Some Notes on Funerals

I'm sure I've probably mentioned that funerals are THE event in Cameroon (and if you've talked to my mother, I'm sure she has mentioned those "CRY-DIES" that they have there... caps intended to denote a Michigander accent). The older you are when you die, the bigger the party, it seems. People spend years planning the events sometimes (my landlord and his family have held numerous family meetings over the last year and a half to plan "Pa's die") and spend ridiculous amounts of their dispensible income on beer, tents, plastic chairs and fowls... lots and lots of fowls.

Actually, at times the money spent is not all that dispensible. It seems that Bafut once had a number of people raising cane rats... a profitable business after the start-up costs have been offset... but they sold off the entire lot of animals to pay for booze at Pa or Ma's big celebration. It's not the kind of spending that thrills development workers (even the Rodney Dangerfield type).

What else can you see at a cry die?

Typically at these events people will try to get all matching african material and make matching shirts and skirts.... sometimes whole pantsuits depending on your importance (after that, you can determine who is in who's family from seeing the matching material all over the country).

They set up sometimes hundreds of rented plastic chairs under rented tents. Normally this is in the front yard of the dead person's house... even if their house was an apartment on commercial avenue in Bamenda....... in which case they set up the tent and chairs on the sidewalks and in the streets. Often traffic is blocked. In the francaphone zones, people dance in a circle holding peace plant sprigs and the headshot of the dead individual. Traffic in Bafoussam is typically blocked by a die circle or two when i come through.

The star of the show is really the corpse, a word that the african people use freely and often. Bringing the corpse, presentation of the corpse, burying the corpse, dancing on the corpse to pack the dirt down on the corpse. It's something we shy away from in the states, but it is really in your face here. The carrying of the corpse from the mortuary to the burial site is a big to-do. And I mean big. During your living years you will ride 4 to a seat on a 4 hour trip from Bamenda to Kumbo on a crappy dirt road in the crappiest hatchback you can imagine... but when you die, they rent you an entire land cruiser with flashing police lights and sweet, sweet Backstreet Boys playing out of bullhorns on the top. Bazor funerals in Bamenda has a whole fleet of these classy "last ride" cruisers. The competitor down the street is "Master P" Funerals.

They make t-shirts with the mommie or papa dem's picture on the front. Buttons, too.

So, for awhile I thought that this was all kind of lame (and I still don't approve of the spending when you've not money to spend)... but I think I am undergoing a slow conversion to celebration of death. What else will you defininately get to celebrate but your birth and your death? You might not get married, have kids, anniversaries, big promotions... but you definitely get to die.

I'm proposing that for my funeral, I'm buried in the front yard (somebody's front yard, don't care much who). It will probably be a block party... I would like my face to be screen printed on t-shirts and the butt of sweatpants. Lot's of margaritas... and I demand that my corpse be covered in streamers and tied to the roof of an fallafel truck with the music blaring. People can eat pitas after. Tears and wailing are welcome, as long as followed by dancing, margaritas and debauchery. It's just the way it should be.