When it comes to it, Paa Joe may be buried in a chisel.
He’s asked the question often, sometimes answers hammer but as he sits in a dusty showroom in Greater Accra dabbing great hunks of fufu in a bright red stew, he like many members of the Ga community imagines he would like to enter the afterlife in celebration and as reminder of his earthly work.
The legendary Ghanaian fantasy coffin maker has made more coffins than he can count.
He follows them to the graveyard sometimes as families bury their loved ones in one of his designs. A canoe for a fisherman. A house for a carpenter. A chisel, perhaps, for a man who has been fashioning proverb coffins (abebuu adekai) for over 50 years.
Sent to the Ga fishing community of Teshie to learn the trade from his uncle, the father of fantasy coffins Seth Kane Kwei, as a teenager, Paa Joe presides over Paa Joe Coffin Works where a handful of apprentices build a basketball, a tortoise and a plantain for a client in the United States.
Though I learnt about fantasy coffins in art class as child at Oranjemund in the mid 90s, the Ghanaian tradition is not an ancient one.
The story goes that in the 1950s, a young carpenter named Seth Kane Kwei built a coco pod palanquin for a local chief who died unexpectedly and was thus buried in the wooden pod. Noting the unique coffin’s many admirers, not long afterwards, Kane Kwei fashioned an aeroplane coffin for his mother who had watched the contraptions pass by overhead so she could fly into the afterlife.
Thus the fantasy coffin business was born with people requesting everything from chilli peppers and Coca-Cola bottles to Porsches.
The coffins take up to a month to produce and Paa Joe admits that he is sad to see them buried. “I feel bad but I get the money,” he says laughing heartily, bare-chested and choking somewhat on his stew.
With almost 10 workshops specialising in fantasy coffins, Paa Joe’s – which lies almost an hour from Osu – its sound drowned by the cacophony of a busy highway practically at its door, remains one of the greats.
An artist, a master craftsman and a mischievous spirit who has me walk him to his house behind the workshop so he can put on a shirt for a photograph, Paa Joe, whose work has been exhibited, celebrated and studied all over the world, says working with death has been a great life.
“Sometimes the person near his death comes to order his coffin with photographs and a story about the design, others order 10 and even 15 years before,” he says. “They are proud of their work. Work is your whole life, you go to the funeral and you know what they did before they died.”
As for my own, though he says I am too young and he still wants to visit me in Namibia, he shakes his head at my suggestion of a pen.
“For a writer, a computer, a laptop!
“It’s your work!
“Your life.”
And ultimately – as my Uber driver and I wind our potholed and hair-raising way back to Osu – it will also be the death of me.
