Introduction

The junction at which one must turn right to enter the town of Peki, an Ewe community in the Ghanaian southeast, branches off an asphalted overland road that leads to the Togolese border. Many tro tro minibuses pass by, making the junction a place of high visibility. Here, a couple of recently deceased community members preside as a welcoming committee, conspicuously attempting to catch the eye of travellers (see Figure 6.1). This presence of the dead in the world of the living reflects the elevated importance which the dead and death-related practices hold in Ghana. Of course, these dead at the roadside are not present in the flesh. They are represented by large ‘funeral banners’: colour-printed posters made out of PVC (polyvinyl chloride), a synthetic polymer-based plastic applied to a fabric-like threaded grid structure.

One will find hundreds more of these funeral banners across town: on the walls of houses, tied to trees or posted to surfaces. They show images of deceased community members, incorporated in digital designs with stock photography, attention-seeking fonts and carefully selected colour schemes. The photographs feature alongside information about the dead, such as their name, age and a headline that indicates whether they died what is locally considered a good or a bad death. Planted onto sticks, these representations of the dead can ‘stand’, despite their physical bodies no longer allowing them to do so. The PVC, a water-repellent material that is surprisingly heavy, flat and flexible, yet strong, gives the banners support and durability. Other, more difficult qualities of this material are its inability to decompose organically and its tendency to tear when folded. Throughout the social lives of funeral banners, their material and visual qualities influence the way commemorative practices are conducted and the kind of death that can be socially produced.

This chapter takes a closer look at Ghanaian funeral banners as a popular obituary format in the Ghanaian south. While obituary print products are not completely new, it is difficult to say exactly when they emerged. Obituary pamphlets seem to date back to the late 1970s in Ghana (Budniok and Noll, 2017). Visual and textual announcements with obituary content of the deaths of important people can be dated back to the 1930s (see McCaskie, 2006).