Zła śmierć i puryfikacja u ludu Konkomba z północnej Ghany

Abstract

Life is the greatest value in the tradional African culture. The care for life permeates all the activities of the African peoples and everything is subjected to it. Disease, infertility, drought and bad death are misfortunes for the Africans. Bad death takes place when a man dies at an improper time or in an extraordinary way. Bad death manifests and explains the course of life of a given man; it has influence on his burial and his fate in the future life. The way in which somebody dies determines his life after death in the sense that it can be the cause of the dead person’s transformation into an evil spirit that does harm to the people and the community out of the feelings of jealousy and revenge. The people who die a bad death do not have a normal burial and a secondary funeral or the funeral rites are made shorter. According to the conviction of the African peoples only the properly conducted funeral rituals make people’s death accepted by the community and they make it possible for the dead to pass to the land of the ancestors. On the basis of the results of field studies carried out twice among the Konkomba people of northern Ghana in the years 1984-1985 and 1990-1991 the author presents a description and interpretation of the purification ritual conducted by that people after a bad death of a woman and a baby during delivery. Men, women and children from all the homesteads of the villages Chakpong and Kpanjol, from which the deceased woman Laaba and her husband Jato came, participated in the ritual. According to the beliefs held by the Konkomba different ritual acts such as prayers, offerings of beer and animals, drinking beer mixed with medicines by all the participants and spitting it out on medicinal plants as well as sprinkling water with medicinal plants over the hut of the deceased woman Laaba and the whole homestead of her husband Jato are supposed to protect the inhabitants of both villages from the misfortune that fell on the woman Laaba.