Consider, for a moment, a funeral in Ghana.

Suppose you’re an elderly Ghanaian—let’s say you’re Kofi, age 74, an Akan. One day, you do as all humans must and die. Perhaps you die at your modest bungalow in a northern suburb of Accra, Ghana’s capital. What happens next?

A few things. First, your immediate family will discover that you’re dead; and, in order to deal with the logistics of your death, they call the head of your extended family: the abusuapanyin. This is not your closest surviving relative. The Akan are matrilineal, and the maternal line “owns” the body, so the abusuapanyin is the most senior male on your mother’s side. And he’s the one who will take charge of the arrangements from this point forward. In consultation with him, your body is taken to the nearest hospital mortuary, where it’s embalmed and placed in a refrigerated unit.

Your body is going to remain in that refrigerated unit for a long time. Typically it will be weeks or months; sometimes bodies can stay refrigerated for an entire year. Why so long? Because the longer that the body stays in the mortuary, the more time the family has to raise funds for a funeral truly befitting your status. And, since the hospital charges escalating fees for each additional week that your body is stored there, keeping your body refrigerated for a long time is itself a mark of prestige.

Eventually, your family decides that they’ve raised the funds they’re going to raise. So they pick a Saturday—the funerals of Christian Ghanaians are always held on Saturdays—and plan a lavish event that will, in fact, stretch across three days. They hire a graphic designer to produce large colorful banners bearing your name, your photograph, your dates of birth and death, and the time and place of your funeral: these are hung on walls and fences at intersections around the city. They rent a venue, hire a large staff—caterers, a DJ or live band, a photographer, maybe also a videographer—and choose a funeral cloth for the family to wear. And if your family can afford it, or wants the community to believe that they can, they commission a craftsman to carve you a “fantasy coffin” shaped like something you enjoyed or admired in life: perhaps a cocoa pod, a school building, a crab, a paintbrush, or a giant blue teapot.

And, finally, after all this, the big day comes. Your body is retrieved from the mortuary; hundreds of people show up, many of whom never knew you in life; and a great deal of money is spent feeding them, entertaining them, and sending you off in the style that an Akan elder deserves.

This all sounds, you’ll notice, very expensive. And it is.

A modest, mid-level funeral in Ghana costs about $5,000 U.S. dollars; a “befitting” one can easily cost $15,000 or $20,000. And all this in a country with a median income of about $1,500 per year. Ghana is known for its particularly ornate funeral culture; but it’s not the only place in sub-Saharan Africa with a culture of exorbitantly expensive funerals. The average household in KwaZulu-Natal in eastern South Africa, for example, spends the equivalent of an adult’s annual income on a single funeral. We see the same tendency for ultra-expensive funerals in a striking number of places: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Benin, Uganda, Cameroon, Mozambique, the Ivory Coast. It’s often observed, in fact, that families will spend more money on burying the dead than on keeping the sick alive: indeed, in the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more money on funerals than on medical care.

So how do people pay for these remarkably expensive events?

Sometimes they’ll have insurance of some kind: funeral insurance, where the payout is earmarked for the funeral costs, is one of the most popular financial products in sub-Saharan Africa—often, in fact, more popular than health insurance. And much of the time, family members will pay for funerals with loans from others. About a quarter of households in KwaZulu-Natal, for example, pay for funerals by going into debt.

And, if it comes to it, families will just cut back on living expenses to cover the funeral costs. In Zimbabwe, households that cannot afford to bury their dead will sell their belongings or even cut back on food. (Zimbabwe has the second-highest rate of death from malnutrition in the world.) This is actually a remarkably common thing. Out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over a period of 25 years, 63 percent cited “heavy expenses related to funerals” as a major cause. And this doesn’t seem to be a new thing. As early as 1853, a visitor to coastal West Africa noted that “even the poorest will pawn and enslave themselves to obtain the means of burying a relation decently, according to the ideas of country.”

This all seems very strange.

Those of us who live in the rich world tend to expect that spending follows a sort of Maslovian progression. Poor people spend money on the necessities; as people get richer, they spend on things further and further removed from the logic of survival, until eventually they are willing to allocate resources to things like dog longevity. But with African funeral spending, this pattern is inverted. Why do some of the poorest people in the world bankrupt themselves to pay for extremely lavish funerals?

The standard answer to this is that exorbitant funeral spending is “part of the local culture,” and particularly reflective of a “reverence toward elders.” And indeed that is true. But that only begs the question of why it’s part of the culture—in fact, why it’s part of so many different cultures across Africa. Why is heavy funeral spending such a pronounced part of life? And if this is merely a reflection of “reverence toward elders,” why do so many elderly Africans complain that far more attention is given to their funeral than to their care while alive? (So common is this sentiment that the Akan have a saying: abusua do funu, “the family loves the corpse.”)

The answer, I think, is that the funeral isn’t really about the deceased. Funerals function as a costly signal of kinship group loyalty: and in that context, the expense of the funeral is the point. And, in turn, funerals tell us quite a lot about why so many societies across Africa have had so much trouble achieving economic “takeoff.” Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor.

The kinship tax

African societies, as a broad pattern, have extraordinarily intense kinship ties. Only a few other places—the Pashtun heartlands of southern Afghanistan, the mountains of Chechnya and Dagestan, the jungles of New Guinea—exhibit kinship intensity on par with what prevails in much of sub-Saharan Africa. This is not a universal pattern across all of Africa—the San people of the Kalahari desert, for example, have relatively flexible social arrangements—but the general tendency is clear: African societies, by and large, are kinship societies.

So what are kinship societies?

You can think of modern societies as large collections of individuals, their lives structured by impersonal institutions like states and corporations. Kinship societies are much older: they are, in fact, the oldest and most durable type of human society. In a kinship society, life is centered on the extended family: the “clan,” the lineage, the tribe—a group that often includes many people who aren’t actually related. These kinship networks don’t act anything like nuclear families in modern societies. They are highly functional organisms: most of the functions provided by states in the modern world—protection from harm, credit, dispute resolution, eldercare, social insurance—are instead provided by the kinship network. If you fall sick, the kinship group will care for you; if you need cash, the kinship group will lend you money; if a stranger wrongs you, the kinship group will avenge you.

Of course, a kinship network isn’t a charity. It’s more like a mutual aid society that you’re born into and can’t leave: what the kinship group gives the kinship group must also take. A huge amount of life in kinship societies is structured by the obligations that people owe to their kin.

The most extreme example of this is the obligation to fight and kill for your kin group if it comes to it: thus the blood feuds and vendettas that characterize intensely kin-oriented societies, from Appalachia to the Somali steppe.

But you also owe things to your kinship network on a more day-to-day level: we can call these sharing obligations. Just as you pay taxes and fees to the various impersonal institutions that govern life in the rich world, you must make regular contributions to the collective welfare of your kin. But there’s a crucial distinction. In a modern society, you will know, more or less, what you owe and when you’ll owe it; but with sharing obligations there’s no such clarity. The demands from your kin—hospital bills, loan requests, funeral expenses—simply come up.

And you can’t really say no to these obligations. The mutual obligation that defines intensive kinship really is essential to the functioning of everyday life in kinship societies. A person who fails to demonstrate loyalty to the group risks losing access to everything the group provides. And this threat is powerfully enforced in traditional cultures. In a society where your standing in the kinship network is often the single most important thing about you, being cast out is a kind of social death.

And so, in a kinship society, nothing that you earn is truly yours. If you make money beyond the point of subsistence, you’ll be expected to share it with your less-fortunate relatives; if you start a business, you’ll be expected to hire your cousins or nephews or in-laws, even if they’re not the best possible employees; if you buy a car, you’ll be expected to lend it out to relatives who need it.

The result is a constant process of redistribution from the most productive members of a kinship group to the least productive. This informal redistribution is a constant feature of life in African societies: 93 percent of Kenyan entrepreneurs agree that success in business leads to financial demands from family and friends. South Africans even have a name for the sharing obligations that define African kinship groups: “the black tax.”

This is, of course, a bad deal for the ambitious and productive within the society. But because refusal is impossible, sharing obligations lead to all sorts of attempts at obfuscation. One experiment found that rural Kenyan women were willing to pay significant sums in order to hide their income from relatives; likewise, in Cameroon, it’s common for people to pretend to be poorer than they are, and thus avoid sharing obligations, by taking out unnecessary bank loans fully collateralized by their savings. Sometimes people get around sharing obligations by working far from home. As one businesswoman in Nairobi attested:

I sell second-hand clothes without anyone knowing, far from home. I hide from my friends because I believe not all friends will be happy with my success, and from family to create a picture that I have no money, for them to work hard for their own money. My previous business, a street-side restaurant, failed due to my in-laws using me for money, yet I wanted to expand it.

The relentlessness of sharing obligations also makes it nearly impossible to accrue savings over time. Thus we see that in KwaZulu-Natal individuals will go out of their way to invest their surplus in non-sharable goods, like roofing or fencing, instead of accumulating liquid savings that their families might claim.

Kinship societies are wealth-destroying societies

Of course, this type of obfuscation is a significant problem for the kinship network. If the productive members of the group can defect—removing their resources from the common pool—then the whole system of mutual obligation begins to unravel. If a productive individual can simply withdraw from sharing obligations, then the network must demand more from those who remain, increasing the incentive to defect: so the entire delicate machinery of mutual obligation collapses in a slow cascade. This is the death spiral for kinship networks.

So from the perspective of the kinship network, wealth is a threat. Those who become wealthy have an incentive to defect; and while social sanctions can punish those who defect explicitly, it’s much harder to police those—like the businesswoman in Nairobi—who defect quietly. The safest bet is to prevent people from becoming too rich in the first place.

So, over time, societies based around intensive kinship have developed strategies to make defection difficult. The most important of these is the ritualistic destruction of individual wealth. This is why kinship societies seem to have so many rituals—public feasting, elaborate gift-giving, potlatch—that seem so strange and wasteful to the outside observer. The expense that you incur is a sort of guarantee that you won’t be able to transcend the bonds of kinship.

You can think of funerals as another wealth destruction ritual. The genius of it is that it can’t be evaded: it is a public ceremony virtually dedicated to the immolation of wealth. In private, you might be able to evade your sharing obligations by hiding your earnings or your savings; but in public, at the funeral, the claims that your kin make on your wealth are at their most visible and least avoidable. You can’t simply not show up to your uncle’s funeral; and, if you show up, you will obviously be expected to contribute a handsome sum.

And this logic is even more powerful for those who are suspected of shirking their kinship obligations. It’s at the funeral where you must signal your willingness to honor sharing obligations most loudly. The lavishness of the funeral is a costly signal of continued commitment to the system of mutual obligation that holds the kinship group together. The point is that it’s expensive and incommensurate with your means.

This is why Ghanaian funerals, for example, have tended to grow only more lavish with time. In the past, most members of a kinship group lived within a relatively small radius, and the decomposition of the body placed a natural limit on the resources that could be marshaled in time for the ceremony; so the body was buried within a few days, and those who couldn’t make it would be accommodated with a “second burial” later on. (The second burial is still practiced in places like Igboland in eastern Nigeria and in large parts of rural Cameroon.)

But in the second half of the twentieth century, this dynamic changed. There was a huge increase in migration, either to major cities or to other countries, and airplanes made it possible for people to work abroad and return home on a regular basis; and refrigeration allowed bodies to be preserved for much longer. And so the old limitations on funeral expenses were blown open. Migrants were generally suspected of shirking their kinship obligations, and so were eager to demonstrate their continued loyalty to the kinship group: and the funeral, where this loyalty could be made tangible and public, was the perfect place to do it.

And so in the second half of the twentieth century a huge funeral economy emerged in Ghana. Bodies could be refrigerated indefinitely in hospital mortuaries, and since the fees escalated with each passing week it became prestigious to refrigerate bodies for a long time; by the 2000s, many Ghanaian hospitals were earning more from storing dead bodies than from treating living patients.

Modernity is about not doing what your family says

There is, I think, something quite pathological about the funeral ritual. The obligations of intensive kinship make it extraordinarily difficult for people to build savings, reinvest in their businesses, or make the financial decisions that would most benefit themselves and their children. Every surplus is claimed before it can compound.

Kinship networks certainly do provide a number of important welfare functions: people want to see their relatives fed and housed and cared for, and a kinship network is, among other things, a mechanism for accomplishing that. But it’s hard not to notice something darker. The kinship network has a strong interest in preventing any of its members from becoming prosperous enough to no longer need it: someone who no longer needs your help is also someone who might not help you.

The obvious incentive, then, is to hobble the most productive: the demands that the kinship group makes on its most productive members are not simply demands for solidarity but demands for a kind of enforced mediocrity. People comply with these demands not only out of genuine loyalty but also out of fear of what happens if they refuse.

This dynamic, you’ll notice, isn’t really compatible with durable economic growth. Economic development is extraordinarily difficult in intensive kinship culture. In large part, this is because kinship loyalties crowd out loyalties to impersonal institutions: this lack of impersonal social trust is why African societies have so few large firms, for example. But it’s also because the glue that holds together kinship society is the occasional immolation of built-up wealth.

There’s a reason why virtually every economically successful society has graduated from a social order that stresses the claims of kin into one that stresses the rights of individuals. Living in a society of individuals governed by impersonal institutions, we have an understandable wistfulness for the imagined world of warm communities and thick familial bonds. But we forget how suffocating that social world is, how parasitical it is on its most productive members, and how poisonous it is for any prospect of economic development.

I don’t think that African societies are ripe for social transformations of the kind just described; loyalties to strong states won’t supplant loyalties to kinship networks anytime soon. But for the most productive people trapped inside these kinship networks, I do think that technology offers something like an escape hatch. Mobile phones and bank accounts held under a single name are tools that help these people put a wall between what they earn and what their family knows they earn. In many cases these technologies are remarkably liberating. Senegalese women who were able to receive hidden income immediately cut transfers to relatives by a quarter and spent the money on healthcare for themselves.

There’s a lot to be said, then, for one of the most underappreciated virtues of modern financial systems: privacy. Social modernity, in the end, is really about not having to do what your family tells you to do—marrying whom you want, taking the job you want, and spending your earnings the way you want. There is something cold about this, of course, but also something deeply emancipating. In a world where your relatives can see and lay claim to everything you earn, anything that makes your income a little less legible to them is also, quietly, an engine of economic development.

And so the lavish funeral, in the end, is not a strange cultural quirk of African life, but the most visible manifestation of a social order oriented toward the destruction of accumulated surplus. And until the grip of that social order loosens, much of the wealth that Africa produces will continue to go, quite literally, into the ground.