Sermons and Ceremonies
The Emmanuel Eye Center sits in a pristine white building two steps down from our hostel and across from Doris and Dan's. It is an anticlimactic establishment on our roundabout, and I have wondered for the past four weeks how an eye center in ghana got such a clean, nice, gated building. It was not until last sunday that I saw, peering through the opened gate, a few dozen people sitting quietly and listening attentively to a man standing above them with a microphone. The Emmanuel Eye Center, I realized, is also a church.
And it seems that every time a nice, neat, concrete building stands out among the packs of shacks, it is inevitably a church. Presbyterian. Episcopal. Methodist. Anglican. Baptist. Charismatic (that one's new to me). Catholic. The churches, along with Shell and Western Union, are doing well in Ghana.
I have attended a couple church services so far (my search for subjects knows no bounds), and I have found them entirely confusing. The preacher screams into a microphone. The content of his sermon is unintelligible to me. The congregants follow the service actively, breaking into a "Hallelujah!" here and there. There is music, sometimes there is dancing; and there is always a big pot for offerings, inevitably full by the end of the service. It's lively, it's colorful, it's loud, and it's got a whole lot of "Jesus". But at the end of the day the precise take-home message remains unclear to me. According to the little I understood of these sermons, and to the weekly Christian paper here, it sounds like Christians in Ghana are told to pray an awful lot.
My husband lied to me about his faith and has disappeared and turned off his cell phone, what shall I do? Pray. My child has been sick for over a week, what shall I do? Pray. My business isn't turning any profit, what shall I do? Pray.
I guess this religious perspective on life would not bother me all that much if every single part of Ghanaian society was not infused with it and praying was not the first obvious alternative to people's woes. All the retail vendors lined up on the side of Accra's streets seem to compete for the most ridiculous religious references on their storefronts. By His Grace Cleaners. Glory Tires. Consuming Fire Fast Food and Catering Services. God Is Great Beauty Salon. I used to think that Nyame was a really important politician I did not know about because that name also appears on every storefront and tro-tro window. Last week, however, I learned that Nyame was merely the Twi word for God.
To be fair - and scientific as us political scientists are - I had to balance out my flirtation with Christianity with an encounter with Islam. Hence we could not refuse an invitation to a Muslim Yoruba wedding last Sunday at the Lebanon House Club. I did not know what to expect of course, but was told that there would be plenty of people and was thus hoping to blend in discreetly on the sidelines or in the background.
When we arrived, we were directed straight to the stage to sit with all the Al-Hajis, next to the bride and groom. We sat down to face an audience of 200 men in robes, staring right back at us. After an hour of people watching and introductions and kneelings and greetings, and after the 3.30pm prayer, the ceremony began. In a blend of Hausa, Yoruba and English, the Imam declared a minimum monetary amount, launching the "Donation Auction" section of the wedding. Audience members came up to donate money while a band of drummers praised each Al-Haji around us in hopes of extracting a 5,000 cedi bill (about 50 cents) out of them. Once the minimum amount was achieved, and we realized this money was going to the Imam and not the newlyweds, we proceeded to the "Refreshments" section of the ceremony, where meat and rice and meat and meat and meat were served. The men and women sat on separate sides of a large square; we, however, were told to sit with all the men at the VIP table, where we were served first. Apparently two obrunis from America can transcend all religious customs here.
This was no random Muslim wedding. This was a high-society Muslim wedding. There must have been a good two thousand guests there; and the MC, who happened to be my contact to all this, invited us two obrunis on stage to introduce my research and the purpose of our presence. When he handed the microphone to me, I tried out one of the many Yoruba greetings I learned last quarter at Stanford: "E Kaasan!" Fortunately for me, greetings are tremendously important in the Yoruba tradition: no conversation truly begins without at least two backs-and-forths of greetings. So my pitiful attempt was enough to delight many a guest and an "aaaahhhh!" of surprise buzzed through the crowd. This, too, is fieldwork?
Later, the bride and groom came into the square to dance and receive, literally, showers of money. By the end of the night, a hoard of kids in torn t-shirts and shorts zigzagged around the labyrinth of tables, scavenging for leftover food.
Blatant income inequalities aside, however, the ceremony - filled with music, colorful Yoruba and Hausa attires, and many many greetings - was a truly and uniquely beautiful experience.
Though I couldn't stop wondering, throughout the night, how many other wives the groom had waiting for him back home.
And it seems that every time a nice, neat, concrete building stands out among the packs of shacks, it is inevitably a church. Presbyterian. Episcopal. Methodist. Anglican. Baptist. Charismatic (that one's new to me). Catholic. The churches, along with Shell and Western Union, are doing well in Ghana.
I have attended a couple church services so far (my search for subjects knows no bounds), and I have found them entirely confusing. The preacher screams into a microphone. The content of his sermon is unintelligible to me. The congregants follow the service actively, breaking into a "Hallelujah!" here and there. There is music, sometimes there is dancing; and there is always a big pot for offerings, inevitably full by the end of the service. It's lively, it's colorful, it's loud, and it's got a whole lot of "Jesus". But at the end of the day the precise take-home message remains unclear to me. According to the little I understood of these sermons, and to the weekly Christian paper here, it sounds like Christians in Ghana are told to pray an awful lot.
My husband lied to me about his faith and has disappeared and turned off his cell phone, what shall I do? Pray. My child has been sick for over a week, what shall I do? Pray. My business isn't turning any profit, what shall I do? Pray.
I guess this religious perspective on life would not bother me all that much if every single part of Ghanaian society was not infused with it and praying was not the first obvious alternative to people's woes. All the retail vendors lined up on the side of Accra's streets seem to compete for the most ridiculous religious references on their storefronts. By His Grace Cleaners. Glory Tires. Consuming Fire Fast Food and Catering Services. God Is Great Beauty Salon. I used to think that Nyame was a really important politician I did not know about because that name also appears on every storefront and tro-tro window. Last week, however, I learned that Nyame was merely the Twi word for God.
To be fair - and scientific as us political scientists are - I had to balance out my flirtation with Christianity with an encounter with Islam. Hence we could not refuse an invitation to a Muslim Yoruba wedding last Sunday at the Lebanon House Club. I did not know what to expect of course, but was told that there would be plenty of people and was thus hoping to blend in discreetly on the sidelines or in the background.
When we arrived, we were directed straight to the stage to sit with all the Al-Hajis, next to the bride and groom. We sat down to face an audience of 200 men in robes, staring right back at us. After an hour of people watching and introductions and kneelings and greetings, and after the 3.30pm prayer, the ceremony began. In a blend of Hausa, Yoruba and English, the Imam declared a minimum monetary amount, launching the "Donation Auction" section of the wedding. Audience members came up to donate money while a band of drummers praised each Al-Haji around us in hopes of extracting a 5,000 cedi bill (about 50 cents) out of them. Once the minimum amount was achieved, and we realized this money was going to the Imam and not the newlyweds, we proceeded to the "Refreshments" section of the ceremony, where meat and rice and meat and meat and meat were served. The men and women sat on separate sides of a large square; we, however, were told to sit with all the men at the VIP table, where we were served first. Apparently two obrunis from America can transcend all religious customs here.
This was no random Muslim wedding. This was a high-society Muslim wedding. There must have been a good two thousand guests there; and the MC, who happened to be my contact to all this, invited us two obrunis on stage to introduce my research and the purpose of our presence. When he handed the microphone to me, I tried out one of the many Yoruba greetings I learned last quarter at Stanford: "E Kaasan!" Fortunately for me, greetings are tremendously important in the Yoruba tradition: no conversation truly begins without at least two backs-and-forths of greetings. So my pitiful attempt was enough to delight many a guest and an "aaaahhhh!" of surprise buzzed through the crowd. This, too, is fieldwork?
Later, the bride and groom came into the square to dance and receive, literally, showers of money. By the end of the night, a hoard of kids in torn t-shirts and shorts zigzagged around the labyrinth of tables, scavenging for leftover food.
Blatant income inequalities aside, however, the ceremony - filled with music, colorful Yoruba and Hausa attires, and many many greetings - was a truly and uniquely beautiful experience.
Though I couldn't stop wondering, throughout the night, how many other wives the groom had waiting for him back home.
posted by cla at 2:14 AM
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