Dead Man Appears at His Own ‘Wake’ Keeping in Ghana…

I often tell myself that Ghana is one of the best countries to live in, because everyday you hear issues that boggle the mind, and makes you wonder how ‘correct’ people are in this country.

Take the recent case of the disappearance of Castro and Janet Bandu, listen to the several theories and speculations from the general public and the ‘spiritualists’, and you realise the veracity of the claim I just made.

Now imagine a family gathering to mourn a supposed dead relative, then that relative turns up to the gathering. As any normal human would do, most of the people at the gathering took to their heels despite the fact that Mr Asante, the individual in question, was very much in human form.

So how did the mix-up occur and a family was mourning a living relative? Reports say there was an accident at Bubuashie, upon which scene the police found a mobile phone with the victim. They thus culled through the contacts on the phone and reached one of them, who was asked to come to the Motor Traffic and Transport Department (MTTD) of the police service.

The family member was then informed that the owner of the phone had been involved in an accident and the body deposited at the Police Hospital morgue. The family was asked to come and identify the body the next day, but word spread fast and family members gathered to mourn Mr Asante.

Apparently, Mr Asante’s phone had been snatched, and it was the thief who was involved in the accident. Mr Asante confirmed this after his re-emergence, when he went with the police to the morgue and identified the dead body.

This chain of events reminds me a lot of Shakespeare’s work ‘A comedy of errors’, where a chain of seemingly unrelated events lead to horribly comical situations down the line. The chain of events needed for an incident like this are incredibly unlikely, yet here we are and the results is one of the more jaw dropping stories we’ve heard for a while.

It is understandable why the police would draw the conclusion that the owner of the phone was involved in the accident, more so that the family would immediately panic on hearing about it and draw the conclusion that the man in question is dead. Still, Mr Asante had not been positively identified when people started gathering to mourn him, and that speaks to one of our weaknesses as a people; a fondness for rumour and innuendo.

I think we can all be glad that Mr Asante is still alive, but one thing I can say though is that I would have given everything to have been there when the ‘dead’ man reappeared.

What are your thoughts on this ‘incredible’ story?