A01=Mariam Goshadze
Accra
Accra Metropolitan Assembly
Africa
African urbanity
and Culture Ghana
Arts
Author_Mariam Goshadze
British Gold Coast
Category=GTM
Category=JBSL1
Category=JHMC
Category=NHH
Category=QRAX
culturalization
Daily Graphic
Drum Wars
Environmental Protection Agency
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Ga community
Ga Traditional Council
Ghana
Gold Coast
H?m?w?
Homofest Ghana
loud worship
Ministry of Tourism
noise pollution
noise regulation
Nuisance Control Task Force
nuisance ordinances
ocularcentrism
Pentecostal Charismatic Christianity
PentecostalCharismatic Christianity
religio-culturalization
religious sound
right to religion
ritual silence
Sankofa
secularism
sonic tensions
sonic theology
traditional religions
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031413
- Weight: 445g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 May 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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For generations, the Ga community in Accra, Ghana, has enforced an annual citywide ban on noisemaking during an important religious festival. In the 1990s and 2000s, this “ban on drumming” became a point of conflict between the Ga people and the newly popular Pentecostal/Charismatic churches, which refused to subdue their loud worship during the ban. Although the Ghanaian state constitutionally and institutionally grants superior status to Christianity and Islam, it ruled in favor of the Ga community, which emphasized its “cultural” rather than religious rights. In The Noise Silence Makes, Mariam Goshadze traces the history of noise regulation in Accra, showing how the Ga people have adopted colonial mechanisms of noise control to counter Pentecostal/Charismatic dominance over Accra’s soundscape. Goshadze shows how the drumming ban represents a reversal of the top-down model of noise regulation and illuminates the reality of Ghanaian secularity, in which the state unofficially collaborates with indigenous religious authorities to control sound. In so doing, Goshadze counters the tendency to push African “traditional religions” to the margins, demonstrating that they are instrumental players in contemporary African urbanity.
Mariam Goshadze is Assistant Professor in the Study of Religion at Leipzig University.
