"All 'the Borders' Are Opened For You": Performing Travel Breakthroughs in Ghanaian Pentecostal Ritual Spaces

In contemporary Ghana, the desire to travel overseas, especially to richer nations of the West is widespread. Aware of the structures that constrain their movements, many Ghanaians have come to view such travels as precarious, racialized, and rife with discrimination, uncertainties, and unjust bottlenecks, and informed by their indigenous notions of travel, they generally believe it requires supernatural enablement in addition to physical efforts. Those who want to travel abroad for reasons including education, business, or asylum-seeking, and those already in the host communities, enlist the help of ritual experts from one or more of the religions in Ghana—Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Indigenous religious traditions (Parish, 2015; Parish, 1999; Parish; Daswani, 2009).  

The paper suggests that the practice of enlisting the help of religious agents and practices for overseas mobility is having a marked effect on the Ghanaian religious landscape in two key ways: first, it has created a demand for religious agents who claim to possess the power to resolve migration-related issues; second, in response to this demand, Ghana's purveyors of spiritual powers have shaped their practices to inspire and enable migration. In the case of the Pentecostals—the focus of the paper, they have designed travel-centered rituals and discourses—What I refer to as rites of mobility. The rites aim to (re)construct dominant labels, negotiate imposed cultural imaginaries, and contest structural barriers or strictures in the flow of mobility for marginalized bodies from the Global South. The phenomenon raises several questions including what is prompting the demand for religious agents in travel or mobility projects, and how have the religious agents shaped their religious practices to meet the demands?

In seeking answers to these questions, I hope to fill an important gap in the emerging literature on religion, migration, and social justice. The literature focuses on ways religion is deployed in the decision-making process, transnational challenges, and integration concerns including identity and health in the host country (Hagan, 2012; Tweed, 2008; Huwelmeier, 2010). Others focus on the effects of migration on religious beliefs and the impact of migration on the religions of the host nation (Nordin, 2023; Beckford, 2019).

This paper suggests that consistent structural barriers, cultural imaginaries of colonized bodies, and the imposed labels on persons from the Global South are engendering new models of local religious ritual praxis—rites of mobility, which are engineered to contest, negotiate, and reconstruct unjust imperial impositions, structures, and barriers of mobility for marginalized groups. I will show how these rites contest repressive immigration structures that spring in part from racialized imperial cultural imaginaries of the black body as threatening to host communities and their ways of life. Such imperial cultural imaginaries grew mainly from constructs of blackness during initial colonial encounters and operate materially as symbols to (re)construct identity labels, space, and belonging.

The paper engages notions of how imperial imaginaries, policies, and structures, construct labels, barriers, and dams in the global flows of certain populations leading to migrants’ sufferings. Revising his emphasis on trans-locative flows and pairing it with another term dams, Tweed theorizes that the kinetics of crossings is mediated not only by transportation or communication technology but also by institutional structures—there are no unimpeded flows. He asserts that all space is striated, marked by traces of social power, wielded by institutional actors and their legal and moral codes (Tweed 2020). He maintains that the flows of people, things, and practices, are propelled, blocked, compelled, and directed by institutions. Extending this aquatic metaphor, he demonstrates how institutional power as well as individual agency, channels and regulates flows--they function like a dam. The paper demonstrates ways imperial imaginaries and the construct of immigration policies, border rites, and labels for black bodies from the Global South, especially Africa, are symbolic dams that impede and regulate flows from the sub-region. I add that colonial cultural imageries, structures, and labels constructed during initial encounters with peoples of the region, play out in the policies and process of modern flows. The borders are just sites for reenacting colonial imaginaries and power. It is this repressive institutional structural mediation of movements of colonized bodies from the Global South that largely propels the enlisting of religious agents who claim to have the ability to use rituals of contestation and negotiation, especially, when these same dominant actors both propel displacement and emplacements yet block the mobilities of racialized and colonized persons.

The paper demonstrates how religion as an institution can be used to enable and even re-direct flows as well as furnish worshippers with resources and models for the mobility process. I argue that not only are religions by their very fluid nature and through human agency, able to move across time and space in single or multiple runways, and as symbols or mechanisms engaged in the mobility process for emotional, social identity, or spiritual support. They provide resources and models that contest and negotiate spaces and labels. They also provide symbols that propel, direct, and map movements, belonging, and citizenship—symbolically acting as spillways that engender flows for colonized persons on the move. The Ghanaian religious agents and their members aware of the imperial structural barriers or dams set to impede, regulate, or block the movements of colonized bodies from the Global South, draw from religious resources as symbols of meaning-making to confront the barriers, map belonging, and negotiate imposed labels in their mobility process.

 Drawing from ethnographic research at the Power Chapel Worldwide in Kumasi, Ghana, I explore ways post-colonial immigration structures for colonially racialized bodies engender the performance of specific rituals.  By focusing on the processes in Ghana’s Pentecostal spaces, I center migrants’ and ritual agents’ perspectives and show how imperial mobility structures engender specific ritual models of global mobility. I show too how participants (re)position themselves in confronting racialized and discriminatory travel policies, labels, histories, and institutions, thereby (re)defining social justice.