Abstract
African attitudes toward death and burial often appear contradictory to Western observers. While death is mourned as a rupture in the communal fabric, it is simultaneously celebrated as a rite of passage into ancestorhood. This paper examines African perspectives on burial adornment and argues that lavish funerary practices constitute a ritual and social technology for maintaining communal solidarity, moral order and political legitimacy. Drawing on ethnographic literature from Nigeria and Ghana, African philosophical accounts of personhood and biblical exegesis, the study critiques the charge that Africans neglect the living while honouring the dead, a misreading that is rooted in neoliberal political economy and International Monetary Fund imposed austerity. Through a qualitative and interpretive methodology that is grounded in African philosophy, this paper reads African burial practice through Matthew 14:13 to 21 to argue that communal feasting and care for both the living and the dead are complementary duties that are not in competition. The paper advances a decolonial reframing that recognizes burial expenditure as cultural infrastructure rather than waste. Findings show that funerals function as sites of governance, redistribution and memory where the dead remain active members of the community, and adornment serves as the material language that sustains that ongoing relationship.
Keywords: African philosophy, burial, ancestors, ritual, decoloniality, personhood, ubuntu, communal solidarity.
Author name(s):
Kingsley Odey Odey,
Department of Philosophy, Federal University Otuoke, Bayelsa State, Nigeria
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23139263
Copyright © [2026] The Author(s). Published by the Journal of People and Worldviews (JPW). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are properly credited.