The Noise Silence Makes: Secularity and Ghana's Drum Wars

For generations, the Ga community in Accra, Ghana, has enforced an annual city-wide ban on noise-making during an important religious festival. This "ban on drumming" became a point of conflict in the 1990s and 2000s between the Ga people and the newly popular Pentecostal/Charismatic churches, who 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, who emphasized their "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 the 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, where 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.