To Pray or Not to Pray: Politics, Medicine, and Conversion among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana, 1929-1939

To Pray or Not to Pray: Politics, Medicine, and Conversion among the LoDagaa of NorthernGhana, 1929-1939Author(s): Sean HawkinsSource: Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol.31, No. 1 (1997), pp. 50-85Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485325 .

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To Pray or Not To Pray: Politics, Medicine, and Conversion among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana, 1929-1939

Sean Hawkins

R surnm En 1932, la societe de Missionnaires d'Afrique a etd le timoin d'une des vagues de conversion les plus dramatiques de l'histoire du Christianisme evangelique en Afrique de l'ouest. En juillet de cette

annee-lad, un groupe de villages installks autour d'une mission, situde dans le coin nord-ouest des Territories du Nord de la C6te d'Or, ont itd menaces par la skcheresse. Les representants ont alors demande aux missionnaires de prier pour qu'il pleuve. Ce qui a ete gentiment fait. La pluie a suivi et avec elle un nombre 4tonnant de convertes. Quinze ans plus tard, les missionnaires se declaraient responsables d'un quart de toutes les ames des environs immediats. Cependant, la plupart d'entre elles s'etaient ralliees a l'dglise immediatement apr&s l'incident. Les etudes disponibles sont incapables d'expliquer exactement pourquoi les LoDagaa se sont convertis en si grand nombre au ddbut des annees 1930; en effet, on semble avoir largement ignore les hypotheses historiques qui restent inexplories. La raison pour laquelle ces etudes on en majorite nid l'histoire est qu'elles ont cherche i une compatibilite entre la pensde religieuse des LoDagaa et la doctrine chritienne. Cet article, qui affirme que l'histoire est plus importante que la thdologie pour expliquer les conversions au sein des LoDagaa, examine dans quelle mesure le malaise politique actuel rdsultat du colonialisme a provoque cette reaction d'une force extraordinaire et la maniere dont les LoDagaa ont vepu les soins medicaux offerts par les missionaires.

Introduction In 1932 the Society of Missionaries of Africa witnessed one of the most dramatic waves of conversion in the history of evangelical Christianity in West Africa. The breakthrough occurred among the LoDagaal at a mission station in the village of Jirapa, part of

50



Hawkins: To Pray or not to Pray 51

the Catholic diocese of Navrongo, situated in the British protec- torate known as the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast. By June 1932, after almost three years of intensive work, most of it medical, the mission could claim five hundred followers, a not inconsiderable success, but modest compared with their subsequent breakthrough (Rapports Annuels 1930-31, 204). Despite the gradual acceptance displayed towards the missionaries, it was not until the next month that they began to have the remarkable success at conversion that was to lead to the mission becoming "a singular case in the history ... of the Missionaries of Africa"

(Bekye 1991, 270). But in July 1932, drought threatened many villages in the area, and representatives came to the missionaries at Jirapa to request prayers for rain. The missionaries obliged and rain followed - and so, too, did an astounding number of converts.2

The small village of Jirapa became a regional center within weeks, attracting people from as far away as the adjoining French colony of Haute Volta. Thereafter, people occasionally came to Jirapa for rain, but primarily they sought cures for other afflictions - political and medical - rather than meteorological. By the end of 1932, the missionaries claimed several thousand converts in the region, almost all of them having been gained in the last six months of that year. Fifteen years later, in 1947, the Jirapa mission, with twenty-six outstations, was said to have been attending to seven thousand converts, among whom there were thirty-six catechists. At the same time, the neighboring mission at Nandom, opened in 1933, had thirteen thousand converts, thirty-eight outstations, and forty-one catechists.3 If these figures are taken at face value, then within fifteen years of the Jirapa incident, the White Fathers had laid claim to almost a quarter of all LoDagaa "souls" in the immediate vicinity of their stations, all within the administrative enclave known as Lawra District.4 Christianity came to be known as Ngwinsore, "the way of god," and anyone who entered the new cult through baptism was known as Mwinpuorobo, or Puor-puorbe, "one who prays" (McCoy 1988, 18, 312; The Diocese, Wa, March 1984: 3).

Catholic observers, who constitute the clear majority of those who have interpreted these events in writing, have devoted a great deal of attention to the rain incident, seeing it as evidence of God's revelation to the LoDagaa. The coincidence of rain following



52 CJAS / RCEA3I:I 1997

missionary prayers was obviously propitious for the evangelical program of missionaries, but while it explains its timing, it does not explain the scale of the sudden response. What attracted the LoDagaa in such large numbers to the missionaries? These same accounts have used the rain as an explanation for the spate of conversions which followed, as if the LoDagaa had also seen it as evidence of God's revelation to them. On this point most studies have proffered divine explanations, such as: "God's way of mani- festing or revealing himself to the Dagartis," "mystere de la grace de Dieu," "God's invitation of love," or "proof of God's special grace" (Der 1974, 52; Hebert 1976, 246; Naameh 1986, 5; McCoy 1988, 19).

These studies have also argued that the reaction which the missionary presence elicited was due to deep structural similarities between LoDagaa religious thought and Christian doctrine, making conversion little more than a case of identification (Der 1980; Der 1983, 226-35; Kuukure 1985; Angsotinge 1986, 44-46; Bekye 1991; Some 1992, 40). This approach has echoed the work of Jack Goody, the British anthropologist who made the LoDagaa into ethnographic celebrities (in the same company as the Nuer, Tallensi, Ndembu, Tiv, and Lugbara) in the annals of academic discourse on stateless or acephalous societies in Africa. Goody argued that the term "conversion" was inappropriate when dealing with the evangelization of the LoDagaa, preferring the term "identification" (1975, 102-05). Accordingly, adoption of Christianity did not represent the abandonment of one set of beliefs for another, but merely the rearticulation of indigenous ideas.

Precisely why the LoDagaa converted in such large numbers in the early 1930s cannot be ascertained from available studies; indeed, historical hypotheses appear to have been largely avoided and remain unexplored. The reason why most of these studies have denied history is that their authors have been interested in establishing commensurability between LoDagaa religious thought and Christian doctrine for various reasons: for Goody, as part of an argument over native agency which would not admit to external motivations for change; and for the local Catholic elite, in order to further the cause of inculturation (Hawkins 1996).

In their criticism of anthropology, G. Marcus and M. Fischer provided a cogent explanation for the attractions of such a




synchronic perspective, even after it came to be so heavily criti- cized:

The setting of ethnographic accounts in a timeless present does not arise from a blindness to history and the fact of continual social change, but rather is a trade off for the advantages that bracketing the flow of time and the influence of events offers in facilitating the structural analysis of systems of symbols and social relations (1986, 95).

Catholic academics and theologians have endeavored to take advantage of the same features of timeless analysis in order to argue that conversion among the LoDagaa had proceeded from a situation of religious commensurability (Hawkins 1996). However, the irony is that an historical analysis does satisfy the expectations (both in terms of agency and commensurability) of these synchronic studies, albeit in ways they did not anticipate.

Conversion was an indigenous movement, and there were strong similarities between LoDagaa beliefs and the practices of the missionaries, but not at the level where most studies have focused. Both Goody's analysis, as well as that of the local Catholic elite, have concentrated on the question of the relation- ship between the indigenous concept of a high god, Naangmin, and the God of Christianity, as if the movement toward Christianity was theocentric. Recently, Fischer has rejected the emphasis on the "intellectual theory" which Horton (1971) has advocated. Both Humphrey J. Fischer (1985) and R. Gray (1990) have suggested that studies of religious change in Africa have focused too much on issues of religious structure, ignoring more pressing and immediate cultural and psychological motivations.

These criticisms provide a needed corrective to the analysis of religious change among the LoDagaa during at least the first decade of evangelization, when theological concerns seem to have been quite secondary, although after that period there is evidence that conceptions of Naangmin did change (Hawkins 1996). But it would be wrong to reject the underlining cognitive processes which Horton has identified as part of the conversion process simply because the focus of LoDagaa converts was local. Just because the movement was not theocentric does not mean that the LoDagaa were not interested in "explanation / prediction / control" (Horton 1971, 1975, 1993). Historical evidence suggests an alternative dialogue during this earlier period, one inspired by



54 CJAS / RCEA 31:I 1997

political disaffection and outstanding existential concerns and not abstract questions of theology.

The tension between the synchronic structuralism of Catholic representations of this period and apparently radical implications which conversion entailed are very evident in many of these studies. The early missionaries were interested in main- taining the idea that their presence in no way undermined or threatened the colonial order. Since the 1960s, the indigenous Catholic elite has been interested in minimizing the implications of conversion, not to improve church-state relations, but to facilitate inculturation. However, it is clear that any analysis of these events must situate them within their historical contexts. If the wave of conversion was really only a matter of identification, then why did it occur? If LoDagaa and Catholic religious ideas were so similar, why did so many LoDagaa, even if only by a substantial minority, nominally break from the form and language of one set of ideas merely to adopt a different set of symbolic representations and rituals that meant the same thing?

Eyre-Smith, a former District Commissioner at Lawra and one of the two Catholic officers who had recommended that the White Fathers establish a mission among the LoDagaa, noted on hearing of these events: "it will not be denied that there must have been some very grave reason to cause these inarticulate people to forsake, on so vast a scale in this area, the religion and beliefs of centuries."5 With the exception of Goody's work, studies of "the missionary impact" have been made by co-religionists - Catholic academics and priests who form part of the local intellectual elite that Carola Lentz (1994ab) has studied - and only one, Peter Naameh (1986), has offered a strictly historical interpretation. This article argues that history is more important to understanding conversion among the LoDagaa than theology. Two main areas are examined. The first has to do with the degree to which the prevailing political malaise that colonialism had produced precipitated this unusually powerful reaction. The second relates to how the LoDagaa experienced the medical care which the missionaries offered.

Colonial Politics and Missionary Society The arrival of the White Fathers had been preceded by a generation of British political engineering during which an autocracy of




indigenous colonial appointees had exercised unprecedented powers. Abuses of the system of rule through warrant chiefs of the type the British had imposed in Southern Nigeria (Afigbo 1972), but known as sergeant-major chiefs in the Northern Territories, went largely unreported until the late 1920s, when Eyre-Smith was District Commissioner at Lawra. He discovered the chiefs had been ruthlessly exploiting their subjects, who were cowered and extremely reluctant to complain to an administration which did little else but support their appointees. In some instances, he argued, conditions approached those of slavery (Hawkins 1989, 42- 51; Hawkins 1996).

The reason such abuses had been possible was that the system of colonial chiefs did not accord with pre-colonial social arrange- ments. The main territorial unit of political life had been the tengaan, or earth shrines, which created areas of ritual interde- pendence and control. Each shrine had an officiant or tengaansob, who had been responsible for ensuring that edicts of the shrine, such as theft, were not violated (Goody 1957). However, the juris- diction of chiefs did not coincide with these areas of ritual sanc- tion, and Eyre-Smith felt that this had afforded license to chiefs in the exploitation of their subjects. People were no longer bound by the tengaan, which had been violated by colonial boundaries. This was particularly true of chiefs who presided over subjects from different noumenal jurisdictions or shrines and were not restricted by the edicts of these other shrines. "The fact that the outside power of the 'White Man' has set up a Chief irrespective of the existing organisation, has already in some cases set him beyond the religious sanctions or laws of his own community [tengaan]."6

The forceful "pacification" of the LoDagaa at the beginning of the century greatly expanded freedom and security of movement and communications within the region. The marginalization of the separate and independent tengaansob, and their displacement by a hierarchical and secular system of political office, extended political as well as social horizons. And, finally, the sudden and drastic pattern of labor migration, which the British instituted, created a wider consciousness of the world beyond that which had been possible during the pre-colonial period (Thomas 1973; Lentz and Erlmann 1989). Homogenizing and expansionist pressures displaced the highly fragmented patterns of the pre-colonial



56 CJAS / RCEA 3I:I 1997

period. A macrocosm of new colonial realities was replacing the disintegrating microcosm of most people's lives when the missionaries arrived.

Jirapa, however, became the focus of an even more sudden and dramatic social transformation. In the immediate aftermath of the rain incident, it became the largest congregation of people ever recorded in the region, and probably the largest ever to have occurred. Naameh has claimed that the British did not actually pacify the region because their methods consisted of the "forceful subjugation of a people and the imposition on them of the European rule and way of organising society" (1986, 328). He and other Catholic observers have claimed that it was actually the missionaries who began the "mystical" or "supernatural" pacification of the land, through the substitution of belief in God for fear of agencies such as the tengaan (McCoy 1988, 129; Bekye 1991, 294).

There is no doubt that the movement which followed the rain incident was unprecedented in terms of either its size or mobility. Twenty thousand people were visiting the Jirapa mission every month in the immediate aftermath of the rain incident (Rapports Annuels 1931-32, 147). By 1937, crowds of five to six thousand were a regular occurrence at Nandom, where a station had been opened four years earlier to deal with the strong reaction in the northern reaches of Lawra District. As one missionary wrote, "la mission des lors fut litt6ralement enhavie, prise d'assut. Monseigneur m'affirmait avoir vu lui-meme 15 000 personnes ai la mission un dimanche" (Germain 1937, 84-85). They came from a wide area and included speakers of various dialects of Dagaare, as well as some neighboring Sisala and Lobi.

The overtly political ramifications of the wave of mass conversion soon emerged after the rain incident. Following this extraordinary incident, delegations from settlements outside of Jirapa, and from as far away as the neighboring French colony (which was similarly afflicted), began arriving in Jirapa to be informed by the Superior of the mission, Father McCoy, that they could not expect rain if they continued to make sacrifices to indigenous shrines. In at least two settlements, where representatives had agreed to the missionaries' terms, but which had not experienced a similar meteorological miracle, recent converts soon began to impose the injunctions of the missionaries on their




non-Christian neighbors by destroying their shrines also. The inflammatory advice of the missionaries led to a series of confrontations between suddenly zealous Christian followers and less credulous pagans in several outlying settlements. Groups of Catholic supporters were reported to have destroyed shrines in these settlements shortly after the Jirapa incident.7

In August 1932, after the over-zealous iconoclasm of the previous month, several of the recent followers openly repudiated the legitimacy of the colonial chiefs and began defying their orders. One, Dapla of Bazim, was reported to have publicly declared that, "there are no more Chiefs now and no white men any longer but the White Fathers," and "they should not obey their headmen anymore."8 Following these remarks, a gang walked through the settlements around Bazim, carrying a red cloth on a stick, "giving out that the authority of the chiefs was at an end."9 Many followers discovered in the missionaries an alternative source of "white" (European) authority; indeed, the missionaries provided a rival colonial society with its own set of political allegiances. It should be noted that while there was usually only one colonial officer at Lawra, the administrative headquarters, there were at this time already three missionaries at Jirapa. And once this alternative source of authority had been discovered and, as it were, proven by the rain incident, long suppressed grievances were given a means of articulation.

At least two observers have noted that in the initial stages of movement, the missionaries, not God, were identified as the source of noumenal powers. As Archbishop Dery, the son of one of their first converts, later reflected:

The missionaries were indeed a puzzle to the people. The people did not know where they came from and what to make of them. The missionaries, unlike the British Colonial Officers, went among the people, visited them in their homes, dispensed medicine to cure their diseases (Dery 1979, 6-7; Der 1983, 57; McCoy 1988, 45-46).

Although the missionaries explained their successes, whether medical or meteorological, in terms of God, early converts saw the missionaries as the locus of the powers they had witnessed: "In the conversion process the attention was focused on the missionaries who demonstrated greater powers than the fetish priests and divinities, and not God, who is never thought of as the cause of sickness or drought" (Naameh 1986, 199).




Indeed, M. Paternot (1953, 133) had noted much the same when he wrote of the legends concerning the missionaries which quickly emerged. Such legends claimed that they had descended from the sky, were white, spoke Dagaare, cured illnesses, and resurrected the dead. All of these were particularly ironic given the White Fathers' policy of cultural adaptation, as it had been set forth in the nineteenth century by Cardinal Lavigerie. Although the consumption of millet beer and quotidian relations with the indigenous population were meant to establish trust and famil- iarity, unintentional aspects of their behavior created a sense of reverence and mystery in the minds of converts.

One of the main issues of antagonism between the administration and the missionaries was over the question of forced labor (by then, known officially as "Native Authority labor"), demanded by the chiefs of both pagans and Christians on Sundays (Der 1975, 54-55). The missionaries' stand on this, and related issues concerning the legitimate powers of the chiefs, gave converts the opportunity to defy the chiefs with some hope of success (because of missionary representation); alternatively, it gave the chiefs a cause of complaint against their once silent and largely passive opponents. Although officers naturally sided with the chiefs, having a strong antipathy against anything that threatened their political engineering, they were also careful not to offend the missionaries too much, realizing that the White Fathers were not without support outside the Northern Territories (Der 1974, 51).

Although Eyre-Smith had left the district for a posting in the Gold Coast Colony before the missionaries arrived, he had been kept apprised of conditions in his former district by migrant LoDagaa who passed through his station on their way to the mines. Commenting in 1933, he suggested that the "religious revolution" had been the result of "the revulsion of the people against the tyranny of the chiefs" who were "no longer bound by the former sanctions of the community." It was only natural, under these circumstances, that the commoners would seek "outside spiritual power" in order to afford themselves some sort of protection which was not available through the District Commissioner.10 The missionary alternative to the inequities of colonial politics in Lawra District was especially appealing because of its egalitarian structure, not just for men but also for




women. Following the rain incident, the colonial administration and

missionaries became direct rivals, representatives of different constituencies. However, successive District Commissioners were mistaken about whom they thought their constituents were. They took it upon themselves to defend what they saw as the vulnerable pagan against the zealous Christian when, more often than not, they were only protecting the interests of the chiefs. Commenting on the methods used by McCoy, the District Commissioner noted:

With true respect to the Catholic Faith ... some of the good Father's actions have been a trifle injudicious. Well aware that historically the coming of any new religion inevitably tends to undermine the old civil authority, by division of obediences, I yet feel that the under- mining must be carefully done in view of the fact that it is the Government's policy to reconstitute and strengthen this very authority. 11

The destruction of shrines in July 1932 had not undermined "the old civil authority"; it had been ignored by the administration for nearly thirty years and effectively marginalised and suppressed by the appointment of sergeant-major chiefs whom later officers naively or deliberately mistook to be part of an indigenously legitimate order. The chiefs were not concerned primarily with the threat this religious movement posed to indigenous practices; they ostensibly defended the latter because the same converts who carried out these attacks were also the agitators who were announcing that the era of the chiefs had come to an end. Indeed, the immediate attack on the shrines, while dramatic, was essen- tially profane rather than profound, executed out of a concern for rain rather than as a result of any deep doctrinal objection.

Missionaries strongly denied the political connotations of the conversion, as did their co-religionists in subsequent accounts. Father Barsalon, a colleague of McCoy at Jirapa, reported that the District Commissioner was worried about the prospects of a revolt, but that this was because of misinformation: "Quelques chefs plus ou moins musulmauis6s et mal intentionn6s, par le moyen de l'interprite, tout a leur d6votion, excitaieant ces craintes du Commissionaire en accusant les cat6chumenes des pires insubordinations" (Rapports Annuels 1934-35, 262). Yet he was willing to admit that the movement was not entirely reli-



60o CJAS / RCEA 31:I 1997

gious and that the stories of insubordination had not been fabri- cated.

Il est certain qu'un bon nombre de gens suivaient le mouvement par emballement et sans trop savoir pourquoi ni ce qu'ils voulaient; quelques-uns mime, dans l'espoir qu'en devenant "les enfants des Peres," ils se soustrairaient aux exactions des chefs et aux requisition et travaux par trop frequents de l'Administration: d'ou, en fait, quelques cas isoles d'insubordination envers les chefs (Rapports Annuels 1934-35, 262).

The missionaries offered many early converts a means of evading forced labor and other exactions (Naameh 1986, 196). Having denied a religious motivation for these isolated incidents, Barsalon went on to ascribe such acts to the exactions of the chiefs and the demands of the administration. He suggested that administrative complaints were perhaps the product of jealousy because so many people were flocking to the missionaries, whereas when- ever the District Commissioner visited a village, the people disap- peared, with the exception of the chiefs, a few elders, and their followers (Rapports Annuels 1934-35, 262). This observation belies the contention that the missionaries' greatest adversaries were sorcerers or polygamists and reveals that the missionaries were implicitly in competition with the colonial administration and the chiefs, with each side attempting their own forms of social engineering.12 As Benedict Der has noted,

It was not only a matter of the Christian faith and conduct being opposed to traditional religion and accepted customs, the more basic question of the authority of the chiefs vis-a-vis the Christians was brought into sharp focus (1983, 131-32).

Although the question arose with particular reference to Christians, the emergence of a Catholic church as an alternative to the opportunities of life under colonial rule, with missionaries and catechumens (later catechists), instead of District Commissioners and colonial chiefs, as the primary level at which that rule was experienced, brought into question the authority of the chiefs over all their subjects.

Writing in his memoirs over fifty years later, McCoy noted that the administration's contention that the chiefs were "the recognized native authority" was a convenient distortion of the facts. "In many ways the chiefs held less power than the tendaana. But the British administration did not recognize the




latter and governed exclusively through the former" (McCoy 1988, 134). However, this line of argumentation was somewhat disingenuous, as the missionaries were even less willing to recognize the authority of the tengaansob. Although McCoy protested to the administration in the 1930s that the catechists did recognize and respect the chiefs, he admitted in his memoirs that one of the reasons for the remarkable evangelical success of the mission had been "a remarkably unservile attitude toward their chiefs" (1988, 229).

The missionaries' denial that their success among the

LoDagaa had either political causes or implications was quite predictable for three reasons. First, they obviously preferred to stress the religious over the political dimensions of the process. Second, although they were aware of the popular resentment of colonial chiefs, they sought to see confrontations with the administration as issues of religious conscience rather than of political conflict. Finally, they were not actually in charge of the events that unfolded after the rain incident. The catechists were in charge of the early converts in the various villages. The pattern of evangelization after the rain incident became intensely decentral- ized, with catechists working from their homes, which became centers of religious and social activity in the dispersed settlements of the region. "It was [after 1932] the catechist, and not the missionary, who made direct contact with the people. The catechist played the leading role in the initial stages of conversions with the missionary remaining largely in the background" (Der 1983, 58-60). They endeavored to settle disputes between Catholic followers, advised them to disobey orders from the chiefs to work on Sundays, as had been the practice before the arrival of the missionaries, and urged allegiance to a different source of authority.

Most Catholic historians have admitted that "a few over- zealous converts did think that in becoming Christians they were absolved from obedience to the chiefs," but have also insisted that there was no instance of Christians' attempting to "usurp the power of chiefs" (Der 1983, 135). These qualifications do little to minimize the revolutionary implications of the converts' behavior. Because most of this revolutionary energy was not directed against the colonial order, but into the construction of an alternative order, its intensity was not as apparent as it might




have been if such an escape valve had not existed. Converts did not need to attempt to overthrow the secular-colonial order; they merely had to join the religious alternative. The missionaries might not have intended for their followers to have behaved politically, but with such a large and sudden movement, they were hardly in a position to control converts' motivations and actions. The sheer number of followers indicates that the process had to have been largely indigenous. There was far too little time for the missionaries to have effected a significant change in LoDagaa culture, as they themselves were only too aware: "que pouvaient faire 3 ou 4 missionaries pour catechiser 50 000 ' 60 000 personnes?" (Rapports Annuels 1932-33, 164). Within two years of the rain incident, there was a decline in the number of catechumens, but this was not seen as an an entirely negative develop- ment, even if the decline had been because of the work of the devil through sorcerers and polygamists, as it was admitted that in the first few years there had not been sufficient time to inculcate serious enough religious convictions (Rapports Annuels 1933-34, 364).

Even without explicitly rejecting the authority of the chiefs, creating and deploying an alternative authority - missionary vs colonial - had unavoidable political consequences. Over time, both the colonial administration and missionaries convinced themselves that although their entire structure of control over the LoDagaa was predicated on, and realized through, native agents, they, administrators and missionaries, were in charge of events. The catechists did function in the church structure in ways very similar to the chiefs; indeed, in many respects colonial and evangelical structures were analogous.

The British had created an extensive structure of chiefs, sub- chiefs, and headmen through LoDagaa settlements, just as the missionaries relied on their networks of catechists present in most settlements. The chiefs and sub-chiefs had been rewarded with medals bearing the likeness of the British monarch, which they jealously guarded and which represented the authority that had been invested in them. Similarly, the allegiance of converts was gained by the distribution of medals of the Blessed Virgin to postulants after six months of catechism, and these, too, were seen as important symbols of allegiance to another order. Indeed, in 1932, administrators in the adjoining French colony attempted




to prohibit catechumens from wearing their medals as a result of the political turmoil which had been caused by the return of inhabitants who had traveled to Jirapa for conversion (Naameh 1986, 179, 190-91, 196-97). Both chiefs and catechists received remuneration from outside sources. Although catechists did not attempt to usurp the chiefs, they did impinge upon their preroga- tives in settling marital disputes between converts and repre- senting an external source of authority in settlements.

The fact that active evangelization was really carried out by the first catechumens, followed by catechists, also brings into question the terms in which converts received the missionaries' religious messages. Given the level of understanding of the first catechumens and early catechists, it has been argued that Catholic ideas were understood in indigenous terms (Bekye 1990, 281; Naameh 1986, 204). Indeed, the "reality of conceiving many aspects of the new religion in continuity with the pre-Christian religious experience, was the fact that facilitated more than anything else the Dagara acceptance of the Christian message" (Naameh 1986, 213). Although practices did change suddenly and abruptly, the effect on beliefs was more gradual and modest, as new ideas were understood in the context of extant religious thinking. According to Naameh, in the initial decades of religious change, the missionaries were often identified as being noumenal powers in their own right, simply more efficacious than diviners, spirits, and other noumenal agencies. Any concept of a Christian God was as remote to most of the early converts as any indigenous high-god had been in pre-Christian religious thought and practice (Naameh 1986, 199, 205, 223, 245, 255).

The catechists communicated between the missionaries and their followers, translating the ideas of this foreign religion into local concepts (Naameh 1986, 274-83). This was inevitable, given the fact that at the end of the first decade of missionary activity, the ratio of missionaries to followers was 1:1 038, that of missionaries to catechists was 1:8, and that of catechists to followers was 1:134 (See Tables 1 and 2).

Of course, there were important differences in the nature of the authorities the chiefs and catechists represented, but their political functions coincided. When leadership in the Catholic community was formalized with the program of Catholic Action in the late 1930s, these tendencies quickly surfaced. It was noted



64 CJAS / RCEA 31:I 1997

that contrary to the intentions behind the program:

... les membres de ces groupements s6lectionnes s'imaginent tout naturellement que le fait d'avoir 6te choisis par le superieur du post et delegues a cette besogne aupres des autres, leur confere sur ceux- ci une vraie prepond&rance, ce qui les amene a jouer aux chefs; alors le resultat attient est tout juste le contraire de celui que nous envis- ageons (Rapports Annuels 1939-45, 3).

The movement began in the outstations of Kaleo, a village south of Lawra District, as a result of what was perceived to be a relative

laxity of the Christian community, but by 1944, it had spread to outstations in both Nandom and Jirapa parishes. A chef, sous-chef, cheffeuse, and sous-cheffeuse were appointed in each settlement.

By 1951, there were 280 members in seventy villages within Nandom parish alone (Rapports Annuels 1951-52, 226). Members took over from the catechists as leaders of their communities, while the latter focused their attentions on evangelization. They were instructed on, among other things, how to lead exemplary lives, administer baptisms in periculo mortis, affect conjugal and affinal reconciliation in the case of disputes, encourage as well as enforce Christian practices, repress any practices which were

contrary to the new faith, and "d6noncer tout propri6taire de mauvais remedes et avertir tout chretien faisant usage de ces remedes" (Rapports Annuels 1953-54, 282-83). Their purpose was one of surveillance or policing.'3

Despite the fact that the undeniable political aspects of the conversion process have been accepted, to varying degrees, by LoDagaa historians of these events, the contemporary priesthood remains reluctant to admit to these as a primary factor. In a

speech delivered in 1983, Peter Dery, the Archbishop of Northern Ghana, claimed that these representations had been the product of a campaign to discredit converts:

Fabrications against Christians in those days (1932) ran wild. Accusations ran thus: that the "Puor-puorbe" (Christians) said they would usurp political power; that the Fathers had come to transfer authority from the chiefs to them; that the "Puor-puorbe" said people should stop helping chiefs on their farms; that the "Puor-puorbe" said their "Sunday" had come to replace "Na-ngmaa-daa" (the traditional work-free market day); that the "Puor-puorbe" said they would not help non-Christians on their farms. Lies such as these were meant to discredit the Christians, and make Christianity unpopular (1984, 3).




Given the political climate which existed in Lawra District at the time, these "fabrications" or "lies," if that was what they were, could only have made Christianity more appealing and undoubt- edly explain some of its popularity. What the missionaries and the indigenous clergy after them refused to admit was the difference between intentions and effects. Although followers such as Poreku, among the first converts (before the rain incident) and father of the Archbishop, might very well have been filled with an evangelical zeal, their effects were unquestionably political. Soon after the rain incident, Poreku commanded a following of several thousand in the area of Zimuopare. Whether he had political motives or not, many of his followers, most of whom would have joined after the rain incident, must have seen Christianity as a means of avoiding the authority of the local colonial chief. And the chief, for his part, could not but have seen this movement as a direct challenge to his authority.14

Medicine and Conversion There is no denying the impressive nature of missionary success in these first few years in Lawra District. However, there are definite grounds for questioning the degree to which this was an evangelical breakthrough. Throughout the story of the remarkable conversion process, missionary sources themselves placed great importance on medicine in acting as a conduit for potential converts. Indeed, the trust and respect for McCoy and his fellow missionaries were directly the result of medical success. McCoy noted that, initially, he and the other missionaries succeeded in establishing a following, principally through injections of emetine to treat dysentery and of sobita solution to treat yaws. It was, thus, fortunate that the founding of the mission coincided with an outbreak of dysentery (Rapports Annuels 1929-30, 182; 1930-31, 204). In the annual report for 1930-31, it was again noted that the dispensary was the main means of attracting followers. In the following year, however, just after the rain incident, the increasing popularity of the mission was interpreted as something else: "Qu'est-ce qui les attire? Dans les d6buts ils venaient chercher la sant6 du corps, un soulagement a leurs maladies, mais maintenant ils viennent y chercher les lumieres de la Foi" (Rapports Annuels 1931-32, 147).

Illness continued to play a very important part in the conver-



66 CJAS / RCEA 31:1 1997

sion process well after the rain incident. When we examine the activities of the missionaries over their first decade, we find that medical work far outweighed pastoral work in all the mission stations. Indeed, the reaction to medical services had "some of the dimensions of a mass pilgrimage," a fact noted by Terence Ranger (1981, 265) in his study of the effects of medical work by missionaries in southeast Tanzania. However, among the LoDagaa, the movement sustained itself sufficiently to grow into a mass conversion. The reasons that the White Fathers had more success than their Protestant colleagues in Tanzania was that they were working in a more propitious political climate, their efforts were more concentrated, and they managed to speak much more directly to the eschatological concerns of their patients-turned- converts. "Adaptation" came much more slowly to the medical missions of Tanzania, and when it did, it caused some controversy between African personnel and foreign missionaries (Ranger 1981, 271-75). From the beginning, the missionaries attempted to represent Catholicism in indigenous terms, especially their medical successes.

With a few exceptions, Ranger among them, little attention has been paid to the effects of missionary medicine on both the dynamics of evangelization and the well-being of rural Africans (Dawson 1987, 85; Good 1991, 2), yet the provision of medical care by the colonial governments was wholly inadequate. Until the 1940s, public health measures in the Northern Territories had been limited to insuring that disease did not disrupt the colonial economy. As different recitations associated with the Bagre (a medical cult which required initiation) attest to, disease had been an important issue among the LoDagaa well before the missionaries arrived. A version of the White Bagre, recorded by Goody in 1951, began, "Gods, ancestors, guardians, beings of the wild, the leather bottles say we should perform, because of the scorpion's sting, because of suicide, aches in the belly, pains in the head" (Goody 1972, WB 1-10). Afflictions and their avoidance were central to the Bagre. After naming the various noumenal agencies who might intervene, the recitation then listed possible causes which might make someone seek out a diviner who, using "the leather bottles," would have determined that they needed to be initiated within the Bagre in order to find protection from disease. Goody noted that the process of consultation and divination




leading to initiation was also described as being "caught" by the

Bagre, with some illnesses, such as guinea worm, being very closely associated with having been seized by the god of the Bagre (Bagr ngmin) (Goody 1972, 39).

The region was adversely affected by disease. One District Commissioner initially expressed relief at having escaped the confines of the forests of Asante and enthused about the open spaces, the panoramas from the hills, and the fresh air. A month

later, however, he was already despairing about the frequency of disease: "It is a disturbing country and begins to get on one's nerves after a time."15 A former Medical Officer, B.B. Waddy, reported in rather dry and dispassionate terms that the area had "the misfortune to be hyperendemic focus of yaws and onchoceri- asis, and a hypersusceptible epidemic focus of sleeping sickness and cerebro-spinal meningitis," in addition to "the usual holoen- demic malaria and some lively foci of schitosomiasis" (1980, 159). In much less clinical terms, he explained the implications of these facts on the health of the LoDagaa in the late 1940s:

It is during the early rains, when humidity rises, that the bone pains of yaws come on, the guineaworms emerge (and guineaworm can paralyse a village), and the annual attack of clinical malaria comes on. It is a long time since the last harvest, and energy is short. Epidemics during the dry season may have left the remaining population exhausted and dispirited. The majority of the village communities of north-west Ghana in 1945-7 were retaining only a tenuous hold on existence, with a little ring of farm surrounding each house, fertilized by the excreta. They had no money, and therefore no clothes or blankets. The houses were windowless, and in the cold of the dry season they slept together in heaps, to retain warmth that they had not the food energy to replace if they lost. Any further adverse factor, such as death of one or two active men [not to mention the effects of labor migration], an extra crop of guineaworms, or a raid on the farm by game animals, could and did bring villages to starvation (Waddy 1980, 164).

Up until this time, the colonial administration had had a very limited effect on the health of the LoDagaa or any other societies of the Northern Territories. There seems to have been very little awareness of the level of privation which was experienced in the district toward the end of the dry season. In the 1930s, the first nutritional survey of the region revealed that calorific intake during this point in the year could often fall as low as five hundred



68 CJAS / RCEA 31:1 I997

to one thousand calories per day (Patterson 1981, 99). Indeed, if anything, colonial administration exacerbated health problems up until the 1940s when the first real, albeit weak, measures were taken to improve the health of northerners (Waddy 1957, 180; Patterson 1981, 4).

The increased movement of people during colonial rule facilitated the vectors for many diseases. The advent of colonial administration coincided with the arrival of cerebrospinal meningitis. Because of upheavals associated with colonial rule in northern Nigeria, where the disease had been endemic, the first known African epidemic erupted, spreading across the savanna until it reached the Black Volta, and especially Lawra District, in 1906 (Patterson 1984, 14-15). Colonial rule had also facilitated the spread of influenza from the coast to the interior through its trans- portation and economic infrastructure (Patterson 1983, 501). With trypanosomiasis and onchocerciasis, an ignorant, poorly equipped, and indifferent administration was certainly responsible for allowing these diseases to spread unchecked (Patterson 1981, 47; Patterson 1978, 109). These major illnesses were dealt with, when they were, almost exclusively as issues of public health, namely, the health and stability of the Northern Territories. Measures taken were almost exclusively concerned with limiting the spread of disease through futile attempts at isolation. Little or no attention was paid to the health problems of the LoDagaa. A report written in 1931 on the condition of northern workers, many of whom would have been LoDagaa seeking employment on the cocoa farms of the south, described them as "dirty, lousy, and of very poor physique. They are veritable museums of helminths of all descriptions, yaws, and guinea-worms" (Patterson 1981, 6; Dummett 1993, 226). Only after the visit of H.H. Princess Marie Louise in 1924 was a hospital of any sort (in this case a mud shed with fifteen beds) built at Lawra for the indigenous population (Waddy 1980, 162). Although a traveling dispensary did begin visiting Lawra in 1928, treating eleven thousand patients in one year, the program was suspended in 1933 as a result of the Depression (Patterson 1981, 25). Any effective provision of medical treatment was, by default, left to the missionaries.

The White Fathers had begun treating patient for yaws, conjunctivitis, malaria, dysentery, and trypanosomiasis as early as 1929, and continued to do so until 1939, when the dispensary was




expanded and taken over by Franciscan Sisters. If we ignore the one occasion on which the missionaries claimed to have provided rain, most of the rest of their time during the first decade of their presence among the LoDagaa was taken up with attending to the ill. McCoy recounted in his memoirs the long hours spent in the dispensary and the effect it had on their work:

The daily routine of the clinic would begin with a prayer aimed at reminding our patients that the curative power of medicines and the care dispensed was a result of God's great love for them as His children. We were conscious of our primary role as ambassadors of Jesus Christ to the people of the Northwest. And so there was a constant effort on our part not only to make them aware of it but also to keep ourselves from forgetting it as a natural consequence of the long hours spent treating the sick each day at the clinic or in their homes (McCoy 1988, 58).

The scale of their medical work was genuinely impressive, given their meager resources. Table 1 illustrates the amount of time this work must have commanded, as well as the scale of the response which it elicited. From 1929 to 1939, well over a quarter of a million dispensary visits were recorded. On average, over this ten

year period for which statistics are available, more than a hundred patients were being seen every day. Without doubt, the dispensary, and not theological questions, was what attracted most LoDagaa to visit the missionaries over this period. The centrality of medical work to the missionary enterprise among the LoDagaa has been neglected as a factor in the conversion process.

Table I Analysis of missionary work among the LoDagaa, 1929-1939 (Rapports Annuels, 1929-1939)

a b c d e f Year Pdres Frdres Communions Confessions Dispensary visits Ratio of d to e

1929-1930 2 1 830 46 3,700 1:80 1930-1931 2 1 831 68 16,425 1:242 1931-1932 3 1 1,100 49 36,500 1:745 1932-1933 6 1 3,109 178 50,449 1:83 1933-1934 9 2 12,215 1,065 25,530 1:24 1934-1935 10 1 14,283 2,407 33,685 1:14 1935-1936 11 1 115,552 11,884 30,800 1:3 1936-1937 11 1 135,840 31,105 59,630 1:2 1937-1938 11 1 281,406 55,573 55,440 1:1 1938-1939 11 1 298,360 77,735 62,887 1:1 Total - - 863,526 180,110 375,046 1:2



70 CJAS / RCEA 31:1 I997

The concept of salvation among the LoDagaa was not based on abstract notions, but on the immediate existential threats of everyday life, such as "sickness, drought, poverty, shame, hunger and barrenness." Words dealing with salvation - "wie (to save), faa (to snatch from, rob), ir (here: to take out of, to remove, to select, to choose)" - dealt with threats which, in the absence of knowledge of "the law of scientific causality," imposed a "greater reliance on the invisible world for the solution of all problems" (Naameh 1986, 119). It is apparent that in offering solutions to noumenal threats, the missionaries were providing those LoDagaa who attended the mission dispensary or called upon a priest while very ill salvation of an unintended variety. We know from various sources that the medical interventions of the missionaries often had extremely dramatic effects.

The missionaries attributed their very first medical successes directly to God. Their first work began with the arrival of four cases of medical supplies, including "a good quantity" of sobita solution (bismuth and sodium tartrate), donated by the principal medical officer in Tamale. The District Medical Officer provided some instruction, but McCoy had received basic training in tropical medicine during his four year training period in North Africa and had worked for a brief period in the dispensary at the Navrongo mission to the east (McCoy 1988, 55-58; McCoy 1979, 31). Weekly injections of sobita solution resulted in "spectacular success" in the treatment of yaws. Equally effective were the hot compresses to deal with conjunctivitis; the quinine to relieve symptoms of malaria; the epsom salts, bismuth, and emetine to deal with intestinal complaints; and epidermal injections of turpentine to treat pneumonia. Of diagnosed diseases, much less effective were treatments for leprosy and sleeping sickness.

However, it was not the effectiveness of specific medicines which excited most attention, but what was taken to be the evidence of cheating death. Again, we find strong parallels between these "miracles" and the Bagre. Individuals underwent the Bagre in order to restore their health or to ward off the threat of illness. Divination revealed to individuals whether they had been, or were in danger of being, caught by the Bagre as one of several remedies (Goody 1972, 39). Performance of the Bagre took place over many weeks, after the beginning of the dry season, but the central ceremony of the first stage (also known as the White




Bagre) was that of the Bagre dance at the end of many weeks of ceremonies. On the evening of the second day, the neophytes were secluded in a room and told to lie down in order to ingest nothing more dangerous than millet beer, but which they had been told was a poisonous medicine containing the highly toxic power of

ground strophanus seeds. According to Goody's eyewitness account of these dramatic events, the atmosphere was tense and

foreboding, with the neophytes in a state somewhere between belief and disbelief (Goody 1972, 97-99). The poison resulted in the ritual death of the neophytes only so they could be revived by the senior initiates.

From the perspective of the Catholic ritual of baptism, what is most interesting about the Bagre ritual was the offer of "a means of conquering death, which is later revealed.as a sham" (Goody 1972, 99). The promises announced in the long oral recitation which accompanied the Bagre dance - "Death kills, the Bagre god saves us, so death can't kill" - were renounced toward the end of the dry season during the second of these oral recitations known as the Black Bagre. "These things we do, though they can't banish death" (Goody 1972, W. 4198-4200, B. 5286-5297). The difference between the ritual killing and revival of neophytes by the initiates of the Bagre and the baptism of patients in danger of death by priests is that the latter ritual often had dramatic and immediate consequences. Aspects of the Bagre were incorporated into rituals of baptism. Baptisms took place at Christmas which coincided with the Bagre, the heads of catechumens were shaved before being anointed as were the heads of initiates into the Bagre, and new Christians took to wearing their finery to their baptism just as successful initiates into the Bagre did at the end of the ceremonies when they reentered society (Der 1983, 288).

In 1930 McCoy was credited with bringing people back from the verge of death on three separate occasions by using a variety of remedies: brandy, emetine, and caffeine (Germain 1937, 83; Goody 1975, 102; McCoy 1988, 56-59). In one instance, the missionaries were called to attend to a man who had fainted, but was presumed to have been dying. Smelling salts were administered, but without effect. Although brandy was sought, McCoy baptized the man as he had been one of those who had "occasionally" come to church. "The crowd was attentive to my every word and gesture." When a small amount of brandy was fed to the



72 CJAS / RCEA 31:I 1997

patient, his breathing returned to normal and he opened his eyes. Soon others came to the mission in search of remedies for a

variety of complaints (McCoy 1988, 56-57). A "moribund" elder who had been brought to the mission was similarly revived with an injection of caffeine. But before he was revived, he had been

baptized and given the medal (Goody 1975, 102). In another case, the missionaries were asked to call upon a man by the name of

Nameri, who was diagnosed as dying of dysentery. Emetine was administered. After Nameri had recovered, McCoy informed the "witnesses" to this "miracle" that, "God was the real master of life and death, not any mere mortal, and that the life that comes from Him is stronger than death" (McCoy 1988, 59).

It seems likely that at this early date, in the absence of any clear communication between the missionaries and their patients, many LoDagaa would have understood these cures in ritual terms, making little distinction between the administration of medicines and relgious rites. Ranger noted that similar perceptions in southeastern Tanzania made the remedies offered by the missionaries similar to movements of witchcraft eradication, but it was the

Bagre which provided the model through which patients must have understood medicine among the LoDagaa (Ranger 1981, 266).

However, the intensity of medical work does not itself explain the conversion process. Ranger noted that despite extensive medical work in southeastern Tanzania, the missionaries of the Universities Mission to Central Africa did not manage to translate their success with a limited series of diseases into converts

(Ranger 1981, 265, 267). As one missionary doctor noted in 1929, "from the missionary point of view this part of our work at first sight seems of very little direct value, for patients rarely stop and often come great distances, so that it is useless to try to teach them the Faith" (Ranger 1981, 267). Among the LoDagaa, as in southeastern Tanzania, the treatment of yaws was the most dramatic and efficacious treatment which the missionaries had to offer. But until after 1945, treatment with drugs such as sobita solution, while temporarily effective, did not produce permanent results. In addition, despite the efficacy of missionary remedies, given the level of disease among the LoDagaa, the effect was not to have conquered death, but merely to have alleviated some anxi- eties on an individual and cyclical basis.

Access to the missionaries followed disease and climatic




cycles. During the long epidemic of cerebrospinal meningitis in the 1940s, ten thousand people received treatment with sulfa

drugs in one year for this disease alone (McCoy 1988, 87). In 1955

McCoy reported that pagan chiefs and elders from Jirapa, Tizza, and Konzokola came to ask for missionary intervention during another drought, "because experience had proven that He listened better in times of distress than did the spirits" (1988, 123). The restricted level of governmental intervention, which included treatment for yaws in the late 1920s and early 1930s through traveling clinics, limited distribution of sulfa drugs to chiefs in an

attempt to prevent outbreaks of cerebrospinal meningitis in the

1930s, and introduction of mass penicillin therapy in the early 1950s, meant that the missionaries were not in competition with the colonial government and therefore could use treatment for direct evangelical purposes without fear of driving patients away.

In 1939, the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary took over medical work, and, within a few years, they had built their own

dispensary, as well as emergency, infant, and maternity wards at their convent in Jirapa. Slightly later, White Sisters arrived to relieve the missionaries at Nandom and soon established a dispensary and maternity ward there. When the colonial government felt that it had to make at least some provision for health care in the district in the early 1950s, it saw the opportunity to use

missionary personnel and thereby save its own resources. In an

unprecedented agreement, the government agreed to build a

hospital at Jirapa to be run entirely by the mission. In 1955 the

hospital at Jirapa was attending to over two hundred outpatients a

day. The government and the mission established a hospital at Nandom in 1965. Similarly to the one at Jirapa, it was administered and staffed with missionary personnel. By 1981, there were two hospitals, six clinics, and several dispensaries in Lawra

District, largely supported by the mission (Bayo 1979, 62-63; Naameh 1986, 302; McCoy 1988, 167-91).

McCoy and others had little hesitation in claiming that what- ever efficacy their remedies (prayers or medicine) had, it was a direct result of the will of God. They made no attempt in the early years to explain either meteorology or biochemistry. In his memoirs, McCoy explained how those who had sought out and accepted the message of the missionaries were spared, whereas those who ignored his warnings and continued to believe in



74 CJAS / RCEA 31: I 1997

"witchdoctors and fetishists" were either stricken with cerebrospinal meningitis, denied rain, or visited by swarms of locusts. Every attempt was made to tie medical work to the wider eschatological concerns of the LoDagaa (McCoy 1988, 87-88, 113, 118, 122-24). This seeming willingness to adapt their message to indigenous concerns explains much of the success the mission experienced. However, it is possible to argue that, in fact, missionaries such as McCoy were so zealous in their faith that they readily understood LoDagaa attribution of ultimate causation to noumenal agencies, the disagreement being merely over which agencies.

If drought and disease brought so many LoDagaa to the missionaries, death made many convert. Gray has pointed out that, "the relevance of eschatology to the debate on conversion has been overlooked" (Gray 1990, 67). Funerals were the central cultural performance among the LoDagaa. As one District Commissioner noted, "the funeral custom seems to be what the market is to the Hausa, the court to an Ashanti and a football match to the British workman."16 It is quite amazing that given the centrality of death to LoDagaa culture, a feature which Goody himself highlighted, its role in the process of conversion has been overlooked in preference to discussion over the nature of an agency, god, which, by almost all accounts, had little importance to the LoDagaa.

Baptism in periculo mortis was a very common conversion process; indeed, up until 25 December 1932, all baptisms had been of people on their "deathbeds" (McCoy 1988, 95, 139). Given the subsequent intensity of such baptisms, one must ask whether patients did not consider it merely as part of the treatment (Naameh 1986, 195). Certainly, medical metaphors have been used to describe divination among the LoDagaa, so it is very prob- able that for most patients there was little distinction between being attended to by a diviner or by a missionary (Kusiele 1973, 23, 31). For the missionaries, medical practice preceded and domi- nated their priestly roles in the early years. Although not officially a medical mission, the White Fathers in Jirapa were competing with diviners and herbalists, not just spirits and gods, and not to save souls, but to cure illnesses. Holy water came to be known as Ngmenkuo, or "spirits' water" (Dery 1979, 8), and may well have come to be associated with the other medicines administered to




the dying (Paternot 1953, 125). At the end of 1931, the missionaries were already training the

first catechist to perform baptisms in periculo mortis as these were a "regular occurrence" (McCoy 1988, 98). By 1939, the White Fathers had performed 20 940 baptisms, yet there were only 12 458 baptized LoDagaa (see Table 2). This enormous discrepancy alerts us to the fact that forty-three percent of those baptisms were performed on those in danger of death. At first, it might seem reasonable to assume that most of those baptized under these circumstances died. However, if we look at the first six years of baptisms in isolation, by 1935 there were 1 215 baptized LoDagaa, and yet, of those, only 318 have been baptized as adults or children. Evidently, the remaining 897 had been baptized in periculo mortis, but had survived. That would mean that there

Table 2 Baptism rates among the LoDagaa, 1929-1939 (Rapports Aintels, 1929-1939)

Year Catechumens Catechists Baptized Adults Children In periculo mortis Total

1929-1930 - - 7 - 1 8 9 1930-1931 432 - 68 1 1 142 144 1931-1932 5,090 10 97 - - 119 119 1932-1933 20,962 44 425 42 44 897 983 1933-1934 10,062 63 574 18 26 970 1,014 1934-1935 7,186 51 1,215 168 17 1,031 1,216 1935-1936 8,183 64 3,132 1,454 430 1,585 3,469 1936-1937 7,391 70 6,937 2,812 845 1,773 5,430 1937-1938 6,484 81 9,696 2272 898 1,329 4,499 1938-1938 6,209 93 12,458 1,885 1,058 1,114 4,057 Total [6,209] [93] [12,458] 8,652 3,320 8,968 20,940

was, assuming that there were no deaths among baptized adults and children, at least a twenty-six percent survival rate for those who had been baptized in danger of death. Accordingly, over two thousand or nineteen percent of the converts made by 1939 would have been baptized in periculo mortis.'7

Baptisms performed in periculo mortis illustrate another aspect of the conversion process. With the exception of peaks in baptisms in the years 1936-37 and 1937-38, the majority of baptisms were performed on the very ill. Whether they were catechumens, relatives of Christians, or spontaneous converts we do



76 CJAS / RCEA 31:I 1997

not know. We can presume, however, that those who were dying received medical attention before their deathbed confessions - a presumption which explains why, indeed, the very ill turned to the priests in such large numbers from a relatively early date - then we see that within a few years, a significant proportion of dispensary patients were being baptized on their death beds. McCoy recalled many years later that when any of these patients died shortly afterwards, "the death was blamed on the baptism and/or the one who had performed it" (1988, 129). Conversely, the survival of patients would have been attributed to the last rites performed by the missionaries. However, it was not the issue of last rites which caused controversy between Christians and pagans, but the question of the appropriate internment of the dead.

Many pagans felt that the missionaries were using last rites to steal souls. In 1939, the Tantuo Naa and Nandom Naa complained: "the Fathers have a habit of rushing to the death beds of Christians and pagans and try to snatch their souls from perdi- tion."18 A formula between chiefs and missionaries had been worked out the previous year by which souls could be shared. Those who died in periculo mortis were to be buried as pagans, but only after the Christians had been allowed to pray over the body. Similarly, when a "fully developed Christian" died, the pagans were permitted "to perform the ceremonies which they believed necessary, but the Christians were to take possession of the body, and bury it in consecrated ground."19 For pagans, the fear was that if the proper sacrifices were not performed, the deceased's soul would not cross over into the world of the ancestors. For Christians, the fear was that breaking the prohibition on pagan sacrifices, which the missionaries insisted upon, might deprive the deceased entry into heaven (Der 1983, 127). But so pressing was the concern of the relatives of Christians that the missionaries soon after compromised on their prohibition against sacrifices at Christian funerals, "to allay some of the opposition to the baptism of catechumens" (McCoy 1988, 137). This was a major departure from canon law, which still continued to be applied to Christian marriages even though it was equally, if not more, unpopular (Der 1983, 245). G.C. Dabir6 (1983, 263) has explained that one reason Islam had such limited success among the LoDagaa was that its funeral practices were considered too




expeditious. The success of the missionaries was, in large part, a result of their willingness to compromise on this extremely important aspect of LoDagaa culture.

Although the missionaries did not want to admit it, LoDagaa and Catholic eschatology were not very far removed from each other. For the LoDagaa, "the communion with, and cult of the ancestors and other spirits [found] a perfect echo in the Christian communion of saints and cult of saints and angels" (Kuukure 1985, 160). Goody noted that many people in a settlement near Nandom in the 1950s had Christian names, "but the possession of such a name did not always indicate a reluctance to participate in sacrifices to the ancestors" (Goody 1962, 400). In the early 1970s a study of divination was conducted among the LoDagaa of Burkina Faso in an effort to work out ways of Christianizing these means of communications. It was found that although Christians rarely sought out diviners themselves, they often did so through relatives so as to be able to consult with spirits and ancestors (Kusiele 1973, 49). Both Der and Kuukure noted in the 1980s that the pagan practice of presenting an offering of twenty cowries to pay the ferryman to take the deceased across the river to the land of the ancestors had been transposed by Christians into "offerings for prayers and suffrages for the dead," in order to make sure that dead went to heaven (Kuukure 1985, 163; Der 1983, 255).

It does not seem that God was particularly central to the conversion process. Death and the afterlife were the real concerns of pagan and convert alike. It is possible that what has been described as identification on the part of converts, combined with what the missionaries felt was either evangelical adaptation or judicious compromise, actually slowed down the conversion process by reducing the distance between Catholic faith and LoDagaa culture over time, therefore making conversion less necessary. Accurate statistics ceased in 1939 because of the war, and after 1945 the practice of providing statistics was not resumed. But Der has argued that already by 1934, the rate of conversion at Jirapa had slowed down as a result of a combination of chiefly opposition and the requirements for baptism (Der 1983, 62-64). He claims that many early converts who had been gained in the aftermath of the rain incident deserted once they discovered the long-term implications of Catholicism - monogamy and prohibition against sacrifices. From the mid-1940s, the growth of



78 CJAS / RCEA 31:I 1997

the mission was mostly a result of "self-augmentation" or natural increase (Der 1983, 65).

The fact that so many dying people (generally elders) sought out the missionaries is revealing. Indeed, a disproportionate number of those adults who underwent baptism were elders (Germain 1937, 86-87). Given the manner in which the missionaries consciously manipulated their rudimentary medical knowledge, it is necessary to question exactly what these deathbed converts might have expected. What were the expectations and understanding of those requesting last rites? It is virtually impos- sible to know, but understanding these baptisms in terms of the ideas of LoDagaa culture strongly suggests they may well have expected to cheat death, as many did.

Conclusion Finally, having looked at the missionary impact from the perspective of indigenous needs - rain, political protection, and health - we can see that conversion did not actually represent a funda- mental change in cultural priorities or psychological perspectives. What so many saw in this new religion was not novel, merely stronger or more powerful at times. Although the LoDagaa readily accepted the efficacy of missionary medicine when and where it was demonstrable, they did not abandon their own etiology of afflictions which the dispensary could not treat. As Der noted, "it was not that people no longer believed in the efficacy of traditional medicine, but many began to realize that Western medicine was more effective in curing certain diseases from which they suffered" (Der 1983, 337).

But there were obvious differences between Christian theology and LoDagaa cosmology. Besides the chiefs, the greatest adversaries the missionaries saw themselves encountering, were the panoply of "fetishes." The outbreaks of violence in the aftermath of the rain incident illustrate the power of the missionaries' demands. But not only was peace established after this period of zealous fervor, it seems that a large degree of syncretism was entertained by converts despite the continual admonishments from their missionary priests. Christian doctrine did represent a sudden and dramatic break with indigenous beliefs, but converts did not experience evangelization at a doctrinal level, but at an experiential level, where political and existential concerns were




more important. Here, there was commensurability. Politically, the catechists created a mirror to the colonial order under which so many had suffered prior to the arrival of the missionaries.

Existentially, the missionaries offered medical remedies to problems which were paramount to LoDagaa religious thought, and

they did so in ways which were unwittingly analogous to central rituals of LoDagaa culture.

Notes 1 The term "LoDagaa" is a sobriquet invented by the anthropologist Jack Goody, in order to deal with an extremely complicated and still unfolding situation of ethnic designation. It includes groups known by other sources and in other contexts, such as the Dagarti, Lobi-Dagarti, Dagaara, Dagaaba, as well as by other less common appelations (Goody 1956). I have retained the use of this external and artificial classification merely because there is no single, indigenous, and uncontroversial term which has emerged. For some discussion of the controversial issues surrounding various designations, see Tuurey (1982), Der (1987, 1989), Somda (1989, and Lentz (forthcoming). The term "LoDagaa," although not an indigenous ethnonym, does have linguistic relevance and, therefore, does refer to a network of social intercourse. All peoples included under its umbrella were speakers of one of several dialects of Dagaare, a language in the Mole-

Dagbane family.

2 Accounts of this incident vary. There are several accounts written by some of the missionaries themselves: Lesourd (1939), Paternot (1953), McCoy (1988). The first two pertain primarily to the history of the church in the adjoining French colony, whereas the latter was written more than a half a century after the event. McCoy was assisted in the research by his cousin, who consulted the original diaries, as well as by another Father, who assisted in the writing. I have also relied on Der (1975, 1983). Der based his account on the original diaries of the missionaries, as well as on interviews. All these accounts were written from a strongly religious conviction that the conversion process was the result of divine intervention, and the narratives of events are colored accordingly. The present author failed, after several attempts, to gain access to the original diaries which are kept in the mission house in Jirapa. However, the annual reports of the mission, as well as available colonial reports, do provide us with some alternative perspectives.

3 Regional Archives, Tamale (RAT ADM) 502, Annual Report Wa 1946-47.



80 CJAS / RCEA 31:I 1997

4 There are definite reasons for treating these claims with considerable caution. Just what constituted conversion was problematic, as the argu- ments of this article indicate. Conversion did not merely take place in one direction. Converts could lapse back into non-Christian practices or abandon the new movement entirely. There is evidence that well after the first decade of missionary activity, reaching up to the present generation of the LoDagaa Catholics, the effects of conversion were often nominal rather than cognitive (Kuukure 1985, 18; Naameh 1986, 225; Bekye 1991, 17). But this is not the subject of this article.

5 RAT ADM, 424, "Comment on 'Interim Report...."' DC Mampong- Akwapim, 2 March 1933, 29.

6 RAT ADM, 424, "Comment on 'Interim Report...."' DC Mampong- Akwapim, 2 March 1933, 26; Goody (1957).

7 National Archives of Ghana (NAG ADM) 56/1/301, Native Affairs, DC Lawra to CCNT, 8 September 1932. In his report to the Chief

Commissioner, the District Commissioner alleged that these gangs had also broken into stores of cowries secreted in pots in the ground, which had been held up until then by all LoDagaa in order to be protected by the ancestors of their custodians. If this did occur, and was not merely incrim-

inating propaganda, the motives were no doubt iconoclastic rather than criminal.

s NAG ADM, 301, Native Affairs, DC Lawra to CCNT, 8 September 1932.

9 NAG ADM, 301, Native Affairs, DC Lawra to CCNT, 8 September 1932.

10 RAT ADM, 424, "Comment on 'Interim Report...."' DC Mampong- Akwapim, 2 March 1933, 28-29.

" RAT ADM, 247, Informal Diary Lawra, August 1932.

12 When the number and enthusiasm of postulants waned after the rain

incident, the missionaries perceived the work of the devil to be operating through elders, witches, polygamists, and chiefs. It was described as open warfare against the mission and its followers (Rapports Annuels 1933-34, 364; 1935-36, 232; 1936-37, 273; 1938-39, 151). The sense of persecution was totally out of proportion with any substantive evidence of menace, bother, vexation, or even violence on the part of the alleged pagan opposition.




13 These features were brought out even more clearly in a description of duties from the Rapports Annuels for the Diocese of Bobo Dioulasso. In

1955, a list of the purposes of these groups concluded: "Mais le meilleur de cette activite c'est bien la 'police des mouers,' si l'on peut ainsi s'ex-

primer" (quoted in Naameh 1986, 400).

14 The Catholic version of Poreku's travails admits to his zeal, but then claims that his intentions were purely religious. Interestingly, both

McCoy and Archbishop Dery, his son, admitted that his actions were

interpreted as political, but insisted that his motivations were purely reli-

gious and that any political interpretations were exclusive to the chiefs and the colonial administration. But if the political implications, even if

wholly unintended, were so obvious to these political authorities, surely they must have been as apparent to their subjects. See Dery (1979, 7-10), McCoy (1988, 75-83).

15 ADM, 61/5/6, Informal Traveling Diary Lawra District, 18 January 1919, 25 February 1919.

16 ADM, 61/5/8, Informal Diary Lawra District, 30 May 1918.

17 Over the first six years, those in danger of death accounted for the vast

majority of those baptized. This was because of the four year period which catechumens had to undergo before baptism and accounts for the delay between the remarkable events of 1932 and the sudden increase in

baptisms of adults in 1935-36. As a result of their preponderance, it is

possible to calculate an approximate survival rate for those in danger of death during this six-year period (See Table 3). This would have meant that from 1929 to 1939, fifteen percent of all baptized adults and children died, compared to seventy-four percent of those in periculo mortis. The survival rate of twenty-six percent for those baptized in periculo mortis cannot be assessed after 1936. There are too many variables to estimate the number of LoDagaa who received the sacraments only to survive and enter the ranks of the baptized after this date. It is possible that most of these people may have been elderly and, therefore, their surviving one serious illness was no guarantee that they would not have died a few years later. But we must also assume that the death rate among baptized adults and children

corresponded to the figures clearly indicated in column "f" for 1937-39. Of

course, the infant mortality rate would also have been very high. Although there are no precise figures, those which do exist for the Northern Territories in 1939 suggest an infant mortality rate of 240 per 1 000 births. But if infant mortality was high, we also cannot discount adult mortality. On the difficulty of assessing death rates in Ghana at this time, see Patterson (1981, 85-95).



82 CJAS / RCEA 31:I 1997

Table 3

Analysis of baptisms in periculo mortis, 1929-1939 (Rapports Annuels, 1929-1939)

a b c d e f g h Years Baptized Adults Children In periculo mortis Total a/yr - (b+c) d as % ofe fas% ofre 1929-1930 7 - 1 8 9 6 89 66 1930-1931 68 1 1 142 144 59 99 41 1931-1932 97 - - 119 119 29 100 24 1932-1933 425 42 44 897 983 242 91 25 1933-1934 574 18 26 970 1,014 105 96 10 1934-1935 1,215 168 17 1,031 1,216 456 85 37 1935-1936 3,132 1,454 430 1,585 3,469 33 46 -

1936-1937 6,937 2,812 845 1,773 5,430 148 33 -

1937-1938 9,696 2.272 898 1,329 4,499 -411 30 -

1938-1939 12,458 1,885 1,058 1,114 4,057 -592 27 -

Total 12,458 8,652 3,320 8,968 20,940 486 43 -

18 RAT 301, Informal Diary Lawra-Tumu, July 1939.

19 RAT 514, Annual Report Lawra-Tumu, 1937-38.

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Documents

To Pray or Not to Pray: Politics, Medicine, and Conversion among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana, 1929-1939