Culture · Essay
Fantasy coffins: a life summarised in one object, and then buried
A fisherman is buried in a fish, a pilot in an aeroplane, a chief in a lion. The Ga carpenters of Accra build a coffin that states what a person was, and then put it in the ground. On Kane Kwei, the Pompidou, and an argument about what funerals cost.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-08-21 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
A carpenter in Teshie is asked to build a coffin, and the first question is not about dimensions. It is: what did he do?
If the answer is fishing, the coffin will be a fish, or a canoe, painted in the colours of the boat he worked. A cocoa farmer gets a cocoa pod. A driver gets his own vehicle, badge and registration included. A seamstress gets a sewing machine. A market woman who sold onions gets an onion. A chief gets a lion or an eagle. A woman who never left Ghana and always wanted to fly gets an aeroplane, in the livery of the airline she watched from the ground.
The Ga call them abebuu adekai, proverb boxes. The object makes a statement about the person, the community reads the statement at the funeral, and then the object is lowered into the earth and never seen again.
The practice is recent enough to be traced to individuals, which is unusual and useful.
Coffins in Paa Joe's workshop. Each is built for one named person and buried within a fortnight of being finished. Photograph by Danieljatuat, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
It is generally credited to Seth Kane Kwei, a carpenter in Teshie who worked from the 1950s. The founding story runs that he built a palanquin in the shape of a cocoa pod for a local chief, who died before he could be carried in it, and it was used as his coffin instead. Kane Kwei's own grandmother, so the account goes, had always wanted to travel by air and had never done so, and he built her an aeroplane.
Whether every detail holds, the lineage is documented. The Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop continued under his family and apprentices, and the best-known makers working today, among them Paa Joe, Daniel Mensah and Kane Kwei's grandson Eric Adjetey Anang, come out of that line. Teshie and Nungua are where you go.
Behind the workshops sits older Ga practice: figurative palanquins carried by chiefs, and a funerary culture in which the send-off is a public statement of the standing of the dead and of the family burying them.
Fantasy coffins left Ghana as art in 1989, when several were shown at Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, an exhibition that set out to place non-Western makers alongside Western contemporary artists. From there they entered museum collections around the world, and the makers acquired names, galleries and commissions.
That created a second market that runs alongside the first. Some coffins are built for families in Accra and buried within a fortnight. Others are built for collectors and will never hold anybody. The makers are candid about the distinction, price accordingly, and generally regard the export trade as what funds the workshop.
It also created the usual argument. Objects made for a specific dead person, to be destroyed at their funeral, sit in glass cases labelled with the carpenter's name and not the name of anybody they were made for. The critique is not that the coffins should not be shown; it is that the exhibition inverts the thing, turning a statement about a life into an example of a genre.
Fantasy coffins sit inside a wider practice that Ghanaians debate among themselves at some length.
Funerals in southern Ghana are large, public, expensive and long-planned. Bodies are commonly held in a mortuary for weeks or months while the family raises money and assembles relatives from abroad. There are printed posters, matching cloth, hired canopies, a brass band or DJ, catering for hundreds, and donations recorded publicly as guests arrive.
A commissioned coffin is one line in that budget and often not the largest. The custom has been criticised inside Ghana for decades, by clergy, by newspaper columnists and by families who have gone into debt for it, and defended just as vigorously as the one moment at which a family says publicly what a person was worth to them.
Both positions are held sincerely, and the practice continues.
The detail worth pausing on is the burial.
A carpenter spends weeks building a portrait of somebody, in wood, at full size. The community sees it on the day. Then it goes into the ground and rots.
Nothing about the form requires that. The coffins are strong enough to keep and beautiful enough that museums want them. But keeping one would defeat the point: the object is not a monument, it is a sentence spoken at a funeral, and a sentence is not meant to be left standing in the room afterwards.
What survives is the memory of having seen it, which lasts about as long as the people who were there.
The tradition is very good at one thing that most remembrance is bad at: compression. It forces a family to answer, in a single image, what this person actually was. Not their virtues in general, not that they were much loved, but the specific fact of a life: he was on the water at four every morning, she sold onions in that market for forty years, he drove that route.
That is exactly the material that disappears first. Photographs survive, dates survive, but the plain summary of what somebody did all day is rarely written down by anyone, because everybody present already knows it.
Ghana's carpenters solve it for one afternoon and then bury the answer. Confinity exists to keep the answer: what the person did, what they wanted, and the detail that would have decided the shape of the box.
The workshop that started it