Madam Akua Dwubi Kete: ‘The angel of death’
Generally, a physician or medical assistant certifies a person as dead.
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They then make a formal declaration of the death and a record of the time of death, all ahead of preparations for the morgue or an autopsy report.
However, in communities where there are no health facilities, and such profesionals like Adansi Adiembra in the Adansi North District of the Ashanti Region and its surrounding villages, there is an unprofessional approach which has been accepted by some residents.
The community relies on oral pronouncements by elderly people who serve as repositories of culture and knowledge.
These individuals are 80 years and above and are revered in the community and believed to be advanced in wisdom due to their long life experiences.
Again, when a family wishes to cut short the pain of dying slowly of a sick or old relative, they consult and tap into the knowledge of these persons.
Some members of the community humorously refer to such women as “abrewa tia” to wit “short old lady with a stick”.
Battling for life
Some of the elders of Adansi Adiembra explained to The Mirror recently that usually, in what is perceived as the final moment of an individual battling for life in the home due to old age related sickness, the head of the home would send for one of these individuals to lead them in some rituals /traditional practices that could help the individual to journey on peacefully into eternity in less than 24 hours or at most, three days.
Some members of the community, who spoke to The Mirror in an interview, said “the declaration and practices of those people have always been superb, they have never been wrong”.
For some, the moment they spot any of these elderly individuals heading to the home of a sick person, ‘‘we already know that the person maybe dying”.
One of the residents, Dentaa, recalled that in 2019 when a doctor at the AGA hospital in Obuasi declared that there was no hope for her 80- year-old mother who was suffering from a strange disease, she called for such help.
She said it got to a time when their mother was in pain and seemed to be calling for death, “so we reached out to one of the elderly women who told us to bath our mother with cold water , apply shea butter on her whole body, place her on a mat in the open and allow her to be and she will die peacefully.
We did it and in less than an hour, our mother was gone”.
Madam Akua Dwubi Kete, 88 years, is one of such persons in Adansi Adiembra who has been offering this service voluntarily for ages.
Sharing her experience , she said she only responded to requests from families.
“When you are home and a person dies, you quickly call an elderly person to come and certify the death”, she said.
She gave a long laughter when asked who would certify her own death and said “there are others who will do that”.
Explaining that the tradition was passed on to her by her greatgrandmother, she said she had lost count of the number of people she had confirmed dead in the community.
Though she does petty trading in charcoal, she is always ready to use her knowledge to serve the community.
Responding to how she was able to tell whether a person was dead, she said “I look for signs of pulse and breathing.
When you raise the person’s hand, you will realise he is not breathing.
With those who have their eyes open, you touch them and they will close.
If a person is dead, you will not see any movement of their eye balls.
The body becomes cold, it is a weird coldness.
Also you will know from their bowel area”.
Catering for the dead
Madam Adwubi explained that there were certain things to do as soon as a person died.
“I tell them to move the body from the bed to the floor, I tell the family to stand on the left hand side of the body and say whatever they wish to tell the person.
The traditional belief is that when the death is fresh, the spirit is in the room and whatever you say to it, it will hear”.
Bath
She believes that it is important to bath the dead with sponge or clean the body with a towel, scented soap and perfumed powder, especially focusing on the armpit and between the thighs.
There is also the need to put on panties on the body before conveying it to the morgue.
Again, the traditional belief, she explained, was that this would prevent the dead from entering the spirit world with body odour.
Body odour The 88-year-old claimed that the numerous persons with body odour in our society was not a medical problem of bacteria infection in one’s sweat or any other factor but as a result of the reincarnation of people whose bodies were not well cleaned when they died in another world.
“Now God no longer creates human beings.
Those who are dead are the ones who we give birth to.
And so if he died unclean, he comes back with body odour and that is why people believe that body odour is sometimes by birth.
When a person dies, the bedsheet should be thrown away.
If you bury him with it, it gives him body odour and he comes back like that.
Do not place him on a bed with clothes on.
Take the clothes off.
All these are ways to avoid body odour”, she claimed.
Past
She also explained that in the past where there were no mortuaries and they did not know how to seal the mouth, they used ‘duku’, a head scarf, to tie beneath the chin to the back of the ears to get the lips closed, “we had no glue”.
“If the fingers had curled, we placed stones on the fingers to straighten them.
We do same for the legs. If the body is unfit for the coffin, do not break the legs, otherwise the person would be reincarnated as your child.
It has happened in this village”, she said.
Madam Akua Dwubi said she was passing on the knowledge she had acquired by teaching her first born whose name she gave as Serwaa
