Description
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. Ghanian 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.
About the Author
Paul Glen Grant is Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville.
Book Information
ISBN 9781481312677
Author Paul Glen Grant
Format Hardback
Page Count 341
Imprint Baylor University Press
Publisher Baylor University Press