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The Power of Money: Politics, Occult Forces, and Pentecostalism in Ghana

Abstract: In the wake of the last democratic elections in Ghana, which took place in December 1996, the electoral commission published and distributed a poster that depicted a voter who was approached by both the Devil and an angel. While the former told the man to sell his vote for money, the latter made it clear that his vote was his voice, thereby insinuating that selling his vote would boil down to selling himself to the “powers of darkness.” The paper seeks to explain how Christianity, especially the pentecostal variant highly popular in southern Ghana, came to cast political discourse in religious terms. On the basis of the examination of a popular Ghanaian movie about a chief who indulges in ritual murder in order to generate wealth and power, it is shown that in Ghana a public debate is going on about the (im) morality of power. In this debate, rumors about the occult sources of power and wealth form the flip side of politicians' claims of being linked with the divine. In distinction to established mission churches, pentecostalism takes such rumors about the threat of sorcery as seriously as the aim to turn Ghana into a Christian country. Presenting themselves as the sole members of society able to contain sorcery, pentecostalists claim to have the power to reveal the occult sources of those in power and subsequently to purify politics and politicians from occult traces and draw them closer to God.