Jan G. Platvoet

THE AKAN BELIEVER AND HIS RELIGIONS

Ch. 17 in: Pieter Hendrik Vrijhof & Jacques Waardenburg (eds.) 1979, Official and Popular Religion: Analysis of a Theme for Religious Studies. The Hague/Paris/New York: Mouton Publishers, 544-604

Summary

To many observers missionary Christianity stands indicted of attempting to cut the Akan believers away from their roots in traditional culture and religion. It is, however, also clear that the missionary churches, though they now dominate the religious scene, have failed in that attempt. They have not captured the exclusive allegiance of those they register as their members. Many of them ‘owe allegiance to more than one religion at the same time’. This basic fact in the religious situation of the Akan makes an analysis of it in terms of the concepts ‘official/popular religion’ irrelevant and misleading, as will become clear from this study. However, most of the materials that I use in this article belong to the well researched field of the relationships of the Christian churches to the traditional culture and religion and were obtained by observers who worked from an explicit or implicit ‘official/popular religion’ framework of analysis. Their innate tendency to draw any new interpreter back into this one-sided, because one-way, analysis can be counteracted by dealing with them in terms of the wider issue of the encounter of religions. To achieve that, one must also draw on materials from the little-researched field of the relations of the traditional Akan religion to the immigrant religions, and focus on the ways in which individual Akan believers relate themselves to the several religions that are endemic now in their society.