Amma Darko

Bought this at an art center in Accra, Ghana. It's a wonderful source if you want to learn about the status of Ghanaian women. In Ghana, for example, funerals are very important, and they often drain a family's resources. Some families need to keep dead relatives for years before they can get together enough money to provide the proper funeral, even though it may cost 20,000 Cedi or more. That's $10,000 in a country where one estimate of annual household expenditures is $1,800. In the novel, a polygynous man, with five wives, dies. There is a delay in his funeral, and so there is betting on when the funeral will take place. The idea is that people are betting on whether or not he was really rich: if he was, his family would have the funeral immediately.

You can also learn a lot about Christian practices, including (in the opening chapter) a place that basically keeps women captive, asking money from their families to exorcise witches; about attitudes to HIV; about polygynous customs; and about modern and traditional family values.

This is not, on the other hand, a good novel. The author, Amma Darko, writes in formulas. Each chapter starts with a mysterious description of someone or something, which is later revealed. Chapters often run like television scripts. The sense of psychological analysis isn't acute, and she is drawn to stereotypical plots and the configurations of romantic comedy.… (mehr)