Funerary Heads

Funerary Heads

These terra cotta heads have a 400 year tradition in southern Ghana, where they were fashioned to resemble the nobles who served a chief during his lifetime. All were originally painted, and some were parts of near-life-sized statues. Smaller heads may have adorned terra cotta vessels made to hold sacrificial offerings to the dead. They were either placed in rows around the grave or in a sacred grove nearby. Notice the sweetness of expression in the head featured in the center of the case!

Ghanaian Funerals and Color

Although their use is no longer restricted to funerals, certain colors retain their symbolic meaning in a funerary setting.
BLACK: is used primarily to mourn the deaths of younger people. It is often accompanied or even substituted by red and, increasingly, burnt orange. A Ghanaian priest tells me red is worn by the immediate family, black by others attending the funeral.
WHITE: is reserved for the death of older people, often accented with black. ADINKRA SYMBOLS, discussed elsewhere in this exhibit, can often be found on funerary cloth of any color.
Unlike its Western counterpart, a Ghanaian funeral is hardly a somber event. Especially in the case of a younger person’s death, the proceedings can get rowdy. Youth sporting red headbands and armbands parade down the street, singing songs and banging drums, sometimes stopping traffic to elicit “respect money” from passersby. I once witnessed a fight break out as a youth tried to prevent the coffin from being lowered into the grave!
Usually, the longer the interval between death and burial, the more important the individual—for one thing, because more friends and family need to be contacted. The burial of a chief can even take years as the succession to the stool is worked out. Funerals can be multi-day events, their constants being eating, drinking and a bombast of music. Indeed, sometimes it is hard to tell a wedding from a funeral in Ghana.
The three shirts hanging in this case are all funerary shirts. Note the accompanying necklace on the white shirt, its pendant fashioned from a melted-down Coke bottle by the Operation Hand In Hand workshop employing Ghanaians with mental disabilities in Nkoranza. The accompanying necklace on the red shirt is the ubiquitous GYE NYAME symbol (from the Cultural Centre in Kumasi). The orange shirt in the middle is of particular interest, its cloth commissioned for the death of Nii Armah II Odorkor Mantse, the Chief of Odorkor–a part of Accra–for 25 years. In addition to his portrait, note the various symbols: two swords (symbol of a former warrior; it is echoed by the hand holding a sword in the front of the case: possibly a LINGUIST STAFF finial) atop a stool (symbol of royalty), and a bird (possibly a totem animal for the chief and/or his people). A colleague related to the chief gave the cloth to me and others, to be made into shirts and dresses for attending the funeral. At the funeral, the chief’s body was decked out in full regalia as it reclined on a royal bed.

Feature Video