Yaw Anokye Frimpong is a lawyer and historian
Did you know that in many cultures in Ghana, the mortal remains of the dead were kept in their homes for about two days before being taken to the morgue or for burial?
According to historian Yaw Anokye Frimpong, this was practised in the Akan culture and other cultures in Ghana.
Speaking in an interview on JoyNews, shared on X on August 31, 2025, Anokye Frimpong pointed out that the practice was to ensure that people were actually dead.
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“In the olden days, immediately they would bathe the person and then place him at a particular portion of the house, or maybe the kitchen, and then hold on for about two days.
“I believe that it was a very good thing. Our people learned to find out whether it was just a comatose state or real death. Then, after two days, they were very much firm in their minds that the person was dead,” he said.
Asked whether “people who were thought to be dead came back to life after going through that process,”
Anokye Frimpong, who is also a private legal practitioner, retorted, “Many times, not only among the Akans but everywhere in the world, because we didn’t have the machines or the facilities to detect whether a person had died or not.”
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He added, “Because they kept having the experience of people waking up somehow, sometime, and then they thought that somebody was, sorry, a ghost had come back. I believe over the years, they felt that they had to keep the corpse or the body there for some time. And usually, it’s not like the Muslim practice, where you are buried within a day or hours. They would have to keep the body for at least two days.”
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