Valuing heritage through the fetish

Abstract

‘I’m going on a crusade this Monday,’ said the family father and Christian priest with whom I lived, while we explored a former Danish fort in the present-day coastal village of Keta in Ghana. His straightforward attitude was in stark contrast to my immediate reaction. I was desperately trying to rid myself of images of stereotypical brownish European medieval knights in armour, men and women perishing at the stakes and in holy wars. After a few seconds, I managed to ask him what he meant. He looked at me as if I was ignorant: ‘A crusade, you know a crusade...’. I stuttered: ‘Ehh, yes, I know crusades, but to me crusades are something that set off long ago from Europe’. ‘No, no, no,’ he replied. ‘We have it too, crusades are still very important. We have to get rid of Satan’s work... those fetishes and fetish priests and their false faith [...], the evil spirits can only be chased away by prayers and destruction!’ I had seen fetishes in the area, small white clay figures looking, to me, like small figures out of Star Wars. Whenever I had asked about these figures, people had laughed and/or looked somewhat perplexed and answered shortly that they were ‘fetishes, traditional religion’. What the priest had planned for the coming Monday was to drive to nearby villages and ‘spread the gospel’. He had on several occasions succeeded in converting people, he said.