Under a sign for “Geisha Soap,” just outside Kampala proper in Katwe, is another smaller, white metal sign, with the word COFFIN painted in red and a yellow coffin with a white cross pictured beneath. In front of the coffin shop is a small table selling toothpaste, combs and the like. The one room shop itself has three rows of coffins stacked three high, some with brass handles and elaborate trim, others just a simple wood box.

“Psychologically, I take it as a box, a wooden box, until there’s a dead body,” says Joseph Ssemakula. “But before that it’s just a wooden box.”

Ssemakula, a lean man in a button-down shirt and worn shoes, has been selling coffins for 10 years. He started a small shop that sold coffins and furniture, but soon found the coffins selling better and requiring less space and capital. The furniture business lasted only a year, but coffin business, capitalizing on life’s ephemerality, is more permanent.

With a price range from Shs50,000 to as much as Shs700,000, Farooq Lukwago, whose shop is just around the corner from Ssemakula’s, says, “There is always a coffin for you. We have each and every thing.”

Lukwago says he doesn’t bargain much with his customers, who just want to come and purchase a box and move onto to sorting out other arrangements, but he will give discounts and find a coffin for anyone who needs one.

He gives them free to his relatives, a job perk many occupations couldn’t provide. “The job has depression, but there is no other option to find another job,” says Lukwago, 23.

His small shop, covered in an old coat of blue paint and decorated with fading political posters from elections past, smells of varnish and wood. Each of the coffins he’s offering for sale has lace-line glass windows, and a panel on the top that slides down to reveal the deceased’s visage.

“I rarely talk about the death because this is business,” says Ssemakula. The separation of mortality and profession seems to be a cornerstone for coffin salesmen, since, as Ssemakula says, “I don’t want to remind people of death.”

Both salesmen cite the increasing rate of death from HIV/Aids to a boom in their business, which they acknowledge with appropriate chagrin.

The job is necessary, notes Ssemakula, because after all, “When some has lost a relative, they don’t have time to go cut a tree and make a coffin.”