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LAST RITES Money, alcohol and machete help send slain Ghanaian on to the next life as whole town turns out for farewell ABOUT THE SERIES THE SERIES

September 1, 2007 12:35 am

BY FRANK DELANO

PRINCE'S TOWN, Ghana--Seth Quayson, 28, died in July at Axim, eight miles away from his home at Prince's Town.

His broken body was found on the rocks below the walls of Fort St. Anthony. The Portuguese built the fort in 1515. Quay-son had been staying there with his father, the fort's caretaker.

Quayson's family believed he was murdered, pushed or thrown to his death over the fort's high parapet in the middle of the night.

While police in Axim investigated his death, Quayson was buried in Prince's Town on July 14.

His was a traditional funeral without benefit of clergy. A relative said Quayson had once belonged to the Seventh-day Adventist Church, but had been excommunicated for drinking.

Nobody in Prince's Town went to work the day of Quayson's last rites. Hundreds of people wearing mourning colors of black and red turned out for the funeral. Some of them had daubed their faces with white clay.

Quayson's body lay in the biggest hall in town. The place was packed. The men sat apart from the women. The crowd filled the streets outside.

Family members recorded cash donations in a notebook. On display was a large, color, close-up photograph of Quayson's head on the rocks.

The Reno Spot bar next door to the funeral hall did a brisk business. A wall of loudspeakers in the street blasted highlife tunes, Ghana's popular music. The mourners danced.

Quayson's pallbearers were all women. Surrounded by the crowd, the women first took his coffin from the funeral hall to his mother's house nearby for a final farewell.

The throng then marched through town to the cemetery by the sea.

Young men, some of them bare-chested and white-faced, tried to stop the procession of their friend's body to his grave. The women pallbearers beat them away with sticks. The ritual repeated itself as the women rushed on to the cemetery.

The women cheered when the coffin was lowered into the grave beneath the coconut trees. The women and most of the mourners returned to town immediately.

A dozen or so men stayed at the open grave to perform the final obsequies.

The people believe that the souls of the dead must cross a river. A man poured a libation of gin into the grave, asking the spirits of dead ancestors to welcome Quayson among them.

The men opened the coffin. The corpse was clothed in a coat and tie. One man used a handkerchief to brush flies from the dead man's face.

The men tucked money in his lapels to pay for his ferry across the river. Another man placed a machete in the coffin for Quayson's spirit to use in revenge.

"Seth, Seth, do not sleep here," one man lamented. "Oh, Sethie, my brother, I will never see you again."

The men screwed down the top of the coffin. They threw handfuls of sand into the grave and then picked up their spades.

The sea thundered on the beach.