Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewl | Hacker News Reader

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...

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com