Relying on God

If an understatement could be made about Ghana, it would be to say that it is a religious

nation.  Usually, my non-religious self finds this exhausting.  More and more, I’m trying to find it pertinent to my understanding of how people cope with life as marginalized subsistence farmers.

Christianity predominates in Ghana and Islam takes a close second.  Though both religions exist in both the north and the south, the country is generalized as being a population of southern Christians and northern Muslims.  Here in the Upper West, Catholicism retains a strong presence despite the ongoing evangelization of the rest of Christian Ghana.  The Catholic church is referred to as “Holy Father” or the more chuckle worthy, “The Church Where You Can Still Drink.” Catholic missionaries were the first non-colonial authorities who made it to this region in the early 20^th Century.  The church is widely respected for building the educational system long before colonial powers took part.  In and around Wa, the largest urban center in the Upper West, Islam predominates.   Islam has a much longer history in the region. The region’s most commonly visited tourist sites are the phenomenally beautiful and traditionally constructed mosques dating to as early as the 17th Century.  Despite the dominance of these monotheistic systems, traditional belief practices remain fairly vibrant and intersect quite seamlessly with the two dominants.

While Ghanaians are devout, it truly does not matter what belief system you practice.  Christians marry Muslims. Traditionalists are not outcast from predominantly Christian or Muslim communities.  Children within one family might be Evangelical Christians, Muslims and traditionalist, as is the case at my landlord’s house where in the evenings some of the kids are dashing off to the mosque for prayers and others are singing Christian gospel songs. What makes religious adherence in Ghana compelling, especially for someone who hasn’t found doctrine too inspiring, is belief is something that can be mixed and matched.  During the most recent Eid Al-Adha celebration, both the Muslims and non Muslims celebrated the New Year holiday.  My landlord is a polygamous Christian.  The predominantly Muslim community where I reside is now trying to resolve a land dispute with a neighboring community through traditional religious practices. The oracles are being consulted. 

All that matters in Ghana is that you believe and apply your belief. I’m beginning to sense that belief helps rationalize the complicated and trying context that many Ghanaians live in.  This is not any kind of groundbreaking ethnographically originating suggestion.  It’s just my own “Aha” in the field moment.

In my ongoing quest to learn how people cope with stress, in particular the anxiety associated with poverty, a common coping strategy reported is “giving everything to God”.  When this maxim has been used in my own day to day experimentation in living in Ghana (i.e. “When will the 1:00 bus be here?”  “God willing, by 4:00”), I have cast it aside as a cop-out phrase meant to appease foreigners. However, in settling in a particular community and getting to know particular people and how and why their circumstances are stressful, it seems that giving things to God is more than an excuse.   Believing in a greater order of cause and effect seems to help keep a brain from thinking itself into overwhelmedness, a futile exercise well practiced by my own brain.

Understanding local cosmology is a cornerstone of anthropology, part and parcel of any introductory level course. Cosmological studies are right up there with kinship studies as far as anything “classically” anthropological.  As a student of the 21^st Century I’ve blithely tried to distance myself from these cornerstones.  My Gob Bluth-esque response to approaching my own research with these lenses was “Yeah, right, like the 21^st Century anthropologist is going to go to Ghana to study traditional religion and do a kinship diagram?  Come on!” And now in the waning hours of my fieldwork, I find myself desperately wishing I had the time left to do kinship diagrams and to better understand the complicated hybridity of belief systems.  Do I want people to understand how financial God/s can have as much power as spiritual God/s in determining fates?  Indeed.  But do I need to understand how the construction of complicated belief systems can help ease the stress of life? Most definitely.  To heed the advice of James Ferguson, a deity of my own in the anthropological realm:

The lesson I draw from this is not that analysts of Africa ought to focus on “political economy” instead of “culture” (as if economic inequalities were somehow non-cultural or cultural differences were somehow immaterial or apolitical).  It is, rather, that the question of cultural difference itself is (everywhere, no doubt, but perhaps especially in contemporary Africa) tightly bound up with question of inequality, aspiration and rank in an imagined “world.”  (page 19, Introduction to Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order)

The longer I stay in this country, the more I come to see how remaining assuredly faithful is not about staying blissfully ignorant of causality. It’s about taking whatever control you might have over a situation and enacting that sense of control.   I’ve recently learned that a ram is soon to be sacrificed to protect my community from Ebola.  Given that the local hospitals are not properly supplied to even set a broken leg, let alone set up a contamination unit, I’m placing my own faith in the ram’s ability to appease and or negotiate with the ancestors to keep that hellacious virus outta here. I’ve got more faith in the ancestors right now than I do in the power of scientific solutions to transcend the labyrinth of social and economic barriers that determine access to health care services.