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 HƆMƆWƆ Festival  108
6. Let Us Offer Thanks for the Nation of Ghana: Hɔmɔwɔ as a Civil Ceremony of Thanksgiving  133
Conclusion: Layered Epistemologies of Contemporary Accra  153
Acknowledgments  159
Glossary  161
Notes  163
References  177
Index  193