Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-t5tsf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T13:29:10.837Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ghanaian Christianity and Popular Entertainment: Full Circle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

John Collins
John Collins*
Affiliation:
University of Ghana
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In this paper I look at the relationship between Christianity and popular entertainment in Ghana over the last 100 years or so. Imported Christianity was one of the seminal influences on the emergence of local popular music, dance, and drama. But Christianity in turn later became influenced by popular entertainment, especially in the case of the local African separatist churches that began to incorporate popular dance music, and in some cases popular theatre. At the same time unemployed Ghanaian commercial performing artists have, since the 1980s, found a home in the churches. To begin this examination of this circular relationship between popular entertainment and Christianity in Ghana we first turn to the late nineteenth century.

The appearance of transcultural popular performance genres in southern and coastal Ghana in the late nineteenth century resulted from a fusion of local music and dance elements with imported ones introduced by Europeans. Very important was the role of the Protestant missionaries who settled in southern. Ghana during the century, establishing churches, schools, trading posts, and artisan training centers. Through protestant hymns and school songs local Africans were taught to play the harmonium, piano, and brass band instruments and were introduced to part harmony, the diatonic scale, western I- IV- V harmonic progressions, the sol-fa notation and four-bar phrasing.

There were two consequences of these new musical ideas. Firstly a tradition of vernacular hymns was established from the 1880s and 1890s, when separatist African churches (such as the native Baptist Church) were formed in the period of institutional racism that followed the Berlin Conference of 1884/85. Secondly, and of more importance to this paper, these new missionary ideas helped to establish early local popular Highlife dance music idioms such as asiko (or ashiko), osibisaaba, local brass band “adaha” music and “palmwine” guitar music. Robert Sprigge (1967:89) refers to the use of church harmonies and suspended fourths in the early guitar band Highlife composition Yaa Amponsah, while David Coplan (1978:98-99) talks of the “hybridisation” of church influences with Akan vocal phrasing and the preference of singing in parallel thirds and sixths in the creation of Highlife.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 31 , 2004 , pp. 407 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acquah, Ione, Accra Survey. A Social Survey of the capital of Ghana, formerly called the Gold Coast, undertaken for the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1953-1956 (London, 1958).Google Scholar
Agordo, Alexander Akorlie, “Contemporary African Music in the Ghanaian Church,” paper read at the Nordic African Institute conference “Playing with Identities in Contemporary Music in Africa, Turku/Abo Finland” (Turku, 2000).Google Scholar
Akyeampong, Emmanuel, Drink, Power and Cultural Change. A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana c. 1800 to Recent Times (Oxford, 1996).Google Scholar
Arlt, Veit, “Der Tanz der Christen: Zu den Anfängen der populären Musik an der Goldküste, ca. 1860-1930,” Jahrbuch für Europäische Überseegeschichte 4(2004), 151–90.Google Scholar
Asimeng, Max, The Social Structure of Ghana (Tema, 1981).Google Scholar
Asante-Darko, Nimrod Kwasi, and van der Geest, Sjaak, “Male Chauvinism: Men and Women in Ghanaian Highlife Songs” in Oppong, Christine, ed., Female and Male in West Africa (London, 1983), 242–55.Google Scholar
Baëta, C.G., Prophetism in Ghana: a Study in Some “Spiritual” Churches (London, 1962).Google Scholar
Bame, Kwabena N., “Comic Play in Ghana,” African Arts 4(1968),Google Scholar
Bame, Kwabena N., “Contemporary Comic Plays in Ghana” (M.A., University of Western Ontario, 1969).Google Scholar
Bame, Kwabena N., Come to Laugh. African Traditional Theatre in Ghana (New York, 1985).Google Scholar
Barber, Karin, “Popular Arts in Africa,” African Studies Review 30(1987), 1–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barber, Karin, Collins, John E., and Ricard, Alain, West African Popular Theatre (Bloomington, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boonzajer-Flaes, Robert, Brass Unbound: Secret Children of the Colonial Brass Band (Amsterdam, 2002).Google Scholar
Brempong, Owusu, “Akan Highlife in Ghana: Songs of Cultural Transition,” PhD., Indiana University 1984.Google Scholar
Christensen, J.B. “The Adoptive Functions of Fanti Priesthood” in Bascom, W.R. and Herskovits, M.J., eds., Continuity and Change in African Cultures (Chicago, 1962), 257–78.Google Scholar
Cole, Catherine M., “Reading Blackface in West Africa: Wonders Taken for Signs,” Critical Inquiry 23(1996), 183–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, John E., “Comic Opera in Ghana,” African Arts 9(1976), 50–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, John E., and Richards, Paul, “Popular Music in West Africa“ in Frith, Simon, ed., World Music, Politics and Social Change (New York, 1989), 12–46.Google Scholar
Collins, John E., West African Pop Roots (Philadelphia, 1992).Google Scholar
Collins, John E., Highlife Time: The Story of the Ghanaian Concert Party, West African Highlife and Related Popular Music Styles (Accra, 1994).Google Scholar
Collins, John E., “The Ghanaian Concert Party: African Popular Entertainment at the Cross Roads,” PhD., SUNY-Buffalo, 1994.Google Scholar
Collins, John E., Paper on the African Music Industry. For the June 20th 2000 Workshop of the World Bank on Developing the Music Industry in Africa. Available from the Policy Science Center, 127 Wall St. Room 314, BOX 208215, New Haven, CT. 06529-8215.Google Scholar
Comaroff, Jean and John, L., “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony” American Ethnologist 26(1999), 279–303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coplan, David B., “Go to my Town Cape Coast! The Social History of Ghanaian Highlife” in Nettl, Bruno, Eight Urban Musical Cultures: Tradition and Change (Chicago, 1978), 96–114.Google Scholar
Field, Margaret, Search for Security: an Ethno-Psychiatric Study of Rural Ghana (London, 1960).Google Scholar
Peter, Garlick, African Traders and Economic Development on Ghana (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar
Gifford, Paul, African Christianity: Its Public Role (London, 1988).Google Scholar
Gilbert, Michelle, “Concert Parties: Paintings and Performance,” Journal of Religions in Africa 28(1998), 62–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goody, Esther, “The Fostering of Children in Ghana,” Journal of Sociology 2(1966), 26–33.Google Scholar
Hill, Richard, “Possession-Trance and the Music of the Blekete Cult of South-East Ghana,” M.A., Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.Google Scholar
Meyer, Birgit, “Popular Ghanaian Cinema and ‘African Heritage’,” Africa Today 46(1999), 93–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nketia, J.H. Kwabena, “The Gramophone and Contemporary African Music in the Gold Coast,” Proceedings of the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research 5(1956), 189–200.Google Scholar
Nketia, J.H. Kwabena, “Modern Trends in Ghana Music,” African Music 4(1957), 11–13.Google Scholar
Nyame, E.K., Song Book (Accra, 1955).Google Scholar
Ranger, Terence, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma (Berkeley, 1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alain, Ricard, “The Concert Party as a Genre: The Happy Stars of Lome,” Research in African Literatures 5(1974), 165–79.Google Scholar
Sprigge, Robert, “The Ghanaian Highlife: Notation and Sources,” Music in Ghana 2(1961) 70–94.Google Scholar
Sutherland, Efua, The Original Bob: The Story of Bob Johnson, Ghana's Ace Comedian (Accra, 1970).Google Scholar
Twumasi, Patrick, Medical Systems in Ghana: A Study of Medical Sociology (Tema, 1975).Google Scholar
Van der Geest, Sjaak, “The Image of Death in Akan Highlife Songs,” Research in African Literatures 11(1980), 145–74.Google Scholar
Waterman, Christopher, Juju: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (Chicago 1990).Google Scholar
Yankah, Kwesi, “The Akan Highlife Song: A Medium for Cultural Reflection or Deflection?” Research in African Literatures 15(1984), 568–82.Google Scholar