No, this Phallus-shaped coffin was not used to bury a woman with ten kids from ten different men. - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
April 28, 2023
A video that seems like the last rites of a person put in a coffin that is shaped like the phallus is being shared on social media. The post which shares this video claims that the deceased person in this video is a woman with ten children from ten different men. Let’s verify the claim in this post.
Claim: A woman with ten kids from ten different men was buried in a Phallus-shaped coffin in Ghana, Africa.
Fact: The person buried inside the Phallus-shaped coffin is not a woman but a man named John Nii Addo Allotey. When he was alive, he used to perform circumcision. John’s family decided to build a Phallus-shaped coffin for him as an honour to his profession. Hence the claim made in the post is Misleading.
We performed a basic keyword search on the internet to learn more details about the video and the claim. It led us to a few news reports (here and here) from 2020, which contained the same video as the post.
According to GhanaWeb, this incident occurred in the city of Accra, Ghana. Building coffins of the deceased based on their occupation while they were alive is a custom there. The person who was buried in this coffin was shaped in the form of a phallus used to circumcise baby boys to make a living. His name was John Nii Addo Allotey.
In an interview given to Television C K, John’s brother William said that he ‘was a certified ‘Wanzam'(circumciser) who had been practising the profession for over 35 years, and hence his family wanted to honour him with the act.‘ He explained this in an interview with the Television C K. The well-known fact-checking website AFP also debunked this claim to be misleading.
To sum up, a woman with ten kids from ten different men was not buried in this coffin that looks like the phallus.