An in-depth look at how mortuary cultures and issues of death and the
dead in Africa have developed over four centuries
In My Time of Dying is the first detailed history of death and the
dead in Africa south of the Sahara. Focusing on a region that is now
present-day Ghana, John Parker explores mortuary cultures and the
relationship between the living and the dead over a four-hundred-year
period spanning the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Parker considers
many questions from the African historical perspective, including why
people die and where they go after death, how the dead are buried and
mourned to ensure they continue to work for the benefit of the living,
and how perceptions and experiences of death and the ends of life have
changed over time.
From exuberant funeral celebrations encountered by seventeenth-century
observers to the brilliantly conceived designer coffins of the late
twentieth century, Parker shows that the peoples of Ghana have developed
one of the world's most vibrant cultures of death. He explores the
unfolding background of that culture through a diverse range of issues,
such as the symbolic power of mortal remains and the dominion of
hallowed ancestors, as well as the problem of bad deaths, vile bodies,
and vengeful ghosts. Parker reconstructs a vast timeline of death and
the dead, from the era of the slave trade to the coming of Christianity
and colonial rule to the rise of the modern postcolonial nation.
With an array of written and oral sources, In My Time of Dying richly
adds to an understanding of how the dead continue to weigh on the
shoulders of the living.
