Figurative palanquin

A figurative palanquin connected with the totem of its owner is a special kind of litter used in the Greater Accra Region in Ghana.

With these figurative palanquins the Ga create ethnic differences between themselves and their Akan neighbours that only use simple boat- or chair-shaped litters.

The ethnologist Margaret Field believes that the boat-shaped Akan litters were introduced in Accra by the Akwamu living there since the 17th century.

The social anthropologist Regula Tschumi found only a short notice in the Gold Coast Independent 1925 indicating that the King of Accra, the so-called Ga mantse used an elephant shaped palanquin in those years.

These palanquins are also, contrary to what was believed formerly by many researchers and even many Ga, still used and built by the same craftsmen who make the figurative coffins.

[6] In the Ga culture, as Regula Tschumi has discovered during her fieldwork, initiations and funerals of the traditional chiefs must complement each other.

The figurative palanquin become sacred after the death of their users and the family keep them in order to maintain contact with the ancestors.

Today all the Ga, irrespective of their religious affiliation, use figurative coffins which were formerly reserved for the traditional kings, chiefs and priests.

The exhibition “Les Magiciens de la terre” 1989 and the theories of Thierry Secretan[13] caused the Teshie carpenter Kane Kwei to be acclaimed as the inventor of figurative coffins and only his products to be classified as works of art.

Through lack of knowledge, the Western art world erroneously attributed the invention of a supposedly new art form to a single artist and made him and the figurative coffins world-famous, while the significance of the already existing figurative palanquins remained until recently completely unknown.