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INTRODUCTION:
In 1989 I started fieldwork among the Peki Ewe in Ghana to gain an understanding of Christianity at the grassroots level. Soon after I began, I visited a prayer service by virtually all the Christian churches represented in the area. It was held in the chapel of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC), a mission church which was established as a result of the activities of nineteenth century missionaries from the missionsgesellschaft (NMG), in Peki Blengo. This All Churches Prayer brought together various denominations such as Catholics, Methodists and Presbyterians, as well as a great number of African independent and Pentecostal churches. I was struck by the fact that these various and competing churches appeared to be united by a common enemy: the Devil. A huge part of the service was focused on his evil manifestations. One pastor preached on how to do away with 'pagan' gods which he described as Satan's demons. In the middle of the service there were attempts to exorcise a schoolboy who appeared to be possessed by a local god worshipped in his family, and there were numerous songs and prayers to ward off the Devil.
In the All Churches Prayer I began to realize the immense importance of the image of the Devil in local appropriations of Christianity among the Ewe. The devil was called upon to draw a boundary between Christianity and 'heathendom' - in other words Ewe religion from a Christian perspective - thus admonishing Ewe gods and spirits. Yet, as I came to understand in the course of my stay, demonstration by no means implies that the former gods and spirits will disappear out of people's lives. As servants of Satan they are still regarded as real powers that have to be dealt with in a concrete way - rather than outmoded 'superstitions,' as modern Protestant theology would have it. Thus, through the image of the Devil, 'old' Ewe spiritual powers continue to be exist. Put differently, the image of Satan offers a discourse with which to approach these powers as 'Christian' demons.
As a matter of fact, people allude to evil spirits and the devil so frequently that I was drawn to deal with this apparently pivotal topic in the lives of many Christians as a main focus of my research. Interestingly, talk about demons and the Devil occurred most frequently and openly in the Pentecostal churches. These churches, which have become increasingly popular in Ghana since the mid-1980s, also shape the religious arena in Peki to a large extent. Indeed those people who left the EPC for another church mostly attributed their move - or better still, their conversion, which transformed them from 'nominal' church members into 'born again' Christians - to the fact that the EPC failed to deal with demons satisfactorily because its leaders would take neither the Holy Spirit nor the Devil and his demons seriously. Therefore the church would be unable to ward off or cast out evil spirits in the name of God and achieve protection and healing. This critique also played a major role in the secession of two prayer groups from the EPC in 1961 and 1991 respectively, which gave rise to two new churches under the name of Abelengor - the Lord's Pentecostal Church, and the EPC 'of Ghana.' These churches have developed an elaborate discourse on demons as well as a number of rituals to deal with them. Along with the EPC, these two churches came to form my main field of investigation, and this study is about these three organizations and the relationships among them. I propose that by examining the images of the Devil held in these churches, it is possible to gain insight into the intricate process of the appropriation of Christianity at the grassroots level, as well as the widespread desertion of the mission-derived churches for Pentecostalism.
Yet all this is not enough account for the evolution of Ewe appropriations of Christianity. Despite the fact that by referring to the image of the Devil a boundary is drawn between Christianity and Ewe religion, both share essential features. The point is that in order to be communicated, the Christian message had to be translated into the local language. Christian Ewe discourse thus contains many 'heathen' terms which also account for the peculiarity of local Christian interpretations. Both the image of Satan and Christian Ewe vocabulary in general have a special relationship with Ewe religion. Whereas through diabolization spiritual beings are represented as demons, translation necessarily involves a positive integration of non-Christian terms. Therefore, it is important to investigate how these paradoxical strategies of both vernacularization and diabolization have contributed to local appropriations of Christianity on the borderline of the old and new religions.
