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Nike Shox X Tema Free The Youth home coming campaign.

Directed by @sarfbort

Photography by Ofoe Amegavie, 2019

FANTASY COFFINS

In Ghana, billboards and posters advertise the dead and their upcoming send-off parties with headlines like “What a shock”, “Gone too soon”, “Painful Exit”, and “Celebration of Life”. The first time a Kenyan friend saw a. Ghanaian funeral, she was totally confused. I was giving her a tour of Accra, when I decided to drive through Bukom, to give her a sense of Old Accra. We chanced on people in red and black wriggling their waists passionately and gyrating to loud booming music emanating from huge black, vibrating boxes. Green beer bottles at different levels of emptiness littered the abandoned tables. No one looked sad. Everybody looked happy. “Are they happy someone died? In Kenya, funerals are solemn” she said quietly. 

The fanfare around death looks crazy to others but has its roots in the traditional belief that humans become more powerful after death. Ghanaians believe when one dies, they shed the restraints of the body and become deities, with powers to harm or do good. So when a relative dies, there’s great effort to send them off with a befitting funeral. It is when the dead are pleased that they listen to the prayers of the living and help them. 

It is in the defining of “befitting” that things go haywire. Many families in southern Ghana get indebted when a loved one dies. Families keep their dead in mortuaries for months, even years, raising money for a “befitting” funeral, raising the money at the expense of quality education or healthcare for family members, hoping donations at the funeral will help balance the books.

In Accra, the coffin is the highlight of many funerals. The Gas love to bury their dead in fantasy coffins (aka proverbial coffins). These are designed to reflect the personality, career, or accomplishments of the deceased or to represent their unfulfilled dreams. Someone requested for an airplane coffin for his late mom because it was her life dream to travel by air.