In this well-researched and accessibly written book, Paul Glen Grant echoes perhaps what indigenous African Christians have always intuited: African Christianity rising, even in its fastest growing wing, is not a twenty-first or even a twentieth-century phenomenon. What is observed continent-wide, and even in diaspora as an evangelical charismatic Pentecostal wave in African Christianity, has its seedbed in the nineteenth-century missionary movement, at least as the case in Ghana suggests.
Based on archival work both abroad and in Ghana, Grant traces the history of missionary work and especially missionary interaction with indigenous cultures and rulers among the Akwapem (the bastion of Basel faith), demonstrating that what we see as enchantment even among Protestants, which spills into the periphery of Evangelical Pentecostal ecclesial spheres, is really a continuation of the mutual work of both African indigenous and Basel missionaries. The project the book outlines is an attempt to explain the gap in the two moments of an obviously single event, and why there are two narratives that frame the moments.
In the first chapter, Grant maps the terrain, which “spans a thousand years” (27) and analyzes the history of the missionary movement in the Akwapem hills. Of note is the interaction of colonial powers and local rulers and the less than fulsome response to the Gospel until the publication of the Twi Bible, which allowed the indigenous people to make an intellectual connection to the lands of the Bible, thus bypassing “the German church history” in receptivity of the Gospel (50).
While the spread of the Gospel proceeded with a “punctuated equilibrium” (91), periods of growth interspersed with lags, Grant offers a compelling account, especially of the ways in which the indigenous peoples utilized the Christian faith as a tool for their survival as disparate ethnic groups, rather than as the spiritual life-changing message of transformation that missionary Christianity brought. It seems Christianity was as much a utility at its inception among the Akwapim and perhaps other indigenous groups as it is now. Grant's assessment helps account an unintended outcome of missionary work to which Grant devotes a chapter, “How Missionaries Became Shrine Priests,” and how some stations become sanctuaries for would-be converts running from slave raiders, local shrines priests, or other warring tribes, thus subtly shaping Christian faith in African psychospiritual mold and imposing what Grant aptly describes as “a cross-cultural dialect process by which Africans were actively imposing a social category upon the church” (175).
Of special interest, and in line with African sociocultural life, is the inescapable issue of what to do with belief in the spirit world and especially that of spirit possession, which, Grant notes, “accentuated differences between European and African outlook on the nature of the self … and a gap in between nineteenth-century and [New Testament] ways of thinking” (181). The process of reconstituting and hence integrating a possessed person into the social world took a communal form, not unlike during New Testament times; creation of places of refuge, called Salems (many of which still dot the landscape of Ghana today), added extra protection from the vengeance of the gods against new converts (180). The confrontations between shrine priests and new converts to the Christian faith are another dimension of the history of Christianity in Ghana, which would bear testimony to the gap between the reception of the faith among the indigenous people and the missionaries. The kinds of incidents raised by these demonstrations of power by the early converts in the nineteenth century underscore the similarity between the tenor of early Christian faith and that of new Pentecostal charismatic faith in the twenty-first century. And yet there is a noticeable hiatus between the earliest expression of Christianity in Ghana and what is currently observed. Much of the book is thus an attempt at answering the question of the long lapse between these two moments of the faith in Ghana.
Whether or not Grant answers his own query satisfactorily is for each reader who engages this well-documented history to determine. But even the opportunity the book affords readers to reevaluate the history of African Christian missionary stories by looking for the gaps that elide the role of the indigenous peoples in their apprehension of the Gospel, especially in how they reinterpret and appropriate it for their needs, makes this a worthwhile read.
