I turned to Zombos. “How does this sound?”
Fantasy coffins are one of Ghana’s most striking artistic traditions. In the Ga language of coastal Ghana, these are called abebuu adekai, roughly “proverb boxes” or “receptacles of proverbs.” They are functional coffins, actually used for burial, but each is sculpted and painted to represent something meaningful about the person who has died: their profession, status, passions, or clan symbol. A fisherman might be buried inside a giant carved fish or a wooden canoe; a successful businessman inside a gleaming Mercedes-Benz; a cocoa farmer in an enormous cocoa pod; a chief in an eagle or lion. There are coffins shaped like Coca-Cola bottles, airplanes, chili peppers, sneakers, mobile phones, hens with chicks, and cameras. Among the Ga people, death is understood as a transition rather than an ending. Ancestors continue to influence the living and a funeral is a major celebration of a life. The coffin honors who the person was and sends them into the next life in fitting style.
“I suppose it will do.” He stooped a little closer. “What are you using?” He put on his spectacles to read my laptop screen better. Yes, I know, but to him they are spectacles. If you dare say eyeglasses he goes all hissy fit and sulks. Old habits and all that, you know, with him. “Does that say Bob’s AI?”
“Uncle Bob’s AI, to be exact. With all the datacenter problems, mounting job losses, and creative desecrations cropping up, Rich Tech is trying to soft pedal and take the nostalgia route. That seems to always pacify people. So giving the likely-apocalyptic technology a human face helps make it all warm and fuzzy and like it’s part of your family. There’s an Aunt Betty AI, too, oh, and I noticed a Them’s AI. I guess they’re trying to grab as much market share as possible. The tagline needs work, though. Leave the thinking to us sounds off a bit.
“Why not just use Claude or ChatGPT? asked Zombos.
I stared at him. “Didn’t you tell me how expensive and green-averse it was using those and I should find a cheaper and greener alternative?”
“Oh, right. I forgot. It was a long while back, you know.” He scratched behind his ear.
“You told me yesterday.” I said.
He nodded a slow one. “Right then, continue.”
Kane Kwei was a Ga carpenter from Teshie, a fishing town near Accra. The most commonly told origin story is that he built a figurative palanquin in the shape of a cocoa pod (some versions say an eagle) for a local chief. When the chief died before he could use it, it became his coffin instead. Soon after, Kane Kwei’s grandmother, who had always dreamed of flying in an airplane but never did, passed away, and he built her a coffin shaped like a plane. The idea caught on, and a tradition was born sometime around the 1950s–60s.
The form spread through Kane Kwei’s apprentices and family, who still carry it on today. His most famous apprentice, Paa Joe (Joseph Tetteh Ashong), became internationally renowned in his own right, and Kane Kwei’s grandson Eric Adjetey Anang runs the original Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop.
The coffins drew major attention from the international art world after several were exhibited at the landmark 1989 show Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Today examples sit in museum collections around the world, including the British Museum and others, where they’re displayed as sculpture, even though back home they remain working coffins meant to be buried.
“I do not see any citations for this information,” said Zombos. “Best ask Uncle Bob what his sources are. Uncles are notorious for making things up.”
I typed in “What sources did you summarize this information from?”
We both adjusted our spectacles and leaned in closer to the laptop screen to see what Uncle Bob had to say.
>>”I should be straight with you. I didn’t summarize from specific sources I read. The text in that response came from my own background knowledge, not from anything I retrieved and read during our conversation. The only tool I actually used was an image search, which returned page titles (things like Amusing Planet and Easy Track Ghana) alongside the pictures, but I didn’t open or draw text from any of those pages.<<
Uncle Bob continued. We were startled by his–I mean its–confession.
>>”That distinction matters, because it means the details I gave you are only as reliable as my training, and a few are the kind of thing worth verifying rather than trusting from memory. Specifically, the dates (Kane Kwei’s 1922–1992 lifespan), the 1989 Magiciens de la Terre exhibition, and which museums hold examples today. The broad strokes, including the Ga origin, the abebuu adekai name, the meaning behind the shapes, the apprentice lineage through Paa Joe and Eric Adjetey Anang, well, I’m fairly confident about those, but “fairly confident from memory” isn’t the same as a citable source. If you’d like, I can search the web now and pull together properly sourced references, which would also let me flag anything I got wrong. Want me to do that?”<<
“I should think so,” said Zombos.
I told Uncle Bob to proceed. We read his–I mean its–response.
>>”I’ll search for solid sources now and check my earlier claims against them…Good material so far. Let me verify the two things I was least sure about, the 1989 Paris exhibition and the museum holdings…One more check on which museums actually hold these, since I named the British Museum from memory…Here’s how my earlier answer holds up against the sources. The good news: the broad strokes check out. There’s one framing issue worth correcting, and a couple of small details to refine.<<
>>”The name and dates are right. Multiple sources, including the de Young museum and his workshop’s own materials, give Seth Kane Kwei’s dates as 1922–1992, a Ga carpenter who lived in Teshie, near Accra. (One Wikipedia page on a later artist lists 1924, but it’s an outlier against the consensus.) The Ga term and meaning check out, I gave both translations and both appear in sources.
>>”The origin story matches the widely told version: Kane Kwei built a palanquin shaped like a cocoa pod for a chief who died before using it, so the family buried him in it; then his grandmother, who had longed to fly, died and he built her an airplane-shaped coffin. The symbolism, the Ga view of death as a transition, and the client-negotiated designs all check out too.
>>”The 1989 Paris exhibition is solidly confirmed—better than I stated. It was Les Magiciens de la Terre (1989) at the Centre Pompidou, curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, and the seven coffins shown were made by Kane Kwei and his former assistant Paa Joe. The apprentice lineage holds: Paa Joe (b. 1947), Eric Adjetey Anang, Daniel Mensah, and others carry the tradition forward, and the workshop is now managed by Kane Kwei’s grandson Eric Adjetey Anang.
>>”The British Museum holding, which I’d flagged as a from-memory guess, turns out to be correct. The British Museum acquired an eagle coffin in 2000, and it also holds works by Paa Joe and Daniel Mensah. Examples are also in the de Young, the Brooklyn Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston (which holds the largest collection outside Ghana).
>>”The biggest concern, however, is the framing in your original question and my answer that Kane Kwei “originated” or invented the form. That’s the popular account, but it’s contested. One source notes that the standard story was retold by Western authors until the anthropologist Regula Tschumi, through her PhD research, disproved the popular version, finding that Ga chiefs had long been buried in figurative coffins shaped like their ceremonial palanquins. Another puts it directly: Kane Kwei did not invent the art form, but he is credited with democratising it—taking what had been an elite, chiefly practice and making it available more broadly. So “credited as originator, and the person who popularized it from the 1950s” is more defensible than “invented it.” One small detail. I called Paa Joe an apprentice, which is right, but several sources also describe him as Kane Kwei’s nephew, so the relationship was both familial and professional.
>>“If you want to go deeper on the contested origins, anthropologist Regula Tschumi is the scholar to look up—she’s written the most rigorous work challenging the popular Kane Kwei “inventor” narrative, and I’d trust her research over the tourist-facing retellings.”<<
Zombos and I looked at each other. “I think that is a wrap,” I said. He agreed. I told Uncle Bob we had enough.
>>“You’re welcome. Glad it was useful, and good instinct to ask for the sources—it surfaced that origin-story nuance that the popular retellings gloss over. Enjoy the rabbit hole if you chase down the Tschumi research.”<<
Rabbit hole, indeed.