The Noise Silence Makes

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 <i>The Noise Silence Makes</i> 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.