Cocoa and Coffins

Our last days in Accra were totally free and unstructured, so my intrepid friend Ann and I jumped at the opportunity to conduct some “field research” outside Accra. Our first stop was Tettah Quarshie, site of Ghana’s first cocoa farm, and named after the man who in 1879 brought Latin American cacao (cocoa) seeds from the island of Fernando Po in the Gulf of Guinea to mainland Ghana. Cocoa is now Ghana’s largest cash crop, and surprisingly, most cocoa production is not mechanized but harvested by hand using machetes and copious amounts of elbow grease and patience (there is also much debate over the extent of child labor on cocoa farms in Ghana). The ripe, yellow pods are cracked open to reveal clusters of beans coated in white, pulpy “mucilage” – which sounds far less yummy than they actually taste.




Later we braved the nightmarish Accra traffic to visit the legendary Ga coffin makers of Teshie. The Ga believe that individuals should be buried in wooden coffins that reflects a person’s profession (photographer, fisherman, pilot) – and sometimes – coffins are carved in order to reveal a person’s vice (cigarettes, beer). For the devotees of this blog, recall that last July I visited the National Funerary Museum in Houston, which houses the largest collection of Ghanaian coffins outside of Ghana.

Who knew that one year later I’d find myself standing on a rickety rooftop overlooking the eastern Atlantic chatting up the actual coffin makers of Teshie! Even more uncanny was the fact that the coffin in progress was none other than a cocoa pod, the most irresistible of vices! For the price of my now broken Nikon D90 – I could’ve walked away with that sweet and shapely cocoa coffin and been the talk of the Colorado suburbs.

Not to sound too morose, but what coffin would you choose if you had a pile of Wawa wood and a Ga coffin maker at the ready? Dibs on the cocoa pod.