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.”
