The mock funeral of Anansewa in The Marriage of Anansewa substantiates Efua Sutherland’s criticism of two conflicting customary practices. Anansewa’s staged death is instrumental in foregrounding the pertinent custom with regard to feminine dignity. Specifically in the text, the marriage choice for Anansewa by her father Ananse establishes the supremacy of tradition over modernity. It therefore takes the detour of a mock funeral to ridicule the flippancy of the contemporary marriageable belle.
Foremost about Anansewa’s death is her father’s solution to the problem of his matchmaking for his daughter. We see in the text how he uses his daughter’s marriageability to raise funds for immediate financial despair. That is, the preconcerted ‘bride price’ doubles as his revenue to renovate his dilapidated house and pay his daughter’s school fee at E.P’s Secretarial School. But this very problem having been solved creates another problem when it is time for the prospective husbands to claim their “object of interest.” Ananse, of course, spins a web around himself with so much exertion as cannot be understood by the poking sensibility of his daughter’s youth. By magnifying the problem with a general description of life’s mystery, the text at once delves deep into fatality of human error on a traditional standpoint. It is thus in a bid to escape the ridiculous that he must engage his daughter by exploiting her childishness and persuading her into the trick he devises. In other words, Anansewa’s mock death serves an indisputable end of her father’s poverty.
Further, Anansewa’s death helps to achieve falling action in the text. The climax is attained when Ananse, the cunning character, has no option but to announce the death of his daughter to the suitors from whom he has received pecuniary gifts earlier. At this point, the play’s suspense is set in motion for the outcome of such ruse. The mock funeral provides an interlude between the gambling of choice at the exposition stage and the proof of human nature at the resolution stage. This substantiates how it turns out that only Chief-Who-Is-Chief oils “the wheel of custom” by bringing the head drink even at the death of his prospective bride. When this trick is closely scrutinised, it suggests that there would not have been a better way to ascertain the chiefs’s genuine feelings without testing their intelligence too. It is thus admissible to suggest that Anansewa’s mock funeral exposes her father’s ingenuity in letting human nature (which is the regard for tradition) take its course and not just the luxury of financial readiness. Her death justifies her father’s genius that not all the chiefs who show interest are eligible. The mock funeral thus becomes a metaphor for the death of the tricks involved in Anansewa’s marriage prospect.
The mock funeral is also symbolic in projecting the overruling culture. The text implicitly resonates the fatal error of the educated young African belle in respect of marriage. Marriage is seen by the folks in question as an impediment to the exploration of the potential that accrues to being beautiful and educated. Such is the counterpoint of Anansewa to her father’s presentation of marriage as the next great stride after her secretarial studies. She imagines that life with a younger husband (as she herself) is more desirable than the distasteful betrothal to some ageing chief. She would not hazard any profit from the enterprise of such antiquated matchmaking! But her father is able to expose the gullibility of her professed enlightenment. He denounces her fanciful idea as subjected to human nature and not the promise of civilisation. The fancies of youth and modern education are not a ticket for genuine love but the inherent nature to regard the capital of a self-contained, human compatibility. This way, Sutherland uses Anansewa’s death to satirise the vanity of the contemporary, young African lady on sacred matrimony rites. That is, her vanity is capable of bringing her to a dead end where it is impossible to be salvaged.
Moreover, identity issue is deducible in Anansewa’s mock funeral. Akin to the identity mismatch and death metaphor in Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, Anansewa’s scripted death marks a point in the plot where the affected character comes to accept the credibility of a long-preserved tradition. As a symbolic exercise in the solution of Ananse’s problem, Anansewa’s death is the jettisoning of the misconstrued notion of marriage by the young, careerist African belle. The fanciful ideas of a perfect match and the perception of marriage as subjugation of feminity are altogether detestable. Anansewa’s ‘resurrection’ is therefore a recognition of folk ways as a diplomatic move in satisfying the demands of a highly placed value/virtue. And, of course, her resurrection symbolises the athanasy of tradition even in the face of a disparaging modernist analysis.
On the whole, the irony about Anansewa’s death exposes some truth about traditional marriage customs. It is none other than a tremendous scrutiny of the stakes involved from all ends – parent(s), suitor(s) and bride apparent. This is an exercise that eludes the sensibility of the modernist process where the considerations, however promising, only prove to be spurious. Time and again, a marriage like Anansewa’s establishes the infallible diplomacy of cultural wisdom to right the wrongs in the flippancy of civilisation.
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