Don’t marginalize indigenous belief systems
Ghana transitioned to a republic under its first President Kwame Nkrumah in 1960 and commemorated July 1 as Republic Day and a statutory public holiday.
Under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government the holiday was adjusted and moved. The current National Democratic Congress (NDC) government brought back the July 1 public holiday, highlighting it as National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving.
The public holiday was moved to Friday, July 4. The government decided that the nation needs prayers, and rightly so, and at the same time expressed gratitude and blessings for a peaceful Ghana.
So, on Tuesday, July 1, a partially prayerful country solemnly observed the day throughout Ghana. “Partially,” because we thought the event would embrace Ghanaians of all faiths who had directly or inadvertently contributed their share of development in the country.
But we were wrong!
Only the two dominant religions in the country – Christianity and Islam – were invited by the government to spearhead the event with sermon and prayer. Both are foreign religions that were foisted on Ghana and Africa by Europeans for their own parochial interests.
In a move characteristic of Ghanaians who detest their own but glorify anything and everything foreign, including but not limited to diet, fashion, and language, practitioners of traditional and indigenous religion were conspicuously left out of the religious equation in the country.
Marginalizing other faiths is retrogressive, and akin to marginalizing contributions to the socioeconomic and political discourse by those who cannot read, write, or speak the English language. Both hamper national development in diverse ways.
Amandla thinks this is yet another slight to the premier religion that our ancestral belief hinged on. Ghana is a multicultural and multi-ethnic nation, and freedom of worship is enshrined in its constitution.
Early Ghanaian leaders up to the time of President John Agyekum Kuffour honored Ghana’s State Protocol of religious inclusiveness. On the flip side, fairly recent leaders have consistently and deliberately shunned traditional religion as paganistic and fetishistic, ignoring its spiritual contributions to the nation.
This discriminatory practice reared its ugly head with the emergence of “holier than thou” charismatic and one-man churches. Traditional orthodox religions such as Christianity and Islam and their various sects had hitherto coexisted peacefully with indigenous faiths.
To not embrace traditional beliefs as part of national spiritual development is not only an insult to our ancestors (and by extension to ourselves), but it stymies national development in the grand scheme of things.
The only group of people who have no business at the National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving session are atheists.
It is worrying to note that the two dominant foreign religions in Ghana have largely taken over the thought patterns of not only Ghanaians but Africans in general.
With Western education as the bedrock of “enlightenment,” to eloquently speak and/or skillfully write a foreign language such as English is erroneously equated with knowledge and wisdom.
In the current dispensation of Ghanaian religiosity, foreign is divine and indigenous is devilish.
Thus, to be Christianized or Islamized – on the average – typifies a Western or foreign-type structured classroom education, whereas indigenous and traditional believers are looked upon through a blurred, opaque lens as uneducated and uncouth.
Traditional religion is therefore the preserve of the non-educated and backward. But it was this “backwardness” that allowed our ancestors to sleep or run errands leaving their doors ajar and unlocked.
Today, with supposedly superior and divine foreign religion at every corner in the country, people sleep with deadbolts, Yale locks, barbed wires, and attack dogs for safety and security. Japan is neither a Christian nor a Muslim nation, but a bicycle may be left unchained for hours without it being stolen.
A few years ago, some church leaders, in an attempt to stem galamsey (the illegal activity of gold mining), embarked on a trail deep into forest riverbeds to pray. We do not know what came out of it, but we know that the pollution of water bodies through galamsey activities has rather intensified.
On the flip side, before the advent of Christianity, indigenous belief discouraged people from entering virgin forests and river bodies on traditional sacred days, and no one would dream of clearing and deforesting lands around river bodies.
Amandla thinks the National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving is not complete without the inclusiveness of the nation’s foremost belief.
Current and successive governments must be an all-embracing one, religiously speaking. After all, several meats do not spoil the broth. The vehicles to get into His kingdom are diverse.
We hoped that the prayers offered on July 1 would reflect a change of attitude of the masses and a diminishment of corruption by people in places of authority.
In retrospect, we would suggest another Day of National Cleanup and Cleansing to get rid of the filth that has engulfed major cities in Ghana and a spiritual cleansing to alter our warped and corrupt minds for a better nation.
A.B. Ellis wrote in his 1887 work The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa:
The practice of propitiating by offering beings who are believed to dwell in the woods or mountains, the rivers or the seas, is not fetishism; nor is the worship or reverence paid to certain animals by particular tribes fetishism. Neither can the worship of idols be so termed, for the idol is merely the representation of an absent god, or the symbol of an idea, and has of itself no supernatural or superhuman power or quality. The confusion which has resulted from the improper use of the “fetish” is extreme, and is now probably irreparable.