Healing and Power in Ghana: Early Indigenous Expressions of Christianity

by Paul Glen Grant

Overview

In nineteenth-century Ghana, regional warfare rooted in profound social and economic transformations led thousands of displaced people to seek refuge in the small mountain kingdom of Akuapem. There they encountered missionaries from Germany whose message of sin and forgiveness struck many of these newcomers as irrelevant to their needs. However, together with Akuapem’s natives, these newcomers began reformulating Christianity as a ritual tool for social and physical healing, as well as power, in a dangerous spiritual and human world. The result was Ghana’s oldest African-initiated variant of Christianity: a homegrown expression of unbroken moral, political, and religious priorities.

Focusing on the southeastern Gold Coast in the middle of the nineteenth century, Healing and Power in Ghana identifies patterns of indigenous reception, rejection, and reformulation of what had initially arrived, centuries earlier, as a European trade religion. Paul Grant draws on a mixture of European and indigenous sources in several languages, building on recent scholarship in world Christianity to address the question of conversion through the lens of the indigenous moral imagination. This approach considers, among other things, the conditions in which Akuapem locals and newly arrived displaced persons might find Christianity useful or applicable to their needs.

This is no traditional history of the European-African religious encounter. Ghanaian Christians identified the missionaries according to preexisting political and religious categories—as a new class of shrine priests. They resolved their own social crises in ways the missionaries were unable to understand. In effect, Christianity became an indigenous religion years before indigenous people converted in any appreciable numbers. By foregrounding the sacrificial idiom shared by locals, missionaries, and native thinkers, Healing and Power in Ghana presents a new model of scholarship for both West African history and world Christianity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481313445
Publisher:	Baylor University Press
Publication date:	10/15/2020
Series:	Studies in World Christianity
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	341
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Paul Glen Grant is Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Moral Imagination
1 Primal Globalization
2 The Existing Ritual Toolkit
3 Three Hundred Years of Irrelevance
4 Satan’s Strongholds
5 How the Missionaries Became Shrine Priests
6 Divergent Modes of Hermeneutics
7 States of Exception
Conclusion: The Cross and the Machete

What People are Saying About This

Andrew F. Walls

Healing and Power in Ghana is a fine piece of in-depth historical writing of wider relevance than its title may suggest. Dr. Grant carefully unpacks the concerns, understandings, and interactions of German missionaries, British colonial officials, and the various peoples of the Akuapem Ridge during a formative period for Ghanaian Christianity. The Bible in its Twi translation is revealed as a significant actor in the story.

Brian Stanley

Scholarship on encounters between Western Christians and African peoples and their cosmologies continues to be lopsided, privileging missionary perspectives. Paul Grant has decisively corrected that imbalance, showing how from the mid-1830s the people of Akuapem in modern Ghana incorporated the Basel missionaries and their message within their own world of ritual power and communal healing. In so doing, Grant achieves two highly significant goals. He shows that the story of what we now label as African 'Pentecostalism' begins much earlier than is conventionally imagined; and by ranking missionaries among the Akan ancestors he skillfully transcends the barren academic debate between advocates of the externality or indigeneity of African Pentecostalism.

Andrew F Walls

Africa its great cities are a major laboratory for twenty-first century Christianity. This important and impressive book tells us much about Christian activity in a major urban centre, deepening our understanding of the influences shaping it. It also reflects how wide a range of phenomena can properly be comprehended under the heading ‘Pentecostalism.’

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu

In Healing and Power in Ghana, Paul Grant returns to the period preceding the rise of African Christian independency to interrogate processes of indigenous reformulation of the gospel in order for it to respond to local religious sensibilities. We have here a groundbreaking volume that enables an appreciation of how indigenous Christians of the Gold Coast recalibrated faith. Through the performative aesthetics of lived religion, they anticipated the rise of independent indigenous Pentecostalism. This is a truly remarkable piece!

Church History - Esther E. Acolatse

In this well-researched and accessibly written book, Paul Glen Grant echoes perhaps what indigenous African Christians have always intuited: African Christianity rising, even in its fastest growing wing, is not a twenty-first or even a twentieth-century phenomenon.

Editorial Reviews

Drawing richly from archival sources, Paul Grant presents a masterpiece describing the place of Christianity in Ghana’s early formation. He skillfully presents the culture and faith of nineteenth-century Ghana.

International Bulletin of Mission Research - Francis Benyah

…A great book that should be read widely by scholars of global Christianity, African Christianity, mission studies, West African history, and religion more broadly

H-Net Reviews - Adam H. Mohr

…Paul Glen Grant succeeds in bringing alive his central argument with rich ethnographic insights. The overall narrative of the book is presented from a cross-historical lens which proves a clearer prism through which to see early indigenous religious expression as a precursor of present-day Ghanaian Pentecostalism. This book will appeal to students of comparative religions and African church historiography.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History - Isidore Lobnibe

Grant’s excellent exposition is highly recommended as a source for scholars and students of the history of Christianity, cross-cultural studies, comparative religion, sociocultural and general studies on Africa.

Missio Dei - Ebenezer Ayesu

In this well-written, historically rich, and detailed monograph, Grant sets out to understand the making of Ghanaian Christianity by exploring how indigenous intellectual and cosmological frameworks, as well as pragmatic concerns and experiences, came to shape the reception and domestication of missionary Christianity.

Reading Religion - Karen Lauterbach

Overall, the study is smart and sensitive. The prose is exceptionally clear and a pleasure to read. Without a doubt, this book is required reading for any student interested not only in missionary activities in Africa, but also in landscapes of power, shrines, and the spiritual dimensions of imperial confrontations.

African Studies Review - Sarah Balakrishnan

It embodies what the whole book documents in detail: that in the years before the English colonizaiton it was the Africans who, in search of healing, belonging, and spiritual powers, created a new, unique form of Christianity, combining it with their religious forms and used the missionaries for this very purpose.

Theologische Literaturzeitung - Martin Hailer Heidelberg