Abstract
Heaven, according to a popular painting by an anonymous Ghanaian artist, is a big city up in the sky, with modern skyscrapers and office towers, surrounded by trees and flowers. In the painting Judgement Day, Jesus arrives in the blue sky and has his angel select the good from the bad. There is a signpost indicating that heaven is up the stairs, whereas hell and the world are on the ground floor, so to speak. Those dressed in white climb up, whereas those dressed in black—a number of youngsters and a man wearing a Fez—are bound to end up in hellfire guarded by a monster that obviously represents the devil. The picture, of course, refers to passages in the book of Revelation and is reminiscent of the depiction of Jerusalem as the heavenly city in popular Protestant imagination and literature, which was introduced to Africa by Pietist missions in the course of the nineteenth century (e.g., John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the well-known lithograph of the Broad and the Narrow Path 1). What is new, and interesting in this image, however, is heaven’s distinctive high modernity, with skyscrapers featured as icons of pride and emblems of prosperity.
This article was originally published in Culture and Religion 3 (2002): 67–87. Permissions to reprint granted by Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Available at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals.
The data on which this essay is based have been collected during a research project conducted in the framework of the research program “Globalization and the Construction of Communal Identities” sponsored by the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) between 1995 and 2000, and my PIONIER research program “Modern Mass Media, Religion and the Imagination of Communities” sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I would like to thank Gerd Baumann, Brian Larkin, Peter van Rooden, Rafael Sanchez, Jojada Verrips, and Marken de Witte for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Notes
Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 31ff.
Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
See also Ruth Fratani-Marshall, “Prospérité miraculeuse: Les pasteurs pentecötistes et l’argent de Dieu au Nigeria,” Politique Africaine 82 (2001): 24–44.
Birgit Meyer, “Christian Mind and Worldly Matters: Religion and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast,” Journal of Material Culture 2.3 (1997): 311–37.
Peter Van der Veer, Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996); Meyer, Translating the Devil 1–14.
Rosalind I. J. Hackett, “Charismatic/Pentecostal Appropriation of Media Technologies in Nigeria and Ghana,” Journal of Religion in Africa 28.3 (1998): 1–19.
Brian Larkin, “Theaters of the Profane: Cinema and Colonial Urbanism,” Visual Antropology Review 14.2 (1998/99): 55.
Karin Barber, “Preliminary Notes on Audiences in Africa,” Africa 67.3 (1997): 347–362.
Paul Nugent, Big Men, Small Boys and Politics in Ghana: Power Ideology and the Burden of History (Accra: Asempa Publishers, 1996), 163ff.
See also Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes From the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26.2 (1999): 21.
See Jojada Verrips and Birgit Meyer, “Kwaku’s Car: The Struggles and Stories of a Ghanaian Long-Distance Taxi Driver,” in Car Cultures Daniel Miller, ed. (Oxford: Berg, 2001).
See Lawrence R. Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 5.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
Carola Lentz and Paul Nugent, eds., Ethnicity in Ghana: The Limits of Invention. (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illustrations (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 236.
James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
David Morley and Kevin Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries (London & New York: Routledge, 1995); Karla Poewe, ed., Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994).
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© 2003 S. Brent Plate
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Meyer, B. (2003). Pentecostalism, Prosperity, and Popular Cinema in Ghana. In: Plate, S.B. (eds) Representing Religion in World Cinema. Religion/Culture/Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10034-4_7
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