My Perfect Funeral: The final destination

By TVPlus13 December 2022

My Perfect Funeral: The final destination

We’re just one episode into My Perfect Funeral – the reality series that takes us inside Ghana’s fascinating funeral culture – and we’ve already seen enough to raise the dead.

In a country where the timeline from death to burial can take a year of elaborate planning while bodies wait silently in the morgue, the path to the grave can be a rocky one. The series’s first episode shows how Nana Otafrija Pallbearing & Waiting Services – whose coffin dancing has gone viral, as did their COVID campaign during which they warned “Stay at home or we will dance at your funeral” – handles the death of one of their own pallbearers, Thomas “Tommy” Elorm Avison (28). With clashing traditions within a family, and debates around a father’s authority, finances, and business, death becomes a fascinating window into the world of the living.

PS: If you thought Mandisa’s funeral arrangements for Nqoba in The Wife (Season 3, episode 9) – including the twerking procession – were extra, dust off your funeral hat and grab a canape, because she would have loved this show!

10 coffin knockers

02:27-02:57: The dance of death

Did we just see pallbearers crawling down the street with the coffin on their back, dressed in full formal white tie? Yes, and it’s awesome! The episode goes on to reveal how coffin dancing has become a viral sensation, even inspiring a Mario Brothers computer game death screen.

11:51-13:24: Funny money

Tommy’s boss Benjamin Aidoo (also nicknamed Otafregya during the show) jokes that Tommy took four of his girlfriends, now Benjamin wants one of them back. Even when Ella rejects him (as gently as she can) on camera, Benjamin hints that he’ll shower her with money if she comes back. In her confessional Ella admits, “I don’t really like him…”

15:50-16:30: The “godmother”

…but it turns out that Benjamin and his crew got one million American dollars by selling dancing pallbearer memes at an NFT auction. When Ella finds out, she visits her “godmother” to ask how she can get the money… without the man. Her mentor suggests that she could make a “cool one hundred thousand” off Otafregya.

17:30-18:00: “The jogging”

As part of the death observances now, young friends and family of the deceased will “do a jogging” together on the first and second Sunday following the death, and maybe the last Sunday before the burial. They run together and sing, beat bells and dance, calling people to come join them. At the front of the jogging procession, people carry full body-sized posters of the deceased, along with their name, age and dates of birth and death.

22:55-24:06: Death at a funeral

Tommy was one of three brothers. His big brother Benjamin Obeng reveals that the brothers had planned to join in all the important funeral rituals for a friend together. When Benjamin was late picking him up, Tommy and their other brother left to go to the mortuary without him, but they were involved in an accident. Sadly Tommy went into a coma and died in hospital.

24:05-24:28: Faker?

Otafregya later reveals that Tommy was a joker and at first, he thought that Tommy was faking his death… because earlier that month musician Shatta Wale had been arrested for pranking people by faking his own death.

27:11-29:11: No hearse in rehearsal

Otafregya and his surviving coffin dancers rehearse for Tommy’s funeral in a normal suburban street, surrounded by people’s homes, kids and other bystanders. Otafregya warns one of his new dancers to tap in a partner if they get tired, and not just to drop out. Graffiti scratched into the paint on a wall advertises a job opportunity…

30:40-31:20 and 31:53-32:15: On the money

Funerals don’t come cheap. In the family gathering we see on the show, everyone in the family is told exactly how much everyone else has contributed. Sadly, Tommy’s father has to call Otafregya for financial help, and we find out that Otafregya is paying the mortuary bill – at Haatso, which is normally for dignitaries, presidents and people from overseas.

33:40-34:30: Funeral days

Funerals should ideally be held Sunday-Wednesday latest in the week, because Thursday, Friday and Saturday are market days, and no one will leave their businesses to attend a funeral. So you need to get the body on a Saturday and bury on a Sunday “so there are no excuses”. Unfortunately, it’s debate time in Tommy’s family when his mother’s side seems to want to shift the day willy-nilly.

38:39-40:35: Whose funeral is it?

There are a lot of moving parts involved in getting the body for the funeral and making everyone in the family happy. Within Tommy’s family, there’s a clash in tradition about when some things are to be done, and where, from bathing the body, to dressing it for lying in state. Tommy’s father (Tommy is his only son) reveals that he’s so angry about the arguing that he’s decided instead to take Tommy’s corpse to his hometown in the Volta region.

How will it all turn out? We’ll be lying here calmly on our satin pillows as we wait patiently for episode 2, landing on Thursday, 15 December 2022. New episodes land only on Showmax every Thursday!

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