to achieve some specific ends, so as to grasp the manner in which people currently transform funeral practices and their objects to meet new needs, express a new imaginary horizon, and create new meanings in a contemporary context

The politics of control in Kenya : understanding the bureaucratic-executive state, 1952–78

Colonial rule in Kenya witnessed the emergence of a profoundly unbalanced institutional landscape. With all capacity resided in a strong prefectural provincial administration, political parties remained underdeveloped. The co-option of sympathetic African elites during the colonial twilight into the bureaucracy, the legislature and the private property-based economy meant that the allies of colonialism and representatives of transnational capital were able to reap the benefits of independence. In the late colonial period these elites not only attained the means of production, they also assumed the political and institutional capacity to reproduce their dominance. The post-colonial state must therefore be seen as a representation of the interests protected and promoted during the latter years of colonial rule. Under Jomo Kenyatta, the post-colonial state represented a ‘pact-of-domination’ between transnational capital, the elite and the executive. The ability of this coalition to reproduce itself over time lay in its capacity to demobilise popular forces, especially those elements of the nationalist movement that questioned both the social and economic cleavages of the post-colonial state. Whilst Kenya may have experienced changes to both the executive and legislature, the structure of the state itself has demonstrated remarkable continuity