Healing and Power in Ghana: Early Indigenous Expressions of Christianity. By Paul Glen Grant

Abstract

Healing and Power in Ghana is a remarkable historical piece. Paul Grant sets out to use historical reports on the Basel Mission in the Ghanaian Akuapem kingdom to argue that indigeneity of the Christian faith started long before the advent of the African Initiated Churches. The book makes three claims; first, that a form of Christianity that is epistemologically and ontologically close to Pentecostalism developed a half-century before the emergence of the Pentecostal movement in West Africa. Second, that mid-nineteenth-century Christianity in the Akuapem kingdom was an indigenous product, not an importation from the West. Third, indigenous Christianity was a pervasive and sustained attempt that incorporated the missionaries into the emerging program. The introduction refutes a general assertion that West African Pentecostalism is an importation. Chapter 1 advances the argument that mid-nineteenth-century political, social, and economic upheavals in the Akuapem kingdom rendered people’s religious apparatus for dealing with life’s eventualities...