“Whom Do Men Say that I Look Like?”: Representing Christ and Christian Personae in Ghana

Abstract

From the earliest attempts to spread Christianity in Ghana, European missionaries used religious art as an important tool for spreading ideas about the Christian faith. This was particularly so for the Catholics and Anglicans who have long-established traditions of religious iconography. Initially this art was highly Eurocentric in that Christ and Christian personae were represented as Caucasians. In the 1960s the need for what was described as inculturation, “the ongoing and critical dialogue between faith and culture,” challenged this tradition, and there were a number of attempts to make religious art, especially in Catholic churches in Ghana, more Afrocentric. This article looks at how this switch from a Eurocentric religious art to an Afrocentric inspiration developed, and at the reaction on the part of Ghanaian Christians to what Afrocentric clergymen in the United States have described as an attempt to “dehonkify Christ.”