Abstract
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. The establishment of Christianity in Ghana involved moments of turbulence and regeneration that have shaped current renewal forms of Ghanaian Christianity. This book details the colonial construction and reconstruction of religion and culture that were cast in terms of European identity and images of otherness, all of which ignored local notions of value and power structures.
Grant shows how the quest for “healing, belonging, and spiritual power” shaped a genre of Christianity that addressed local needs and struggles for political and economic emancipation after long periods of war, slavery, and economic turmoil. The people of Akuapem achieved this result by “imposing an indigenous cosmological framework” on the messages they heard and, through innovation and ingenuity, opened the door for “prosperity, protection, and healings,” which later became a foundation for Ghana’s contemporary renewal forms of Christianity (1–5). The people of Akuapem did this by enfolding the missionaries into their cultural milieu and by taking on cultural images (e.g., becoming shrine priests), which allowed them to confront the task of preaching the message and refine or remove elements of culture and traditions that stood in the way of the new faith.
Grant recounts candidly both the successes and the failures of the Basel Mission effort in Ghana during the mid-nineteenth century, from its ritual ceremonies to political and leadership struggles and the formation of indigenous preachers. He concludes that the innovative ways the Akuapems appropriated Christianity served as a precursor for contemporary Pentecostal movements in Ghana and beyond. In doing so, Grant helps to solve one of African Christianity’s historical puzzles. Grant pushes back against a narrative of “ecclesiastical externality” and “extraversion” (i.e., the idea that Pentecostalism in Africa is simply an American import). He argues against the idea that current renewal forms of Christianity in Africa (Pentecostalism in particular) are not genuinely African phenomena born out of African experience that meet African needs.
Although the book does well in acknowledging the role played by Africans, or more particularly the African initiatives, in reformulating Christianity, I was expecting to see more reflection on the role played by the West Indians in the work of the Basel Mission in Ghana. It is remarkable to observe how the success of the Basel Mission today in Ghana owes much to the work of the Jamaican Christians who served as missionaries for the Basel Evangelical Missionary Society from 1843 to 1918, after European missionaries had failed (e.g., see A. N. O. Kwakye, “Returning African Christians in Mission to the Gold Coast,” Studies in World Christianity 24 [2018]: 25–45). This is a serious lacuna. Nonetheless, Grant has authored a great addition to mission historiography and to the study of African church history. The volume is valuable for both graduate and undergraduate students in the study of history and Christian missions, particularly in West Africa.