How funerals keep Africa poor

From the article:

A modest, mid-level funeral in Ghana costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars; a “befitting” one can easily cost $15,000 or $20,000. And all this in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year. Ghana is known for its particularly ornate funeral culture; but it’s not the only place in sub-Saharan Africa with a culture of exorbitantly expensive funerals. The average household in KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa, for example, spends the equivalent of an adult’s annual income on a single funeral. We see the same tendency for ultra-expensive funerals in a striking number of places: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Benin, Cameroon, Mozambique, the Ivory Coast. It’s often observed, in fact, that families will spend more money on burying the dead than on keeping the sick alive: indeed, in the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more money on funerals than on medical care.

[...]

The answer, I think, is that the funeral isn’t really about the deceased. Funerals function as a costly signal of kinship group loyalty: and in that context, the expense of the funeral is the point. And, in turn, funerals tell us quite a lot about why so many societies across Africa have had so much trouble achieving economic “takeoff.” Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor.

[...]

African societies, as a broad pattern, have extraordinarily intense kinship ties. Only a few other places—the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan, the mountains of Chechnya and Dagestan, the jungles of New Guinea—exhibit kinship intensity on par with what prevails in much of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a universal pattern across all of Africa—the San people of the Kalahari desert, for example, have relatively flexible social arrangements—but the general tendency is clear: African societies, by and large, are kinship societies.

[...]

But you also owe things to your kinship network on a more day-to-day level: we can call these sharing obligations. Just as you pay taxes and fees to the various impersonal institutions that govern life in the rich world, you must make regular contributions to the collective welfare of your kin. But there’s a crucial distinction. In a modern society, you will know, more or less, what you owe and when you’ll owe it; but with sharing obligations there’s no such clarity. The demands from your kin—hospital bills, loan requests, funeral expenses—simply come up.

And you can’t really say no to these obligations. The mutual obligation that defines intensive kinship really is essential to the functioning of everyday life in kinship societies. A person who fails to demonstrate loyalty to the group risks losing access to everything the group provides. And this threat is powerfully enforced in traditional cultures. In a society where your standing in the kinship network is often the single most important thing about you, being cast out is a kind of social death.

And so, in a kinship society, nothing that you earn is truly yours. If you make money beyond the point of subsistence, you’ll be expected to share it with your less-fortunate relatives; if you start a business, you’ll be expected to hire your cousins or nephews or in-laws, even if they’re not the best possible employees; if you buy a car, you’ll be expected to lend it out to relatives who need it.

[...]

The relentlessness of sharing obligations also makes it nearly impossible to accrue savings over time. Thus we see that in KwaZulu-Natal individuals will go out of their way to invest their surplus in non-sharable goods, like roofing or fencing, instead of accumulating liquid savings that their families might claim.

[...]

So from the perspective of the kinship network, wealth is a threat. Those who become wealthy have an incentive to defect; and while social sanctions can punish those who defect explicitly, it’s much harder to police those—like the businesswoman in Nairobi—who defect quietly. The safest bet is to prevent people from becoming too rich in the first place.

[...]

You can think of funerals as another wealth destruction ritual. The genius of it is that it can’t be evaded: it is a public ceremony virtually dedicated to the immolation of wealth. In private, you might be able to evade your sharing obligations by hiding your earnings or your savings; but in public, at the funeral, the claims that your kin make on your wealth are at their most visible and least avoidable. You can’t simply not show up to your uncle’s funeral; and, if you show up, you will obviously be expected to contribute a handsome sum.

And this logic is even more powerful for those who are suspected of shirking their kinship obligations. It’s at the funeral where you must signal your willingness to honor sharing obligations most loudly. The lavishness of the funeral is a costly signal of continued commitment to the system of mutual obligation that holds the kinship group together. The point is that it’s expensive and incommensurate with your means.

[...]

And so in the second half of the twentieth century a huge funeral economy emerged in Ghana. Bodies could be refrigerated indefinitely in hospital mortuaries, and since the fees escalated with each passing week it became prestigious to refrigerate bodies for a long time; by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.

[...]

There’s a reason why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals. Living in a society of individuals governed by impersonal institutions, we have an understandable wistfulness for the imagined world of warm communities and thick familial bonds. But we forget how suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development.

I don’t think that African societies are ripe for social transformations of the kind just described; loyalties to strong states won’t supplant loyalties to kinship networks anytime soon. But for the most productive people trapped inside these kinship networks, I do think that technology offers something like an escape hatch. Mobile phones and bank accounts held under a single name are tools that help these people put a wall between what they earn and what their family knows they earn. In many cases these technologies are remarkably liberating. Senegalese women who were able to receive hidden income immediately cut transfers to relatives by a quarter and spent the money on healthcare for themselves.

There’s a lot to be said, then, for one of the most underappreciated virtues of modern financial systems: privacy. Social modernity, in the end, is really about not having to do what your family tells you to do—marrying whom you want, taking the job you want, and spending your earnings the way you want. There is something cold about this, of course, but also something deeply emancipating. In a world where your relatives can see and lay claim to everything you earn, anything that makes your income a little less legible to them is also, quietly, an engine of economic development.

The author also wrote another post that's very dark: Why kinship societies kill their old

The Akan have a proverb, abusua do funu: “the family loves the corpse.” I quoted it in my essay on funerals, as a sort of wry comment on the tendency to spend more on funerals than on the living. But really it’s much darker than that: it’s one of the proverbs that Ghanaian taxi drivers paint on the backs of their cars as charms against witchcraft, alongside others like sura nea oben wo, “fear the one who is close to you” and otan firi fie, “hatred comes from the home.” They are sayings about the dangers that lurk within the family unit. The family loves the corpse because the corpse no longer eats. The living elder, in bad times, is not always loved at all.