Eyes on You while Your Eyes Are on God: State Surveillance of Religion in Ghana under the Provisional National Defence Council Regime

Abstract

This paper discusses Ghana’s erstwhile Religious Bodies Registration Law (PNDC Law 221) passed by the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in 1989 and the associated bans placed on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormon sects. First, the paper analyzes how the state’s surveillance moves engendered lateral and anti-surveillance practices. Second, Eric Stoddart’s concept of (in)visibility is used as an analytical framework to track how both the surveilling entity (the state and community surveillers) and the surveilled (religious bodies and their members) actively partook in constructing the visibility and invisibility of the surveilled. The paper concludes that the state’s theoretical ambition of religious surveillance was not fully matched in practice, as implementation was mediated by a pragmatic blend of “seeing” and “unseeing.” Also, the response of the religious sects to the surveillance involved a strategic pursuit of simultaneous visibility and invisibility.