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 20th 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 21st
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 21st
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.
