EPITAPH

 

FANTASY COFFINS OF GHANA

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Fantasy coffins, aka figurative coffins, are functional coffins made by specialised carpenters in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana.

Comments:

• The fantasy coffins developed out of figurative palanquins, a special kind of litter connected with the totem of its owner. The litters are used are used only by the local Ghanian kings and sub-chiefs when they are carried in public a events such as festivals.

• They are not only coffins but are considered works of art and were shown for the first time to a wider Western public in an exhibition in Paris in 1989.

• Fantasy coffins are mainly used by the southern Ghana-based Ga people because of their religious beliefs regarding the afterlife. The Ga believe that life continues in the next world in the same way it did on earth. Ancestors are also considered much more powerful than the living and able to influence their relatives who are still alive, and the social status of the deceased depends in part on the use of an exclusive coffin during burial.

• Fantasy coffins are only displayed on the day when they are buried with the deceased. They often symbolize the deceased person's profession. Certain shapes, such as a sword or stool, represent regal or priestly insignia with a magical and religious function. Only people with the appropriate status are allowed to be buried in such coffins.

• Animals such as lions, cockerels and crabs may be used to represent clan totems. Similarly, only the heads of clan families are permitted to be buried in coffins of that particular shape. 

• Many coffin shapes evoke proverbs, which are interpreted in different ways by the Ga. That is why fantasy coffins are sometimes called proverbial coffins in the Ga language.

• Among Christians, the use of custom coffins is relatively recent and began in the Greater Accra Region around 1950. They were formerly used only by Ga chiefs and priests, but since around 1960, figurative coffins have become an integral part of the local funeral culture.

• Figurative coffins are produced to order. Master carpenters employ one or more apprentices who carry out a large part of the work. This allows the artist to make several coffins simultaneously. Coffins are generally made from the wood of the local wawa tree. In the interest of durability, items produced for museums are made from mahogany or another high-grade hardwood so as to guard against cracking and attacks by insects when transferred from one climate to another.

• Each coffin takes two to six weeks to produce, depending on the complexity of the construction and the carpenter's level of experience. For urgent orders, several carpenters will work on a single piece. The woodworking is done using simple, non-electric tools. Painting can take up to two days to complete. Some models are painted by the head of the workshop, others by local sign writers, some of whom are well known in the Western art market for making hand-painted movie posters.

Gallery:

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

 

FUNNY FRIDAY

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Having had a few Bytes items about Pastor Niemoller in the last few days and wondering what to post for Funny Friday, I settled on pastors and religion.

Enjoy, my Byter congregation.

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SOME HUMOUR:

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Timmy didn’t want to put his money in the offering plate Sunday morning, so his mother decided to use some hurried creative reasoning with him.

“You don’t want that money, honey,” she whispered in his ear. “Quick! Drop it in the plate. It’s tainted!”

Horrified, the little boy obeyed.

After a few seconds he whispered, “But, mommy, why was the money tainted? Was it dirty?

“Oh, no dear,” she replied. “It’s not really dirty. It just ‘taint yours, and it ‘taint mine,” she replied. “It’s God’s.”

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Mrs. Smartt was fumbling in her purse for her offering when a large television remote fell out and clattered into the aisle.

The curious usher bent over to retrieve it for her and whispered, “Do you always carry your TV remote to church?”

“No,” she replied, “but my husband refused to come with me this morning, and I figured this was the most evil thing I could do to him legally.”

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The weary evangelist knocked on another door, fully expecting to have it slammed in his face. Sure enough, the older woman who answered, angrily demanded that he leave once she figured out why he was there and slammed the door.

The door, however, bounced back open, and the woman shouted, “Get your foot out of my door!”

“But ma’am…” the evangelist began, when the woman again slammed the door in his face. Once again it bounced back open.

“I said get your foot out of my door!” the woman yelled again. One more time she slammed the door. One more time it bounced open again.

“But ma’am…” the evangelist said again, only to be cut off.

“Don’t talk back to me!” the woman screamed in a rage. “I want you off my property!” She slammed the door a fourth time, only to see it bounce open a fourth time.

“Ma’am,” the evangelist yelled as he beat a hasty retreat down the sidewalk, “you’ll be able to close your door if you move your cat out of the way!”

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The young couple invited their aged pastor for Sunday dinner. While they were in the kitchen preparing the meal, the minister asked their son what they were having. “Goat,” the little boy replied.

“Goat?” replied the startled pastor. “Are you sure about that?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “On the drive back from church I heard Mom say to Dad, ‘Remember, we’re having the old goat for dinner tonight.’ ”

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When I turned 18, I went down to the courthouse to petition to change my name.

The clerk asked me why. "Just look at my application," I said. "If you were named Oskar Von Wootengootenbootenshoot, wouldn't you want something different?"

The clerk said, "I suppose you've got a point."

I said, "Yeah, I don't like Oskar, either."

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Sister Mary, who worked for a home health agency, was making her rounds visiting homebound patients when she ran out of gas. A filling station was only a block away, but the attendant said they had no gas can for her to borrow.

Sister Mary returned to her car to see if there was a gas can in the trunk. There wasn’t, but she found a bedpan. Being resourceful she took it to the station and asked the attendant to fill ‘er up.

As she was pouring the gas into her tank two men watched from across the street. One of them turned to the other and said, “If it starts, I’m turning Catholic!”

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A man from the city bought himself a farm.

On his first day at the farm he was walking his acres, discovering the creeks, hills and other features when he came upon a large hole in the ground. He looked inside but he could see only blackness. He picked up a small stone and dropped it into the hole, waiting to hear it strike the bottom to ascertain its depth, but he heard nothing.

He then dropped in a larger stone, with his ear held over the hole, but again he heard nothing.

Looking around he noticed a railway sleeper. With some effort he managed to push it into the hole. As he waited to hear the sound of it striking the bottom, a goat ran out from some nearby bushes and charged staright at him. He managed to get out of its way at the last moment but the goat continued straight on, into the hole.

A short while later a man came by and said to him “’Scuse me, mate, but you haven’t seen a goat around here anywhere, have you?”

”Well, as a matter of fact I have,” he replied. “A goat came out of those bushes, charged at me and dived into this hole.”

“That wouldn’t be my goat,” he replied, “mine’s tied to a railway sleeper.”

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LIMERICK OF THE WEEK:

A lonely young lad of Eton

Used always to sleep with the heat on,

Till he ran into a lass

Who showed him her ass –

Now they sleep with only a sheet on.

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GALLERY:

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CORN CORNER:

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God is talking to one of his angels and says, “Do you know what I have just done? I have just created a 24-hour period of alternating light and darkness on Earth. Isn’t that good?”

The angel says, “Yes, but what will you do now?”

God says, “I think I’ll call it a day.”

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Why did god make it so painful to give birth?

So for once, women get to know what it’s like for a man to have the flu

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Philip was walking home in the rain with his mother following Sunday worship. It finally stopped raining as they rounded the corner, where to their surprise and delight appeared a vivid double rainbow in the sky.

“Doesn’t it look like an artist painted this rainbow?” his mother exclaimed. “I bet God painted this just for you!”

“Yes,” replied Philip, “God did it, and he did it left handed.”

Confused, his mother asked him, “What makes you say God did this with his left hand?”

“Well,” said Philip, “we learned in Sunday School that Jesus sits on God’s right hand.”

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People said I’d never get over my obsession with Phil Collins.

But take a look at me now.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY

“Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants. And do your homework.”

-Maggie Kuhn (1905 – 1995)

At age 65, when many people prepare for quiet years, Maggie Kuhn embarked on the greatest adventure and most important work of her life.

In 1970, forced to retire from her career with the Presbyterian Church at age 65, Kuhn and a group of her friends in similar circumstances organized and founded an organization which became the Gray Panthers. The organization was created to work on issues of concern to the elderly, such as pension rights and age discrimination, but also to concern itself with larger public issues, such as the Vietnam War and other social concerns. At the core of the Gray Panthers’ message was that older people needed to seize control of their lives and be in the active world working for issues in which they believed.

Kuhn, who continued to play a role in the Gray Panthers until her death at age 89, is considered by many to have started nothing less than a contemporary cultural revolution, both in terms of redefining the meaning of age and through her insistence on “young and old together.” She and the Panthers have been directly instrumental in enacting significant national reforms, including nursing home reform, ending forced retirement provisions, and combatting fraud against the elderly in health care.

PASTOR NIEMOLLER

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Yesterday I posted Pastor Niemoller’s famous poem ”First They Came For” and I gave some brief facts about both the poem and the pastor.

It occurred to me later that there was some interesting information about Pastor Niemoller’s writing of it that was worthy of a further post, as below.

It is noted again that Niemoller was initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and a self-identified antisemite. He became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches, became an opponent of the Nazi policies and was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution.

After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help victims of the Nazis.

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The poem:

Here is the poem again:

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Martin Niemoller (1892 – 1984):

Portrait of Martin Niemoeller as a young cadet in the Flensburg-Muerwik Naval Academy, c 1910

Martin Niemoller as a German naval officer

German naval officer Martin Niemöller (top, foreground) commands a U-Boat during World War I. Flensburg, Germany , ca. 1914–17.

Born a pastor's son in a conservative family, he first joined the Navy after passing his school leaving exams (Abitur). He was assigned to the submarine service, where in August 1917 he became executive officer of U-151, which set a record of 55,000 tons of ships sunk in 151 days. He then became commanding officer of UC-67, where he served until war's end. He received the Iron Cross First Class for his service.

Due to his conservative opposition to the Weimar Republic, he left the navy in 1919 and decided to become a pastor rather than become a farmer. He studied Lutheran theology from 1919 to 1923 at the University of Münster. During this time he served as a Freikorps commander during a revolt in that city.

He was ordained in 1924 and became pastor of the Church of the Redeemer in Münster. In 1932 he was given the pastorate of the Lutheran church in Dahlem, a Berlin suburb, where he became friends with future German Field Marshal Model. When the Nazis took power he was at first in favor, as he thought they would bring a return to conservatism. But he stood directly opposed to the "Aryan Paragraph" (1933) as inimical to Christianity. He did at first try to form a compromise with the so-called "German Christians", but then formed with Barth and Bonhoeffer the Confessing Church in 1934 in opposition to the Nazi-controlled "German Church".

He spent the war interned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps until war's end in 1945. The time in prison changed him. He had been anti-Semitic, but his experiences gave him a great compassion for people of all walks and beliefs.

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Post-release from the German concentration camps:

He delivered the opening address at the 1946 meeting of the Federal Council of Churches in the United States and traveled widely speaking about the German experience under Nazism.

In 1947, he was elected as president of the Hessen-Nassau Lutheran Church and began a world tour preaching collective guilt for Nazi persecution and crimes against humanity. His ideas are best reflected in the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt (Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis), written mainly by Niemöller in October 1945 and issued in the name of the German Evangelical Church.

In the wake of Nazism, Niemöller's prominence as an opposition figure gave him international stature though he remained controversial. In Germany, he quickly became unpopular because of his call for acknowledgment of collective German guilt. He emphasized the particular guilt of the German churches for their support of Nazism. Niemöller's political discourse, however, continued to display some of the prejudices that led him to welcome the Nazi rise to power in 1933. He blamed the weakness of the parliamentary Weimar Republic for the rise of Hitler and failed to explicitly repudiate Hitler's political aims, condemning unequivocally only Nazi interference in religious matters.

By the mid-1950s, Niemöller had become a pacifist. He worked with a number of international groups, including the World Council of Churches, for international peace.

Niemöller died on March 6, 1984 at the age of 92.

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Niemöller made confession in his speech for the Confessing Church in Frankfurt on 6 January 1946, of which this is a partial translation:

... the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?"

Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? Only then did the church as such take note.

Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible?

The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. ... I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now.

This speech was translated and published in English in 1947, but was later retracted when it was alleged that Niemöller was an early supporter of the Nazis.

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We can still learn a lot from his words and life.

PEOPLE

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Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (1892 – 1984) was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor.

He is best known for his opposition to the Nazi regime during the late 1930s and for his widely quoted 1946 poem "First they came ...".

The poem exists in many versions; the one featured on the United States Holocaust Memorial reads:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemöller was a national conservative and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler and a self-identified antisemite. He became one of the founders of the Confessing Church, which opposed the Nazification of German Protestant churches.

He opposed the Nazis' Aryan Paragraph, a clause in the statutes of an organisation, corporation, or real estate deed that reserved membership or right of residence solely for members of the "Aryan race" and excluded from such rights any non-Aryans, particularly those of Jewish and Slavic descent.

For his opposition to the Nazis' state control of the churches, Niemöller was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps from 1938 to 1945. He narrowly escaped execution.

After his imprisonment, he expressed his deep regret about not having done enough to help victims of the Nazis. He turned away from his earlier nationalistic beliefs and was one of the initiators of the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt.

From the 1950s on, he was a vocal pacifist and anti-war activist, and vice-chair of War Resisters' International from 1966 to 1972. He met with Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War and was a committed campaigner for nuclear disarmament.

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There are numerous versions of the ‘First they came’ work in circulation today, some of them set in stone, with varying claims of legitimacy.

For example, visitors to the New England Holocaust Memorial on Boston's Freedom Trail find this version, inscribed in 1995:

They came first for the Communists,

    But I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

    and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

    and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,

    and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

    and by that time no one was left to speak up.

    

This version substitutes Communists for Socialists, moves Jews up before Trade Unionists, and adds Catholics as a persecuted group. Although various historical arguments can be made for the ordering of the groups, the selection of groups generally relates to the person or organization employing the quotation.