For generations, the Ga community in Accra, Ghana, has enforced an annual citywide ban on noisemaking during an important religious festival. In the 1990s and 2000s, this "ban on drumming" became a point of conflict between the Ga people and the newly popular Pentecostal/Charismatic churches, which refused to subdue their loud worship during the ban. Although the Ghanaian state constitutionally and institutionally grants superior status to Christianity and Islam, it ruled in favor of the Ga community, which emphasized its "cultural" rather than religious rights. In The Noise Silence Makes, Mariam Goshadze traces the history of noise regulation in Accra, showing how the Ga people have adopted colonial mechanisms of noise control to counter Pentecostal/Charismatic dominance over Accra's soundscape. Goshadze shows how the drumming ban represents a reversal of the top-down model of noise regulation and illuminates the reality of Ghanaian secularity, in which the state unofficially collaborates with indigenous religious authorities to control sound. In so doing, Goshadze counters the tendency to push African "traditional religions" to the margins, demonstrating that they are instrumental players in contemporary African urbanity.
Mariam Goshadze is Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion at Leipzig University.
A Note on Orthography ix A Note on Pronunciation xi Introduction: Altered Ontologies and Reversed Paradigms 1 1. Jumping on the Anti-Noise Bandwagon: Drumming Permits for Accra's Residents 25 2. Winds of Change: The Ban on Drumming Enters the Public Sphere 46 3. The Power of Sound: Cross-World Sonic Theologies 69 4. When the Deities Visit: Translating Religion into the Language of the Secular 87 5. Sacred Acoustic Inspectors: The Ghanian State and Noise Abatement during the H?M?W? Festival 108 6. Let Us Offer Thanks for the Nation of Ghana: H?m?w? as a Civil Ceremony of Thanksgiving 133 Conclusion: Layered Epistemologies of Contemporary Accra 153 Acknowledgments 159 Glossary 161 Notes 163 References 177 Index 193
"Re-sounding tensions about 'noisemaking' arising between Ga 'traditionalists' and Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians in Accra, Mariam Goshadze offers a fresh take on interreligious entanglements from a sonic angle. This amazing book breaks new ground for understanding the precarious position of 'traditional religion' vis-A-vis Christianity by situating it in the Ghanaian secular regime in which religion, culture, and heritage are defined and managed. A trailblazing contribution to the study of religion and secularity in Africa." - Birgit Meyer, Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University "This fascinating, innovative, and theoretically and ethnographically rich study questions the fixity in Ghana of the categories by which most political analysts define contemporary democratic nation-states. Mariam Goshadze's argument for recognizing Ghanaian secularity as a unique formation is compelling and convincing. The Noise Silence Makes represents what is best about religious studies: its ability to analyze apparently nonreligious dynamics in productive ways through the accumulated tools of ritual analysis. A tour de force." - Joseph Hellweg, author of (Hunting the Ethical State: The Benkadi Movement of Cote d'Ivoire)
