Fisherman buried with a fish coffin in Ghana (Photo)

Fisherman buried with a fish coffin in Ghana

The reception of a Ghanaian who was a fisherman and buried in fish coffin 

George was the brother of my father. He died at age 49, he had smoked and drank a lot but it was a very quiet man. He was a fisherman. We are a family of fishermen. He learned the trade from my grandfather and when he died, he managed to buy his boat, motors, all the equipment. He started on his own. As the market is much better at Sekondi, he left to settle there. The fishing went well.

Some leave in the morning about five and a half hours or six hours and return at about six o'clock in the evening. It's called "go-come". 

But he was doing what we call lagas : they go to sea for a full week. Aboard the boat, they may be five or seven. Before leaving they calculate everything they need to take for a week of sailing: fuel, ice to preserve fish, rice, cooking oil... Of course, they eat the fish they catch. The boats are not very big but in the box there is all that is needed. To stay longer than a week, we would need to load more reserves. They have no radio and there are accidents, as with the big boats at night who do not see them. Once a boat was overturned. Of the seven fishermen, only one was saved. They know the sea and where the fish is hiding: sometimes, they sail for two days without fish, just to get to the scene. They may bring 70 or 80 boxes of fish when it works well. When 

George fell ill, he returned to Accra. Then he died July 2. I am the secretary of the family, so I was given a portion of the funeral arrangements. It is me who kept all the accounts in the book. 

For the choice of coffin, it was during a family reunion that one of George’s daughter who was sixteen or seventeen years, no more, stood up and said she had just had a vision , a revelation that his father had to be buried in a fish-shaped coffin. 

The family then decided to do it. In fact, my grandfather was Wulei Atse that is to say, the traditional chief of the fishermen in Osu and it had already used a fish-shaped coffin. This was more than twenty years ago. Kane Kwei had made the coffin. So I went to look in Teshie for carpenters specialised in design coffins and I found this shop by chance. I had seen another one just before where the coffins were also exposed but I had not stopped.