Want to be buried in a giant wooden coffin that looks like a Coke bottle?
Coffin artist Paa Joe is the guy who can make that happen. He crafts fantasy wood "proverb coffins" (aka as abebuu adekai in his culture) out of his shop in Ghana. He's considered the grandfather of the fantasy coffin trade and his work is exhibited in museums worldwide. But hard times fell on his business.
Paa Joe & The Lion is the 2017 documentary that tells the story of how he and his son are rebuilding the family legacy together. It's now available to stream on Amazon (free with Prime). It's really inspiring!
Paa Joe dreams of his bygone days — bringing money home in briefcases and work being shipped to galleries the world over. Now, he sleeps as the cars hurtle passed. There are no customers, no tourists — there are no coffins to make. His son, Jacob, dreams too, he dreams of returning his father to his glory days and rebuilding the family legacy together. Over the next four years they stand side-by-side, conquering love and death and embracing a life changing opportunity to travel to the UK to undertake an artist residency. It is the start of their future together — master and son... Paa Joe & The Lion
Here's a look at some of his pieces:
via john nash
Cacao pod coffin image via akhenatenator
via Allison Meier
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Rhino fantasy coffin
A post shared by Paa Joe (@paajoecoffins) on Aug 27, 2018 at 10:48am PDT
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A mighty oak tree has broken leaving a legacy behind.
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Members of the Ghanaian lost their composure in fits of giggles and guffaws when MP John Frimpong Osei listed out the names of towns in his district that were awaiting electrification.
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The BBC's pidgin service is aimed at West African audiences; it is a pure delight.
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Le Monde has published a new collection of documents from the whistleblower Edward Snowden, showing that the British spy agency GCHQ targeted the leaders of allied countries in Africa, as well as business executives and employees of telecommunications companies, whose accounts were a means to gaining access to communications infrastructure across the continent. Read the rest
German photographer Kevin McElvaney shot portraits of the itinerant pickers who work on Agbogbloshie, the toxic e-waste dump outside of Accra, Ghana. Read the rest
Gmoke writes, "Pure Home Water (PHW), the same people who make AfriClay Filters -- a locally-sourced clay pot water filter -- in Taha, Ghana are now building toilet blocks for local schools. In June 2013, PHW built a 6-stall toilet block in 30 days for a school in the village of Taha. They are planning to build the same toilet block for the neighboring village of Gbalahi and are looking for $8,600 over the next two months."
Toilets for Schools - Improving Sanitation in Ghana
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The Smati Turtle 1 is an "African concept car" created by Dutch artist/researcher team Melle Smets and Joost van Onna, who worked with the artisinal car-makers of Suame Magazine, Ghana, to create a killer junker for the African market. Suame Magazine is a neighborhood full of people who take apart scrap cars and rebuild them for local markets, removing the difficult-to-maintain electronics, expanding the cargo areas. The Turtle 1 took three months to create, and had its test-drive inaugurated by the Ashanti king. Read the rest
Gmoke sez, "Susan Murcott and her team's factory making clay filters for Pure Home Water in Ghana. Over 100,000 served, so far."
They're shooting for 1,000,000.
Pure Home Water, Ghana: AfriClay Filters
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Here's an interesting, short memoir about science fiction in Africa, written by Jonathan Dotse, a science fiction writer in Accra, Ghana. Dotse describes how his early exposure to science fiction changed his outlook on life, and how he sees the field relating to the future of Africa.
Imagine a young African boy staring wide-eyed at the grainy images of an old television set tuned to a VHF channel; a child discovering for the first time the sights and sounds of a wonderfully weird world beyond city limits. This is one of my earliest memories; growing up during the mid-nineties in a tranquil compound house in Maamobi; an enclave of the Nima suburb, one of the most notorious slums in Accra. Besides the government-run Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, only two other television stations operated in the country at the time, and satellite television was way beyond my family’s means. Nevertheless, all kinds of interesting programming from around the world occasionally found its way onto those public broadcasts. This was how I first met science fiction; not from the tomes of great authors, but from distilled approximations of their grand visions.
This was at a time when cyberpunk was arguably at its peak, and concepts like robotics, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence were rife in mainstream media. Not only were these programs incredibly fun to watch, the ideas that they propagated left a lasting impression on my young mind for years to come. This early exposure to high technology sent me scavenging through piles of discarded mechanical parts in our backyard; searching for the most intriguing sculptures of steel from which I would dream up schematics for contraptions that would change the world as we knew it.
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This old WFMU clip from 2005 features the beautiful "work-song" of Ghanian postal workers from the University of Ghana cancelling stamps, banging out infectious rhythm and melody.
Work Song From Postal Employees in Ghana (MP3)
MP3 Link
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Daniel sez, "Global Health resource is a facilitator of medical travel. Presently we are helping Mohammed Issaka of Ghana who only has half a face to receive plastic surgery in India. He has some sponsorship for this, but we would like to make this public as so perhaps solicit more funds to help others."
This is the inspiring story of Mr. Mohammed Issaka from Ghana in West Africa. 2 years ago Mohammed was diagnosed with a tumor behind his left eye. Fortunately for him the mass was benign, but in the process of the surgery his left eye and most of the left side of his face had to be removed. Since then this 28-year-old new husband has been living with a large hole in his face. Due to the extreme condition of his face he is forced to conceal the gaping wound on a daily basis.
A New Face for Mohammed
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Here's a really interesting look from Younghee Jung at the global phenomenon of multi-SIM phones that can talk on multiple networks at once. Some people get these SIMs because they want to take advantage of low-cost calling within an single network (which means that you have to keep track of which network each person in your address book uses!). Others use it to establish priority -- a business man who has a "private number" for his best customers that he always answers. Sometimes, it's just a way to get a bargain, loading up prepaid minutes on different SIMs depending on who's got the best deal. A sketch from a Liberian refugee camp in Ghana depicts an "ideal phone" that holds four SIMs.
Many mobile network operators offer cheaper rates for inter-network calls, especially in markets where competition among network operators is high. Highly cost-conscious consumers naturally get multiple numbers for cheaper calls. While it may not take too much effort to acquire the new number itself, this comes at a cost of efforts and skill: Remembering, or identifying who in your social network has the number belonging to a specific network operator. People develop a tactic, such as indicating the network operator in the name stored on the phonebook. This is not an exclusive behavior only for the developing economies, however. When the 3G network was newly introduced in Japan several years ago, many Japanese consumers also owned two numbers, one from 3G for cheaper messaging & data connection, another from existing network for cheaper voice calls.
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The much-vaunted anti-terror eagles at the TSA have subcontractors whose hard-drives turn up in Ghanain junk-markets in heaps of illegally disposed-of e-waste. The drives are stuffed full of unencrypted, sensitive documents:
A team of journalists investigating the global electronic waste business has unearthed a security problem too. In a Ghana market, they bought a computer hard drive containing sensitive documents belonging to U.S. government contractor Northrop Grumman.
The drive had belonged to a Fairfax, Virginia, employee who still works for the company and contained "hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts," said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led the investigation for the Public Broadcasting Service show Frontline. He would not disclose details of the documents, but he said that they were marked "competitive sensitive" and covered company contracts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Transportation Security Agency.
The data was unencrypted, Klein said in an interview. The cost? US$40..."It was a wonderful, ironic twist," Klein said. "Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe."
Off-camera, sources in Ghana told the reporters that data thieves routinely scour these hard drives for sensitive information, Klein said.
Reporters find Northrop Grumman data in Ghana market
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A Ghanian entrepreneur makes handsome carrier bags out of recycled disposable plastic bags:
In the Trashy Bags workshop a dozen tailors and seamstresses sit at manual sewing machines stitching together old plastic sachets. In west Africa tap water is not fit to drink so millions of half-litre "pure water" sachets costing only the equivalent of 2p are discarded by thirsty consumers every day. A storage room overflows with more than three million sachets that have been collected and cleaned ready for recycling...
Local people arrive at the Trashy Bags workshop carrying sacks stuffed with thousands of the sachets on their heads. They exchange 1,000 sachets for £2 – good money in a country where the average person earns only £254 a year.
"I collect sachets because I am jobless and this gives me money," said Hadiza Ishmael, a 55-year-old grandmother who had just arrived with 4,000 sachets. "It also makes the place look nicer."
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Here's an ingenious method for making your own headphones out of bottlecaps, foam, and wire. The technique was created by Prince Dzuckey a boy at Takoradi Technical Institute, Takoradi, Ghana.
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Garth sez, "This a flickr photo set of wax-printed fabric that my girlfriend just brought back from Ghana. The Ghanaians that she bought the fabric from tended never to notice the objects that were printed on the fabric--they all served as abstractions. She wasn't able to track down her holy grail--a fabric printed with roasting chickens! You'll have to settle for batteries, umbrellas, lipstick...and a first aid kit."
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(Thanks, Garth!)
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