Ghanaian Fantasy Coffins Ferry People to the Afterlife in Style

The making of fantasy coffins dates back to the late 1950s, when a Ga chief commissioned carpenter Seth Kane Kwei to build a cocoa-pod palanquin; the chief died before he could use it and was buried inside instead. Not long after, Kane Kwei made an airplane-shaped coffin for his grandmother, who had wished to travel beyond Ghana, so she could journey the world in the afterlife. Over the following decades, other coffin makers took up the practice, creating coffins that reflected the lives of the people they were made for.

Among those represented in the exhibition is internationally renowned sculptor Paa Joe, who spent years apprenticing under Kane Kwei before opening his own shop, where his son Jacob Tetteh-Ashong now works alongside him. Daniel Mensah, better known as Hello, later trained under Paa Joe and founded Hello Design Coffin Works. The original workshop remained in Kane Kwei’s family, passing to his son Cedi Anang Kwei and then to his grandson Eric Adjetey Anang, who runs it today and collaborated with Sloan on the exhibition.

For the Ga, Sloan explains, death marks a passage into the ancestral realm, where the dead remain powerful presences in the lives of the living. A coffin can become, as he puts it, “a kind of poetic biography of someone carved in wood.”