The public health question and mortuary politics in colonial Ghana

Abstract

ABSTRACT British colonial rule in Ghana profoundly affected the interment of corpses. The practice of home burials was widespread in nineteenth-century Ghana. Guided by prevailing Euro-Western discourses on sanitation and public health, colonial officials banned home interment and introduced cemeteries. This article examines the imposition of cemetery burials in colonial Ghana, the responses of the local population, its impact on indigenous burial practices, and its ramifications beyond the public health imperative. I argue that, despite initial opposition, the colonial administration succeeded in imposing cemeteries and this reoriented the people’s beliefs and practices regarding burial rituals, with spiritual and pragmatic implications for health, identity and the use of space; it also reoriented the people’s perceptions of the relationship between the living and the dead. The widespread acceptance of cemeteries was accompanied by a penchant by chiefs and other notables to create private cemeteries exclusively for their families. This threatened the spatial planning policies of the colonial administration, especially in urban areas, forcing them to strictly regulate the creation of cemeteries, limiting burials to public cemeteries, and closing already demarcated ones. Chiefs exploited cemeteries to flex power by imposing customary fees and sanctions, and by forcing their opponents to exhume their buried relatives.