Death in the Ghanaian society is regarded as one of the rites of passage that mark the transition from the present world to the other. It is believed to extend family relationship into infinity and therefore great effort is put into organising befitting funerals. In planning the funeral, a document, which the paper calls the funeral brochure, is prepared. These funeral brochures have become a valuable source of historical, social and biographical information. This article examines 107 Ghanaian funeral brochures belonging to all classes of people in the society, printed between 1993 and 2006. It provides insight into the various pieces of information contained in these brochures that qualify them as a rich source of biographical information. The paper concludes by calling on librarians to begin acquiring funeral brochures as part of their collections.

“Many African languages have a long written tradition, e.g. Ge'ez, Kiswahili, Hausa, etc.” reads the summary of panel 21 of the AEGIS conference “African Manuscripts and Museum Collections in Europe”. The list could be extended to include other names familiar to a wider audience, e.g., Fula(ni) (Fulfulde), Manding (Mandenkan, Bambara, Dyula, Mandinka), Wolof, Asante (Akan), Songay. The Kanuri language however, needs some introduction. This is to a certain extent a historical paradox, because Kanuri was in fact the first African language to be extensively documented in the middle of the 19th century by Sigismund Koelle. In 1854 Koelle published two large volumes on Kanuri grammar and an anthology of oral narratives (1854a, 1854b). Remarkably, four tales from the Koelle's Kanuri anthology found their way into Volume 3 of the 3rd edition of the Grimm Brothers’ Children and Household Tales (1856).