The Coffin Dancers Who Made the World Laugh: What Ghana’s Pallbearers Say About How the Country Handles Death

In March and April 2020, as governments around the world were announcing lockdowns and the internet was processing collective anxiety through whatever format came to hand, a video of Ghanaian pallbearers dancing with a coffin became one of the most widely shared pieces of media the year produced.

The men in the video were not performing. This is how they work.

Benjamin Aidoo and Nana Otafrija

Benjamin Aidoo runs a pallbearing and funeral service company called Nana Otafrija Pallbearing and Waiting Services, based in Cape Coast in the Central Region. The business is legitimate, established, and long-running. The dancing is part of the service offering.

He has explained in multiple interviews that Ghanaian funeral culture does not read death the way European and American funeral traditions do. In the Ghanaian context, a well-attended, joyful funeral is a mark of respect for someone who lived a full life.

The family pays for a service that will honor their relative with movement, music, and performance rather than silent procession. The dancing pallbearers are delivering exactly what their clients want.

When the internet found the video in 2020 and attached it to the “meanwhile in Africa” meme cycle, then to the COVID meme cycle where it represented the consequence of ignoring safety rules, Aidoo became briefly one of the most discussed Ghanaian figures in international media. He gave interviews to BBC Africa, to European outlets, and to American digital publications.

He was measured about it. The attention was good for business. The interpretation, where the dancing was read as absurdist humor rather than as a genuine cultural practice, was a misreading he corrected wherever he had the platform to do so.

Fantasy Coffins

The pallbearer video is the most globally visible expression of a much longer Ghanaian tradition around death.

The fantasy coffin industry that exists primarily in the Greater Accra Region produces coffins shaped like the things the deceased loved: airplanes for pilots, fish for fishermen, mobile phones, Nike shoes, beer bottles, cars.

The tradition is associated particularly with the Ga people of the Greater Accra Region and is linked to beliefs about the afterlife and the importance of entering it with the markers of one’s earthly identity.

Kane Kwei, a carpenter in Teshie who began making figural coffins in the 1950s, is credited with commercializing the tradition. His grandson Paa Joe and other craftsmen in the same tradition have since exhibited in art galleries internationally, with fantasy coffins selling as art objects at prices that have nothing to do with their original function.

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The dancing pallbearers and the fantasy coffins come from the same cultural framework: the funeral as a full expression of who someone was rather than a solemn reduction of their life to a body in a box.

What the Viral Moment Got Wrong

The meme version of the coffin dancers removed the coffin from its context and replaced it with anything that was going wrong: a car crash, a failed cooking attempt, a person falling off a bicycle. The pallbearers became the visual representation of consequences.

That reading made sense within the meme logic but was disconnected from what the video actually showed. The dancing was not a symbol of doom. It was a celebration. The family of the person in the coffin had paid for a service that honored their relative with the energy and movement that Ghanaian funeral culture considers appropriate for a life well-lived.

Aidoo has not spent significant energy correcting the misreading on the internet, where the meme has its own life that no clarification can reach. He has instead continued working, giving interviews when asked, and building a business that has received more international recognition from the viral moment than it would have otherwise.

The Larger Point

The coffin dance meme tells two stories simultaneously. The surface story is about an internet moment that spread because it was visually striking and adaptable to the meme format. The deeper story is about what happens when a cultural practice from one context travels without its context into another.

Ghana does not handle death the way the meme assumes. The dancing pallbearers are not a joke or an anomaly. They are professionals delivering a service that reflects a genuine cultural philosophy about what the end of a life should look like.

Benjamin Aidoo and his colleagues are still working in Cape Coast. They will probably be dancing at someone’s funeral this weekend.