DEAD ON YOUR FEET

Ghana’s celebratory attitude to death has birthed a creative approach to coffin-making. Tamara Davison takes a look

- Tamara Davison

It's hard to miss the coffin shaped like an old Nokia brick phone at the entrance of the sunlit workshop on the outskirts of Accra.

Here, on a busy road next to Ghana's Atlantic coastline, Eric Kpakpo Adotey and his small team of craftsmen spend each day working in the thick humidity to bring people's creative final wishes to life.

"Most of the time, people don't cry when they see these ones," Eric explained as he zigzagged between a coffin shaped like a Nike trainer and another in the form of an intricately detailed, pink fish. "They forget there's a body in this coffin," he added, the sounds of carpentry tools hammering away around him.

"They all talk about the design, the art, the shape of it... it change[s] the atmosphere." Visiting a coffin maker is hardly at the top of many travellers' bucket lists, but it should be if you visit Ghana. In this vibrant west African nation, death isn't mourned in the sober ways you may expect. For many, it's also a time of celebration, carried out in prolonged, colourful ceremonies full of music and dancing that can span multiple days. One of the more unique traditions adopted into Ghanaian funerary culture is the use of fantasy coffins that carry the dead into the afterlife, just like the ones Eric has crafted for the last 25 years.

Locally referred to as abebu adekai (proverbial coffins), these figurative designs have been primarily used by the Ga people, one of Ghana's ethnic groups, since around the 1950s. They're typically crafted to resemble a person's trade and symbolise the work they'll continue in the afterlife, like a cocoa bean for a cocoa farmer or a fish for a fisherman.