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Comment by madradavid | Hacker News Reader

I am Ugandan. These kind of burials are unheard of in my country. The Author is labeling this an “African” thing which is just the usual daft nonsense. A number of Ghanaian and Nigerian tribes bury their dead like this , it is more a celebration of life. This is like taking something a small town in Louisiana does and declaring it an “American” tradition.

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1 million% agree - I've lived in Ghana and a number of other countries in West and Southern Africa. I've sadly attended many funerals in each place. These photos that visually drive the sense of opulence are entirely of Ghanaian fantasy coffins. I've only ever attended Ghanaian funerals with regular square coffins, and makers of fantasy coffins are rare, as is their use. Primarily by Ga people, who because they are from around Accra, tourists and foreigners have easier access to them. Already off to a biased start.

Beyond the poor writing of making this an "Africa" practice, it's also limited to Christians, and affluent ones at that. The Muslim burials I've attended are modest to the point of being barely even ceremonial.

While families do pour resources into funerals in Zim and other neighboring countries, it's doing things like hiring professional wailers and church groups to sing - paying the living for a service. Totally without irony, this is called "economic development" in other contexts. Families are hiring caterers, hiring drivers, keeping textile makers booked, supporting churches, hiring choral groups, printing banners. These a jobs for the living that also cement the family as stalwart members of the community. Almost none of the money is being buried in the grave and thus wasted. Typical "Africa is bad and weird" article - ill-informed, out of context data, and a Western-focused "only what I say is right" perspective.

Case in point, India has been bemoaned for its lavish wedding traditions - until someone decides it's time to praise it for being a significant part of GDP. https://www.kenresearch.com/articles/india-wedding-industry-...

It turns into a general rant about kinship societies - which again, are hardly unique to Africa, and aren’t hobbling economic development in other places, which means the author’s core thesis is likely untrue.

I mean, if we’re treating anecdotes as facts - my grandfather - British - used to send most of his pay packet from the navy back to support his mother and his grandmother - and one can hardly argue that the U.K. hasn’t seen economic development.

Shit, I was 19 years old, supporting my mother, my great aunt, and my sister. A few decades on, retired millionaire. It put me in such dire straits that I was forced to work several jobs and then start businesses in my spare time until one stuck. Best thing that ever happened to me.

Ain’t nothing wrong with helping others.

Societies which have the Clan, the family as the biggest institution building unit, are crippling societies they are part of wherever they go.

Family units can not build nations. Only societies that can build meta-families can. You will never be part of the institution of Saud if you are not born into it.

To be fair, I can imagine a pretty parallel article "Americans are spending a fortune on weddings" that does not include the case of a courthouse wedding or a backyard wedding and in fact mostly discusses a few idiots with more millions of dollars than IQ points in the Hamptons or equivalent.

Imagine no more! An article about this seems to be written about a trend of "too expensive!" every decade.

2023: https://www.luxurydaily.com/american-couples-spending-more-m...

2015: https://www.bustle.com/articles/69667-the-average-cost-of-a-...

His article has a link to an article about Uganda called How the deceased are robbing the living. [1]

I know approximately nothing about Uganda, and I have no way of evaluating the article. Especially since I haven’t read it yet. But it does contradict Madradavid’s statement that these kind of burials are unheard of there.

[1] https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/magazines/life/how-the-dece...

I did read that article; it is just a generic article about how funerals are expensive, you could replace Kampala with New York, and it would still hold.

My point is that the Author has picked a practice by a couple of tribes on a Continent so diverse and large you could fit the states, the UK, and still have space for 30 or so more countries, and passed it off as the norm.

Funerals can be expensive, anywhere. I don't want you going away with the impression that all these poor Africans are using up all their hard-earned savings to throw these outlandish burial ceremonies.

That counter argument is valueless. Yes, it might be unequally spread but unless you can proof the locality of the phenomena the cliche still communicates. Not everything in the west is California but thanks to hollywood it is.

That sounds like a reversal of the burden of the proof to me. David Oks is claiming in his blog that "funerals keep Africa poor". The job of showing whether it is widespread and generally true in Africa belongs to David Oks, not to Madradavid.

Clanfamily culture unable to form states is keeping africa poor, the scoundrels of the family parlaying the patriarch to institute family internal socialism and extract from the entrepreneurs of the family.

Articles about two countries cannot be more true than the lived experience of actual residents of Africa. I am Kenyan as well, that article describes something very specific to individual communities in some countries in West Africa, it is foreign to me. The largest expense of funerals that I've experienced in my life is usually paying the medical expenses of the deceased (if the person had been ill for a long time) and feeding the funeral attendees (we do usually get a huge crowd and they generally get lunch).

Another data point: maybe 35-40% of people in Africa identify as Muslim. They usually bury people the same day they die or at worst the next day, and there is no elaborate coffin, usually just a cloth sheet.

My wife is Sotho from South Africa. While there were certainly a bunch of, to me, very strange practices when my FiL died, it was nothing like what was mentioned in the article.

That said, funeral insurance is extremely common in SA, as even normal burials can be pretty expensive.

Funerals are a big thing in South Africa. It can be often to the same level as a wedding, where families will take out loans to host the event. Hence the funeral insurance being common. You go to an ATM and get advertised Funeral Cover, offered by your bank.

Might depend on the tribe, and on personal circumstances. The biggest/weirdest thing for me was the whole night vigil and brewing (Umqombothi) and cooking/roasting of the lamb to honor the elders, which had several guests, but not on a wedding level.

Funerals are huge in india too. It runs for 13 days in some communities. To be clear, the actual cremation happens immediately, but the funeral ceremonies continue for 13 days after that.

Most of the expenses are days of one-meal-a-day for guests, and the general extra expenses of having a lot of relatives over at your house. The ceremonies themselves are fairly cheap - it's mostly prayers.

However there is no insurance and so on, since the aforementioned expenses scale with usual QoL.

> That said, funeral insurance is extremely common in SA, as even normal burials can be pretty expensive.

This is off-topic, but how does funeral insurance even work? You're guaranteed to die at some point, right? To me, insurance is there to hedge against something not very likely, but expensive. The odds are you're going to pay money in, and never see it back (if you don't get sick / crash your car / whatever).

Is funeral insurance just some form of forced savings?

Indeed it is forced savings but with the benefit of covering your funeral expenditure if it is required suddenly and unexpectedly.

For context, it might cost you $5 per month, and give you funeral cover of $500.

As OP mentioned it is very common in South Africa, likely owed to the unpredictable life expectancy. All the large insurers offer it, it’s a massive market.

You're more likely to die each year that passes.

If you subscribe to an insurance in your 20s it'll cost you less per month than if you start it in your 60s.

Same way as term life insurance, I expect

Funeral insurance is small policy life insurance.

Profitability comes from three prongs: many policies are canceled before a covered event, premiums are often collected for many years and have time to be invested before a covered event, and bundling with inappropriate investments.

For examples of inappropriate investments, you can look at whole life and variable annuities. Most people would be better off spending the same amount on term life + a stock index fund; assuming access to stock index funds, which is probably not a given in many African countries.

The writer is using the elaborate funerals as a life story to draw people into the article, because starting with an abstract discussion of African culture isn't going to draw many readers. This is a standard journalistic technique, which is why you see writers interview Gemma the soccer mom who's affected by whatever the story is rather than an academic who produces fifteen paragraphs on the societal implications of the event. This is completely normal. They're not claiming that the personal-interest bit is representative of all of Africa any more than Gemma's complaint about getting her kids to school is representative of whatever country she's in.

> The Author is labeling this an “African” thing which is just the usual daft nonsense

> This is like taking something a small town in Louisiana does and declaring it an “American” tradition.

I've mentioned this issue on HN a ton but it gets downvoted to oblivion. It truly is a hivemind.

It's a hivemind of a certain culture who are only taught there exist only 9 countries in the whole world: USA, Canada, South America, UK, Europe, Japan, China, Asia, Australia.

What do you mean that Africa is a continent of great diversity in cultures, languages and history? They all look poor and black to me.

The "people who'll levy the complaint you just did" and "people who'll pretend all of europe is the same when it suits them" is far too close to a circle for my liking.

That said, I endorse your complaint.

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