Religions at the Crossroads: Africa’s Creative and Spiritual Heritage

8:30 – 9:00 AM: Ghana Dance Ensemble - Opening Performance

9:00 – 9:15 AM: Opening Remarks
9:15 – 10:45 AM: Sacred Organology

• John Dankwa, “From Funeral Xylophone to Eucharistic Instrument: Re-inscribing the Gyil in Dagara Catholic Worship” 
• Kai Mora, “The Gnawa Guinbri: In the Interstices of African Materiality and Islam” 
• Kwasi Ampene, “Staging and performing sacred soundscapes: Ivory trumpeters, poetic rhetoric, and the spiritual essence of the number seven in Africa and the African Atlantic”
• Alfred P. Addaquay, Chair

10:45 - 11:00 AM: Break

11:00 AM –1:00 PM: Ritual Technologies

• Collin Edouard, “Sounding Ritual Technologies: Vodou Vocality” 
• Leticia Burtet, “Sound, Presence and Being-With: Umbanda Ritual Music as Embodied Sacred Practice in the Afro-Diasporic Atlantic” 
• Robin Garcia, Becoming River: “Water as Method in Osun’s Sacred Aesthetics” 
• Yomi Folaranmi, “‘The Beauty and Vividness Is Like Nothing but Itself’: Tessellation and Ritual in Belkis Ayón’s Collography” 
• Steven Friedson, Chair 

1:00 – 1:45 PM: Lunch

1:45 – 2:15 PM: Lecture-Demonstration, Ben Amakye-Boateng,“Agbe as Sacred Soundscape: Music, Memory, and Religious Pluralism Among the Tabom of Ghana”

2:15 - 2:25 PM: Break

2:25 – 3:55 PM: Politics and the Sacred-Secular Divide

• Peterson Kabugi, “The Rhythm of Resistance: How Benga Music Articulates Spiritual and Political Consciousness in Western Kenya” 
• Michael Frishkopf, “Religious freedom, sects, musical ritual, and conflict:  a comparative perspective on Sufi music in Ghana and Egypt” 
• Aristedes Hargoe, “Sustaining Klama and Kple Sacred Arts Amidst Hostilities: An Ethnographic Study”
• Eric Sunu, Chair

3:55 - 4:05 PM: Break

4:05 –5:35 PM: Panel 4 - Gender and the Black Sacred Arts

• Sheila Wandera, “The Sacred Cloth and Secret Pleasures: Imagining Sexuality on the Swahili Coast of Mombasa” 
• Moses Nii-Dortey, “Sacred agency, performativity, and gender transformation of a chiefdom:  Asafotufiam festival and the unsung heroines of Ada”
• Gayle Murchison, “The Beyoncé Mass (2018) Quod libet:  Womanist/Feminist Empowerment and Black Liberation Theology of Becoming” 
• Adwoa Arhine, Chair

9:00 – 11:00 AM: Entangled Histories

• Eduardo Lichuge, “Missionary Soundscapes and Sonic Conversion in Colonial Mozambique”
• Sophia Kitlinski, “The Press, The Police, and Abakuá Counter-Aesthetics in Late Colonial Havana” 
• Janie Cole, “Music and Ritual in the Early Modern Kingdom of Kongo: Indigenous and Afro-European Spiritualities and Performance” 
• Elyan Hill, “Dancing at the Crossroads: Sacred Geographies of Domestic Enslavement in Togolese Performance” 
• Deborah Atobrah, chair

11:00 – 11:15 AM: Break

11:15 AM – 12:15 PM: Keynote, Torgbui Gideon F. Alorwoyie 

12:15 – 1:00 PM: Lunch

1:00 – 2:30 PM: Staging the Divine

• Nathalie Joachim, “The Eternal Present: Vodou, Voice, and the Regeneration of Freedom” 
• Aileen Robinson, “The Stagecraft of Spirit: Fabiola Jean-Louis and Material Transmutations” 
• Benson Ohihon Igboin, “Iovbodẹ Festivals among the Iuleha of Nigeria: A Study in Polyontological Preservation of Communal Memory”
• Kofi Anthonio, chair

2:30 - 2:45 PM: Break

2:45 – 4:15 PM: Digital and the Divine

• Oluwatosin Ibitoye, “Soundscapes of Merchandised Worship and Convivial Trends in the Digital Mediation of Selected Pentecostal Ministries in Nigeria”
• Deborah Jayeoba, “‘Digital’ Christianity and Nigerian New-age Churches: Mediatization as ‘New’ Syncretism in Lagos Pentecostal Worship” 
• Ernest Jnr Frimpong and Jonathan E. T. Kuwornu-Adjaottor, “The Digital and the Divine: Opponents or Potential Partners for African Music and Art in the 21st Century”
• Fiifi Fosu-Ankrah, chair

 4:15 – 6:00 PM - Lahare Kunde Shrine Event
 

8:30 - 9:00 AM: Welcoming Performance by the Madina Lunsi Royal Drummers of Dagbon

9:00 – 11:00 AM: Performative Christianity in African Religious Meaning-making

• Patrick Oloko, “Ikon Allah and the Musical Crossroads: Gospel, Islam and the Politics of Performance”
• Anthony Okeregbe, “Rethinking Sonic Excess and Embodied Spectacle in African Christian Worship”
• Catherine Uchechukwu Nkulume, “‘Omenela ga adi, uka ga di’: Igbo Catholic Worship in a New Mediational Frame”
• Kyama Mugambi and Njane Mugambi, “Multiple Belongings in Black Sacred Art Music: The Case of Missa Amani”
• Daniel Avorgbedor, Chair

11:00 - 11:15 AM: Break

11:15 –12:15 PM: Roundtable - Theology and the Arts: Challenges and Opportunities for Research and Collaboration

• Fulera Issaka-Toure, Moderator
• Joshua D. Settles
• Alfred P. Addaquay
• Frederick M. Amevenku
• Cosmas Ebo Sarbah

12:15 – 1:00 PM: Lunch

1:00 – 1:45 PM: Performance and Paper with Lunsi, Nathaniel Ash-Morgan, “Damba Festival: Indigenous Roots of a Syncretic Islamic Celebration” 

1:45 - 2:00 PM: Break

2:00 – 4:00 PM: Performing Liberation: The Ritual Pursuit of Resistance, Rights, and Violence in and across the Black Atlantic?

• Albert Kafui Wuaku, “The wonder that was Little Haiti: Structural violence, the malcontents of gentrification, and Vodou practice in South Florida.” 
• Genevieve Nrenzah, “Symbolic violence and divine communication in Ghana’s Indigenous religious traditions”
• Seth Tweneboah, “When traditional spirituality don jam modern technology:” rethinking secularism in Ghana’s Crime-Control Regime 
• Joseph Hellweg, “Harmony of Hunting, Counterpoint to Human Rights: Dozo Eudaemonia in Côte d’Ivoire through the Songs of Dramane Coulibaly” 
• Kwasi Kuwor, Chair

4:00 - 4:15 PM: Break

4:15 PM –4:45 PM: Final Discussion

The gyil, a pentatonic wooden xylophone central to Dagara ritual life in northwestern Ghana, occupies a distinctive place in Catholic worship among Dagara communities. Traditionally associated with funerary ceremonies and other moments of collective consequence, the gyil functions as an authoritative ritual instrument through which social order, moral obligation, and communal participation are enacted. This paper examines how the gyil was incorporated into Dagara Catholic liturgy and argues that its presence in the Mass represents a process of musical re-inscription rather than syncretism or aesthetic accommodation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and liturgical observation, the paper traces how the gyil moved from its primary association with funerals into Catholic worship through the emergence of Missa yielu, a locally grounded Mass repertoire that developed in the mid-twentieth century. Rather than abandoning its ritual gravity, the gyil retained its organizing authority while being redirected toward Eucharistic theology and Christian worship. Its established cultural legitimacy enabled Catholic liturgy to be experienced as spiritually serious, intelligible, and ritually efficacious within Dagara cosmological frameworks. The analysis focuses on gyil-led Mass performance to show how the instrument structures the liturgy by cueing entrances, regulating tempo, stabilizing pitch, and sustaining antiphonal exchange between choir and congregation. In this context, the gyil functions as a form of ritual technology that actively governs participation and shapes the temporal flow of worship, rather than serving as decorative accompaniment. At the same time, song texts and performance practices selectively engage indigenous ritual categories, allowing Catholic theology to be articulated through locally resonant sonic and symbolic forms without reproducing traditional ritual practice. By foregrounding the gyil’s movement from funerary authority to Eucharistic centrality, this paper contributes to scholarship on the Black sacred arts by demonstrating how indigenous instruments can be re-inscribed within Christian worship as agents of theological meaning, cohesion, and cultural continuity.

John Dankwa is an Assistant Professor of Music at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, USA. He is an ethnomusicologist and Africanist music scholar whose research focuses on West African musical traditions, especially Ghanaian xylophone (gyil) music, ritual performance, and sacred sound. His work examines how music operates as a source of social authority, theological meaning, and communal identity in African religious contexts. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana, particularly among Dagara communities in the Upper West Region, and among Ghanaian Christian congregations in the diaspora. His current projects explore musical semiotics, indigenous epistemologies of sound, and the incorporation of traditional instruments into Christian worship. In addition to his scholarly research, he is an active performer and ensemble director, teaching courses in African music, performance, and ethnographic method.

 This paper will explore the origins of the Gnawa guinbri, a stringed musical instrument associated with Black Africans in Morocco, to illustrate how indigenous African conceptions of materiality were interwoven with the Islamic framework. Developed by West Africans brought through the trans-Saharan slave trade, the guinbri is a morphological descendant of stringed instruments, such as the Senegalese xalam and Malian ngoni. More than inanimate objects, these musical instruments were full of sacred energy, constructed by spiritually powerful blacksmiths with ritually-charged materials such as wood, iron, leather, and cowrie shells. Descended from these forms, this paper will ground the guinbri as dialogue between these indigenous African spiritual traditions in materiality and Islam. Framed as a curatorial walkthrough, this paper will take the audience through a collection of selected material—from photographs, video footage, to sketches—describing the development of the guinbri from its morphological antecedents. It will describe how early contact between West Africans and Islamized Amazighen lead to forms like the xalam and ngoni, illustrating how indigenous African spiritual worldviews flourished in the Islamic framework. This paper will then look at how these lute forms contributed to the development of the guinbri as a ritual object of healing that traversed the contours of both indigenous African and Islamic worldviews. A part of a larger dissertation project, this inquiry on the guinbri will attempt remediate the sequestration of Gnawa identity as a “North African” phenomenon with mostly symbolic connections to Africa below the Sahara Desert. Rather, I will demonstrate that the cultural networks between so-called North and sub-Saharan Africa are actually historically fluid, and that indigenous African traditions continuously found expression in its contact with Islamic influences. Ultimately, I will illustrate the development of the guinbri as a ritual object that exemplifies the long durée of historical exchange in northwestern Africa.

Kai Mora is a Ph.D. candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, specializing in music and spirituality in northwestern Africa. She graduated with her B.A. and M.A. in History from the City College of New York. Her work has been featured in The Republic, The Black Scholar, Transition Magazine, Callaloo, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and HISTORY.

The widespread use of ivory trumpeters as socio-political mediators and indexes of spirituality and power in Africa dates back to ancient times. In the days of territorial conquests among the Asante Akan in Ghana, ivory trumpeters preceded army units while sounding coded messages as signals for the infantry. Oral narratives are replete with stories about the spiritual potency of sounded ivory trumpets that can send bees in the direction of enemy combatants to neutralize them before face-to-face encounter leading to references to akobɛn (fighting trumpets) in Akan Adinkra pictographs. In Jamaica, a metal sculpture erected on the monument of Queen Nanny of the Windward Maroons is a replica of the Akan abeng (the trumpet), which was critical to Nanny and her group’s war against British soldiers. The sculptured abeng is designed to give voice to the monument in metaphorical and metaphysical terms. Drawing on my research among the Asante Akan areas in Ghana, I shall examine instrumental poetry performed by a royal ivory trumpet ensemble to advance my argument that, far from the notion of praise poetry, ivory trumpeters perform poetic rhetoric to negotiate a complex system of sacred soundscape for spiritually potent security clearance in formal settings, court ceremonies, and rituals. I identify two domains: instrumental poetry representing the sounded spiritual domain while the unsounded field involves the spiritually potent number, seven, as the numeric makeup of ivory trumpet ensembles. Finally, I will link the Asante notion of the number seven with African Atlantic religious streams in the Caribbean and South America as embodied and lived religious worldview of the Devine essence and the natural order.

Kwasi Ampene is a professor in the Department of Music at Tufts University, a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, and specializes in Akan musical arts. Ampene’s book publications include Asante Court Music and Verbal Arts in Ghana: The Porcupine and the Gold Stool, Engaging Modernity: Asante in the Twenty-First Century, and Female Song Tradition and the Akan of Ghana: The Creative Process in Nnwonkoro. He is the leading editor of Discourses in African Musicology: J.H. Kwabena Nketia Festschrift. Asante Court Music is the winner of J.H. Kwabena Nketia Book Prize for the best monograph on African music in 2022. Ampene is the producer of the film documentary, Gone to the Village: Royal Funerary Rites for Asantehemaa Nana Afia Kobi Serwaa Ampem II. In early 2024, Ampene successfully facilitated the repatriation of artifacts from the University of California-Los Angeles Fowler Museum to the Asante Kingdom in Ghana.

This paper examines Vodou vocality and vibration as embodied technologies of resistance and worldmaking within Haitian Vodou. Drawing on ethnographic research with practitioners, ritual specialists, and sound archives, it foregrounds the voice, breath, rhythm, and percussive utterance as epistemic forces that exceed language and textuality. In Vodou ceremonial contexts, vocal sounds, chants, cries, seemingly unintelligible utterances, call-and-answer patterns, and breath-inflected exhalations operate not merely as expressive media but as vibrational acts that reorganize space, time, and relationality. These sonic practices call lwa yo (Vodou spirits), activate ancestral memory, and recalibrate the body toward balance, producing what practitioners describe as alignment rather than belief. By centering the animation of vocality in Vodou, this paper examines how vocal performances function within the liturgical cycle, their role in sustaining cultural memory, and their capacity to mobilize both spiritual power and social solidarity. It examines instances of divine interaction as conveyed through vocal sonorities and the responses elicited from listeners. It highlights the expertise of Vodou priests, who provide insight into the significance of voice and the interpretations of performances of Vodou liturgical songs. Situating Vodou vocality within Black Atlantic histories of enslavement, colonial violence, and epistemic suppression, the paper argues that vibration functions as a counter-archive: a mode of transmission that resists capture by colonial grammars and survives through repetition, resonance, and corporeal attunement. These vocal practices transcend expression; they function as vibrational strategies that regulate energy, mediate the presence of spirits, and promote collective equilibrium in situations marked by social precarity. Vocal vibration becomes a practice of fugitivity, enabling practitioners to sustain worlds that colonial modernity sought to silence or eradicate. Through sustained attention to timbre, iteration, and resonance, the paper theorizes Vodou sound as a material force that shapes social life and African cosmology alike.

Houngan Collin Edouard is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology at Yale University, specializing in vocality and ritual sounds within Haitian Vodou. He was awarded the 2023 Karen McCarthy Brown Award for his research on breath and the body in Vodou and received the 2024 Emerging Scholars Award from the Haitian Studies Association. He introduced innovative courses, such as “Music of the Global South,” at Bridgeport University, where he asks his students to consider mobility and vocality beyond Eurocentric frameworks, earning him the 2024 Excellence in Teaching Award. He serves on the boards of PBKNY and Kosanba, organizations dedicated to enhancing scholarly engagement for students and professionals both within and beyond the academy. He holds an M.Mus from the University of Cambridge and an M.A in music and music education from Teachers College, Columbia University. He is a priest in the Haitian Vodou tradition and a proud member of Sosyete Nago.

This paper examines Umbanda ritual music as an embodied ritual sound practice, arguing that sound in Afro-diasporic religious life functions not as representation but as a referential and ontologically generative mode of relation through which the sacred is enacted, mediated, and ethically negotiated. Based on long-term reflexive ethnography and autoethnographic participation in Umbanda terreiros in Southern Brazil, the paper centers on pontos cantados (sacred sung chants), drumming, bodily attunement and ritual atmosphere as technologies that organize presence, restraint, and collective attunement. Often described as the first religion to be systematized on Brazilian soil, Umbanda emerged in the early twentieth century – particularly within lineages associated with Zélio Fernandino de Moraes – through the entanglement of African diasporic cosmologies, Indigenous knowledge systems and EuroChristian and Spiritist frameworks. Rather than approaching this triple heritage as harmonious synthesis, the paper foregrounds how these streams are unevenly held together and actively negotiated across different ritual situations and sonic registers. Drawing on phenomenological and anthropological reflections on listening, embodiment, and dwelling, the presentation shows that ritual sound in Umbanda does not symbolize the sacred but opens relational fields in which human and non-human agencies co-emerge. Through ethnographic vignettes of ritual singing and near-incorporation, it demonstrates how listening functions as an embodied and ethical orientation that demands availability, vulnerability, and disciplined restraint. By framing Umbanda ritual music as a lived sound practice, this paper contributes to conversations on Black sacred arts, ritual technologies, and Afro-diasporic epistemologies, while inviting renewed attention to sound as a site where the sacred is not merely expressed, but where living persons and human spirits are brought into relation through ritual practice.

Letícia Burtet is a PhD student in Ethnomusicology at the University of North Texas. Her research examines sound, ritual, and embodiment in Afro-diasporic religious practices in Southern Brazil, with a particular focus on Umbanda as a Black sacred art. Rather than treating music as representational, her work approaches ritual sound as a practice through which sacred relations, ancestral presence, and communal worlds are enacted and negotiated. Trained as a classical singer and music educator in Brazil, and herself an Umbanda medium of incorporation and ritual singer, she conducts ethnomusicological research from within embodied religious practice. Her scholarship attends to Umbanda’s formation through the historical entanglement of African diasporic cosmologies, Indigenous epistemologies, and Euro-Christian and Spiritist traditions. Her broader interests include decolonial sound studies, Black Atlantic studies, sensory anthropology, and the ethics of embodied knowledge production.

When Osun, the riverine goddess of fresh water, sweetness, healing, justice, and fertility, speaks through devotees, she teaches cosmology through sensation, sound, and movement. Drawing on interviews conducted during spirit incorporation and fieldwork in Osogbo, Igede-Ekiti, Abeokuta, and Ibadan, this presentation develops the method I term becoming river: a framework that treats water’s qualities—cooling, reflecting, carrying, cleansing, as methodological guides. Using Sensiotics (Drewal 1992) and Indigenous Hermeneutics (Olupona 2014) to track shared sensory indices of presence, rhythm, temperature, texture, timing, even the “weight” of the air, I show how priestesses and devotees translate cosmology into ritual form through song, mirror and brass, river rituals, and disciplined comportment. Rereading Ose Otura, a foundational divinatory sign in the Ifa corpus (the Yoruba knowledge and divination system), as method rather than myth, I foreground two understudied dimensions of Osun’s agency: her deliberate refusal to make ebo (ritual offering) and her non-maternity. Fieldwork reveals how these themes reframe kinship beyond biology. Osun’s “children” include stones that multiply in her waters, devotional paths that carry distinct facets of her power, and initiates trained to embody water’s law. Becoming river names a daily repertoire, cooling, feeding, cleaning, oath-making, incorporation, that regulates heat, circulates care, and sustains relation with the elemental world. In what Ayodeji Ogunnaike calls an “Age of Ogun,” where iron, technology, and speed have been idolized, Osun offers the antidote: cooling practices that moderate, sweeten, and bind iron to water. Building on Rowland Abiodun’s account of Yoruba aesthetics, these practices activate reality, channeling ase (vital force) toward coolness and repair through embodied ritual, sound, and movement. This paper demonstrates how sacred presence becomes method, sensed through the body and put in practice through ritual, offering Osun’s protocols as vital resources for addressing contemporary crises of extraction, heat, and ecological imbalance.

Robin Garcia is a Chicana scholar-practitioner and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia whose work bridges Africana religions, Indigenous studies, cultural studies, and sacred aesthetics. An initiated Ifa/Orisa priestess with over twenty years of practice, she studies how devotional practice generates knowledge through embodied performance, spirit incorporation, and care for land and water. Her research develops “becoming river” as a practitioner-led method for reading ritual, sound, and movement. In 2024–25 she conducted multi-sited fieldwork in Yorubaland (Osogbo, Igede-Ekiti, Abeokuta, Ibadan), including interviews with devotees and during spirit incorporation. Dr. Garcia also works in community arts and cultural equity. She co-curated Voices in the Water, a sound installation on diasporic water stories in Los Angeles, and Of Soil, Seeds, and Stars, a meditation on ancestral memory, land, and the body. Across scholarship and curation, her practice shows how ritual becomes method, sensed through the body and enacted through care.

This paper examines the work of Cuban artist Belkis Ayón (1967–1999) for its syncretic iconography, focusing her technique of collography as a form of ritualized visual practice. Drawing on the cosmology of the male-exclusive Abakuá secret society, Ayón developed a subversive symbolic language composed of repeated figures, masks, scales, eyes, and ritual signs arranged and sometimes composed of densely patterned fields. My primary argument is that Ayón’s collography operates as a ritual process rather than a purely representational medium. The labor-intensive acts of cutting, assembling, inking, and printing matrice mirror the iterative and codified gestures of ritual practice. Tessellation emerges as a visually arresting compositional strategy and conceptual motif through which spiritual subjects are invoked and reiterated. The stark greyscale palette and frontal, hieratic figures reinforce the solemnity and hermeticism associated with ritual space. Particular attention is given to Ayón’s repeated depiction of Sikán, a female figure in Abakuá mythology punished for revealing sacred knowledge. Through her multiplication and redistribution across the picture plane, Sikán is transformed from an isolated transgressor into a persistent, collective presence, in a way that invokes the artist’s intrusion into this male dominated space. As such, Ayón’s stagings function as a critical intervention within a patriarchal symbolic system, asserting female authorship through ritualized repetition.

Yomi Folaranmi is a PhD student in art history at Harvard University. His work examines the politics (and poetics) of representation and relation across the Atlantic world since the nineteenth century. He previously completed a BA (with Italian) and an MA in Comparative Literature at University College London, followed by an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford. His research takes Afro-Brazilian religious and visual culture as a point of departure to explore the cultural, artistic, and intellectual entanglements between Africa, Latin America, and Europe. He is broadly interested in processes of hybridity, global modernisms in art and literature, and their intersections with the history of anthropology.

This presentation explores Agbe music as a sacred soundscape through which the Tabom people of Ghana—descendants of Afro-Brazilian returnees—live out and negotiate religious pluralism. The Tabom practice Şángò worship, Islam, and Christianity, often within the same families and even individuals. Rather than resolving these religious differences through doctrine, the Tabom use Agbe music to create communal space where spiritual traditions coexist. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and performance analysis, the presentation examines how Agbe functions as a medium for ritual inclusion, diasporic memory, and identity-making. It considers how sound, movement, and participation produce sacred experience, particularly in moments where music bridges distinct theological logics without collapsing them. The session includes live performances by the Tabom to illustrate key aspects of Agbe’s role in funerals, initiation rites, and public celebrations. By framing Agbe as both a sonic and social practice, this presentation contributes to the conference theme “Sacred Soundscapes and Performance.” It demonstrates how African musical traditions do not simply accompany religious life but actively shape its form, feeling, and meaning—especially in communities where multiple religious systems must be held in tension and ritual conversation.

Dr. Benjamin Amakye-Boateng is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Ghana, where he specializes in African music, performance studies, and religious soundscapes. His research focuses on how music functions as a site of cultural memory, religious negotiation, and identity formation, particularly within Afro-diasporic communities in West Africa. His long-term ethnographic work with the Tabom people explores how Agbe music serves as a sacred practice through which religious pluralism—spanning Şángò worship, Islam, and Christianity—is embodied and mediated. Dr. Amakye-Boateng integrates academic research with community engagement, collaborating with traditional musicians and ensembles to document and interpret performance practices as living archives of heritage and belief. He has presented his work at national and international conferences and is committed to advancing scholarship that honors indigenous epistemologies and performative ways of knowing.

This paper challenges the conventional secular–sacred divide by examining the spiritual undercurrents embedded in Benga music, a popular genre that emerged in western Kenya in the postcolonial period. Far from being merely entertainment, Benga functioned as a cultural and ethical discourse through which artists articulated collective anxieties, moral values, and political critique. Focusing on the works and performance practices of influential musicians such as the late Osito Kalle and Daniel Owino Misiani, the study demonstrates how Benga music drew deeply from Luo cosmology, ancestral consciousness, and Christian symbolism to comment on social injustice, political marginalization, and moral decay.  Through close textual analysis of lyrics and ethnographic attention to performance contexts such as funerals, political rallies, and communal gatherings—the paper illustrates how Benga musicians mobilized biblical allegory, prophetic voice, and indigenous spiritual metaphors to speak truth to power. These artists assumed roles akin to cultural intermediaries, blending oral tradition with modern musical forms to create a sonic space where spirituality and political consciousness converged. Benga thus became a medium through which everyday struggles were framed within a broader moral and cosmological order. Conceptually, the paper positions Benga as a dialogic exchange between artistic imaginings and performance practices, foregrounding music as both social commentary and spiritual expression. It argues that the genre reflects the interconnectedness of the sacred and the secular in African quotidian life, where political critique is often articulated through spiritual idioms. By situating Benga within debates on African popular culture, religion, and resistance, this study contributes to broader discussions on how music functions as a site of aesthetic resistance, moral negotiation, and cultural continuity in postcolonial African societies.

Rev. Dr Peterson Thumi Kabugi is a Catholic priest serving in the Diocese of Nyahururu, Kenya. He is a Lecturer and University Chaplain at Laikipia University, where he earned his PhD in Religious Studies. His academic expertise encompasses ethics, human rights, and peace studies, reflecting a profound commitment to social justice and support for marginalised communities. An advocate for women’s empowerment, Rev. Dr Kabugi has published research on the socio-economic contributions of women in Laikipia County. Through his teaching, research, and pastoral care, he continues to foster ethical leadership and inspire positive change within his community and beyond.

In my paper, I interrogate relations among religious freedom, sect-formation, ritual, and conflict, through a comparative study of Sufi musical ritual in Ghana and Egypt. Unlike Egypt, many Ghanaian families are peacefully multi-faith. Freedom of religion is upheld in Ghana’s constitution and in practice, unlike Egypt, where Islam is the official state religion, shariʿa is the principal basis for legislation, religious affiliation is hereditary, and Islam is relatively monolithic. In Egypt, musical rituals mark and coalesce Sufi orders (turuq) manifesting diverse ritual interpretations of Islam, including periodic mawalid (saint festivals). Egypt’s salafis (inspired by Saudi Islam) reject such rituals as bidʿa (heretical). However, rejection does not trigger violence. By contrast, Ghana’s Muslim population, though small, is strongly sectarian, including traditional syncretic Islam, the Sufi Tijaniyya, and a salafi group, the Ahlus Sunna walJamaʿ. Ghanaian Tijaniyya perform stirring zikiri hymns with akwashi rawa drumming and dancing at the mawlidi (Prophet’s festival). Unlike in Egypt, Ghanaian salafis sometimes act violently against these musical rituals. Why? Drawing upon historical and ethnographic data, I seek an explanation rooted in economics and social network theory. Affiliation networks combined with musical festivals generate powerful religious solidarity. In Ghana, religious freedom provides a competitive market for adherents, while structural holes (Burt 1992) privilege Ghanaian Muslim leaders with exclusive connections to external sources of authority (Egypt or Saudi for the Ahlus Sunna wal-Jamaʿ; Senegal or Nigeria for Tijaniyya), triggering sect formation. Such sects compete for adherents in Ghana’s freer religious market. In Egypt, historical dominance of Islam militates against structural holes, and socio-legal constraints inhibit sect-formation. However, in Ghana, the conditions for sharp intra-Islamic competition — structural holes, external authority, religious freedom — are all present. The affiliative power of the musical mawlidi appears threatening to Salafis who, for ideological reasons, cannot avail themselves of it.

Michael Frishkopf is Professor of Music and Director of the Canadian Centre for Ethnomusicology at the University of Alberta, Canada. Centering on Africa, his research includes Music and Islam, Immigration, Development, Global Health, and Social Network Analysis. Recent publications include co-edited books, Tarab: Music, Ecstasy, Emotion, and Performance (University of Texas Press, 2025), Resisting the Dehumanization of Refugees (Athabasca University Press, 2024), and Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam (2018), as well as “The Sonorous Audible Mosque”, in Mosque: Approaches to Art and Architecture (2024); “Localized Timbres and Tonalities of Qur’ānic Recitation: From Africa to Indonesia”, Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 8:1 (2023); and “Music for Global Human Development: Participatory Action Research for Health and Wellbeing”, MUSICultures 49 (2022). He has led several applied ethnomusicology projects in Ghana, especially “Singing and Dancing for Health” (http://bit.ly/sngdnc4h) and has served as Adjunct Professor at the University for Development Studies in Tamale.

Among the GaDangme communities of Ghana’s Greater Accra Region, Klama and Kple sacred traditions function as complex epistemological systems that encode ancestral wisdom, moral imperatives, and collective identity. These indigenous religious practices, however, increasingly confront systematic marginalization within Ghana’s shifting religious and political terrain. Scholarly attention to Ghanaian religion has disproportionately focused on Christian and Islamic traditions, inadvertently positioning indigenous spiritual systems as static cultural artifacts rather than dynamic contemporary practices. This analytical blind spot obscures critical questions about how traditional sacred arts negotiate religious hostility and institutional exclusion in modern urban contexts. This ethnographic study examines mounting tensions between Klama and Kple practitioners and Christian communities in Accra, focusing particularly on disruptions to sacred temporalities such as the violation of kpoo feemor—the ritual silence preceding Homowo festivals. The research further investigates the political marginalization of traditional religious authorities, exemplified by the systematic exclusion of Ga Wulormei from state-sponsored interfaith ceremonies since the mid-2000s, despite constitutional guarantees of religious equality. Drawing on extensive fieldwork including in-depth interviews and community discussions with traditional priests, cultural guardians, and practitioners, the study maps both the sources of religious intolerance and the innovative survival strategies developed by indigenous communities. Evidence reveals that Klama and Kple traditions demonstrate remarkable adaptive capacity through strategic negotiations, ritual modifications, and grassroots resistance networks. By centering indigenous sacred arts as living traditions actively engaging modernity’s challenges, this research contributes to decolonial scholarship on African religious pluralism while highlighting the urgent need for inclusive frameworks that recognize traditional spiritual systems as legitimate components of Ghana’s contemporary religious mosaic.

Aristedes Narh Hargoe (PhD) is currently a Snr. Lecturer at the Department of Dance Studies, School of Performing Arts, University of Ghana, Legon. He is a University of Michigan African Presidential Scholar (UMAPS – Fall 2022), BECHS-AFRICA (Andrew Mellon Foundation Fellow – 2026) and doubles as the Artistic Director of the Ghana Dance Ensemble of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana Legon. He holds a PhD, University of Cape Coast, an MFA, and BFA degrees, University of Ghana. His research lies within the domain of Dance Ethnography, and Dance Aesthetics. Beatrice Oforiwaa Dankyi, based at the Language Centre of the University of Ghana in Accra, brings a richly layered linguistic background to her ethnographic research on indigenous religious traditions. Her native language is Larteh, spoken in southeastern Ghana by the Guang people, and she has proficiency in Akuapem, Fante, and Asante Twi, widely spoken dialects across southern Ghana.

Beatrice Oforiwaa Dankyi is based at the Language Centre of the University of Ghana in Accra, brings a richly layered linguistic background to her ethnographic research on indigenous religious traditions. Her native language is Larteh, spoken in southeastern Ghana by the Guang people, and she has proficiency in Akuapem, Fante, and Asante Twi, widely spoken dialects across southern Ghana. She also speaks Ga, the dominant local language in Accra, which she acquired during her formative years in the city, and which proves essential to her work with Ga-Dangme communities and their sacred traditions. English has been her primary medium of instruction from basic school through postgraduate studies, and she uses it fluently in academic and professional settings. Her basic knowledge of French, developed through formal schooling, was sharpened during language training programmes in Benin and Côte d’Ivoire. Driven by intellectual curiosity, she later travelled to Beijing to acquire foundational speaking and writing skills in Mandarin, supported by courses at the Confucius Institute at the University of Ghana.

Kanga, colorful Swahili texttile worn on waist by women, have historically been a powerful communication tools that helps to convey complex messages in form of proverbs, social commentary, political views, love, religious messages beyond restricted speech, acting as wearable greeting or expressions of identity through their Swahili text and imagery navigating social dynamics in daily life.  This paper examines Swahili textiles, particularly the kanga and ceremonial veils, as sacred technologies that mediate sexuality, piety, and power in Mombasa. Situated at the crossroads of Africa’s triple heritage (indigenous, Islamic, colonial), these cloths encode tensions between public modesty and intimate desire. Through analysis of textile symbolism, ritual performances such as unyago initiation rites, and oral histories, I argue that cloth serves as both a veil and a canvas for sexual imagining. By centering women’s and queer voices, this study addresses the call to reevaluate gendered embodiment and the epistemological challenges of studying secrecy in Africana sacred arts.

Prof. Sheila Pamela Wandera-Simwa is an Associate Professor of Kiswahili Studies in the Department of Literary and Communication Studies at Laikipia University and the founding coordinator of the Gender Centre (2016–2021). She has over 28 years of university-level teaching experience and has played a key role in advancing gender mainstreaming within the institution. At the Gender Centre, she coordinated all gender-related initiatives and established both ladies’ and gentlemen’s mentorship programmes. She has also served as coordinator of the Kiswahili subsection at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and as the department’s field attachment coordinator. Currently, she is the substantive Dean of the School of Humanities and Development Studies, overseeing 26 academic programmes and managing curriculum development, review, and innovation. A trained Kiswahili instructor for non-native speakers.

Ada asafotufiam festival’s designation (mass/communal musketry), history and ritual enactments all reinforce its defining ethos as a war memorial. Yet, until a decade ago, there was hardly any activity that situated the martial contributions and related legends and folk songs of Ada women warriors in asafotufiam performances beyond the relatively peripheral roles of preparing and administering special foods and “medicines” to male warriors at the war front and singing/dancing to welcome the survivals back home. The last decade has, however, witnessed increased initiation and participation of women Asafoanyeme (warrior queens) and Manyeme (queens- the female counterparts of the chiefs) in major asafotufiam rituals and Ada general chieftaincy affairs never witnessed before. Investigations into clan-based war legends, possession dramas, and folk song attribute the gendered transformations mainly to what I call “ancestral/sacred agency”— through protestations by manifesting spirits of unsung Ada war heroines during asafotufiam preparatory rituals. Giving that contemporary socio-political pressures and advocacies have failed to achieve same levels of gender inclusivity in the chieftaincy institution nationally, the article interrogates why religious action (sacred/ancestral agency) succeeded where political pressures and advocacies failed. What are the socio-political implications and inferences when highly guarded institutions (whose time-honoured legitimacy and stability rest on religious dogmas) can seem to be transformed only through the same religion that insulate it against external forces? Using the Ada chieftaincy story as a case, the paper argues for the privileging of indigenous religious beliefs and their related performative ethos in ethnographic research and advocacies that are intended for sustainable gender transformation of religion-based institutions in indigenous communities. 

Moses Nii-Dortey, (PhD Ethnomusicology and African Studies) is a Snr. Lecturer/Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Music & Dance Section of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. He was a recipient of the African Presidential Fellowship, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2009), and an AHP Fellow with residency at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, (2011-2012). Nii-Dortey has published on Arts Research in Africa, folk opera development in West Africa, traditional festivals as integrated performances, the Ghana National Symphony Orchestra, and challenges of pre-tertiary music education in Ghana, among others. In the last 20 years, Nii-Dortey has also been involved in applied ethnomusicological initiatives to safeguard Ghana’s dying folk operatic tradition pioneered by Saka Acquaye in the 1960s, and the effort has produced a documentary Reminisces of the Wulomei, and a short film Adaptation of ‘The Lost Fishermen’ in 2023, directed by Kwame Crenstil.

March 8, 2020, the Reverand Yolanda M. Norton and the DMV Singers presented a worship service The Beyoncé Mass at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Created by Rev. Norton, then San Francisco Theological Seminary Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible, the mass began as a course assignment. A Biblical scholar of womanism and religion, she instructed her students “to tell black women’s stories using Beyoncé’s music in a worship setting.” From the responses, Rev. Norton curated the quod libet Beyoncé Mass—an assemblage of Beyoncé songs—with Biblical readings. The Beyoncé Mass as Christian worship resonates with Black women’s spiritual needs, yet speaks to broader congregation—and stands against oppression. The Mass at the Kennedy Center drew some minor criticism in the press; the harshest came from viewers of the service on the Center’s YouTube channel. Overall, the Mass met with positive response and repeated services. Its measured success, I argue, results from the Mass drawing not just upon Beyoncé’s status as a feminist icon and the popularity and meaning of her music among young Black women. Rather, as my close reading shows, it flows in a stream of African American contemporary gospel music and African American worship tradition in which contemporary music and vernacular culture can be borrowed, appropriated, and newly-composed to meet the religious and spiritual needs of a congregation and its members. Second, The Beyoncé Mass stands within a tradition of worship beyond feminist praxis. The Mass’s music, liturgy of Black Liberation Theology, and womanism intersect both to empower Black women and oppose heteroagression and all forms of oppression. The resonance of The Beyoncé Mass can also be located in the contexts of the Covid-19 pandemic, #Black Lives Matter Movement, and a Black feminist movement especially rooted in wellness, self-love, and healing.

Gayle Murchison is Associate Professor of Music at William & Mary. Recent publications include book chapters on Nadia Boulanger, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Woman, and Mary Lou Williams. Author of The American Musical Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetic of Copland’s New American Music, the Early Works, 1921-1938 (University of Michigan Press, 2012, she researches African American and African disaporic music, e.g., Mary Lou Williams, William Grant Still, and Zap Mama. She centers music in socio-cultural movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights, and the Afro-European studies. She was editor of Black Music Research Journal 2014-2019.She is co-editor of Jazz Perspectives. In 2024 she was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at the University of York where she undertook research on Williams and British Black musicians Cleo Laine, Shirley Bassey, and Winifred Atwell. She is currently writing a book on Mary Lou Williams in Europe, 1952-1954.

This paper examines missionary soundscapes in colonial Mozambique as sites where Christianity, empire, and the arts became entangled through sound. It argues that Christian conversion was not only a doctrinal or theological process, but also a sonic and embodied one, enacted through regimes of listening, vocal discipline, and musical training in missionary schools, churches, and related educational settings. Drawing on missionary writings, colonial educational records, and sound archives, including hymnody, choral practices, and recorded performances, the paper shows how music functioned as a technology of religious governance. Hymns translated into African languages were framed by missionaries as instruments of evangelization and moral reform, yet they also reveal complex processes of negotiation, appropriation, and re-signification by local communities. Sound thus became a privileged medium through which Christian authority was internalized, contested, and reworked. Rather than treating missionary archives as transparent records of religious transmission, the paper approaches them as epistemic infrastructures that actively produced categories of African sacred music. Through practices of classification, translation, and moral framing, these archives established distinctions between sacred and profane, disciplined and undisciplined, and authentic and corrupted forms of sound distinctions central to colonial projects of spiritual and social ordering. Against this archival framing, the paper foregrounds African performance practices in southern Mozambique as sites of sonic reasoning that exceeded missionary categories. These practices articulated alternative moral worlds, historical memories, and forms of religious authority that cannot be reduced to syncretism or passive reception. By centering sound as both archive and practice, the paper contributes to interdisciplinary debates on religion, colonialism, and the arts, and advances a decolonial politics of listening attentive to African sonic practices as active producers of religious thought, memory, and critique.

Eduardo Lichuge is a Mozambican ethnomusicologist and currently is a Visiting Professor at Yale University (MacMillan Center, Council on African Studies). His research examines colonial music archives, politics and urban popular music and social memory in Mozambique.

Significant social and political upheaval marked the final decades of Spanish rule in Cuba. As slavery’s decline and the approach of war destabilized colonial authority in the late nineteenth century, the Abakuá society—an all-male initiatory organization with roots in West Africa—expanded its influence across working-class neighborhoods in Havana, provoking alarm among state officials and the state-allied press. This talk centers on an 1884 police raid in which officers arrested the carpenter Santiago Llanelis and ten other men accused of forming Ecoria Efor no. 2, an Abakuá chapter. Reading the resulting case file alongside sensational newspaper accounts, I argue that “mystery” operated as a colonial discourse of oppression: the press portrayed Abakuá ritual as tenebrous and “Machiavellian” to strike fear into the Havana public, while simultaneously positioning the Havana police as the only force capable of piercing their secretive ritual practices. Yet, as I will argue, the Abakuá also mobilized the deconstruction of mystery as an aesthetic mode of response to the press’s falsifications. By focusing on a quartered-circle sign that appears across confiscated papers and objects from Ecoria Efor no. 2, this paper asks how Abakuá practitioners de-mystified the rituals of power of the Spanish colonial state. By adopting the graphic procedures of official seals—symmetry, format, repetition—they exposed colonial truth and authority as made rather than given: a performative artifice sustained by techniques of inscription and display, no less reliant on ritual than the practices the state sought to criminalize.

Sophia Kitlinski is Assistant Professor of Latin American and African Art History at the University of Kentucky. She earned her PhD in History of Art from Yale University in 2025. Her work examines nineteenth-century Afro-Atlantic visual and material cultures, showing how Cuban ritual practitioners expanded and reshaped the aesthetic practices of signing, stamping, and sealing which underpinned Spanish colonial governance. Her research across Cuba, Spain, England, Scotland, and Nigeria has been supported by institutions including the Spanish Fulbright Commission, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery and Abolition, the Council on Latin American History, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, and the John Carter Brown Library.

Music and ritual played an integral role at the royal court of the early modern kingdom of Kongo in vibrant manifestations of indigenous traditions, spiritual practices, social hierarchies, political power, and cultural identity in Afro-European encounters. The adoption of Christianity as the state religion in the 1490s led to the creation of an Afro-European Christian music influenced by both traditions. Yet while scholars have worked extensively on early modern cultural and religious histories of the Atlantic world, demonstrating the impact of African Catholicism emanating from West Central Africa on the emergence of African-Atlantic performance traditions, few musicological studies have focused on music and spirituality in 16th- and 17th-century Kongo and Afro-European musical manifestations of Christianity. Drawing on foreign travelers’ narratives and missionary archival visual-textual components, this paper explores the role of music-making and musical instruments in indigenous ritual and religious practices in the kingdom of Kongo, and how these impacted on local Afro-European interactions and the development of a distinct Afro-European Christian music. First, it focuses on music in relation to traditional Kikongo spiritual practices and rites, especially in spiritual communion with nature. Second, it traces evidence of the incorporation of European sacred music alongside local rituals, Kikongo texts and instrumentation, which reflected the cultural syncretism developing after the advent of Christianity in the region. Lastly, it centers on AfroCatholic performances, such as the sanga, which served as further musical expressions of this form of African Catholicism. These Black sacred arts transform our understanding of early musical practices in the region before 1800, African music and instruments in relation to spirituality and rite, and global interactions between Africans and Europeans unfolding outside of a colonial context which substantially contributed to the multifaceted and intersecting musical identities of the early modern world.

Janie Cole is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Connecticut and was a Research Scholar at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and Visiting Professor in Yale’s Department of Music (2023-24). Prior to this, she was a Senior Lecturer (adjunct) at the University of Cape Town’s South African College of Music for nine years (2015-23) and Research Officer for East Africa on the University of Cape Town’s multidisciplinary Mellon-funded project Re-Centring AfroAsia (2018-23). Author of two books, Dr. Cole’s specialty research areas are three-fold: musical practices, instruments and thought in early modern African kingdoms (Ethiopia and the Kongo) and Afro-Eurasian encounters; music, poetry and spectacle in late Renaissance Italy; music, social change and prisons in 20th-century South Africa. She is co- founder of the International Musicological Society Study Group Early African Sound Worlds (2023-), founder Africana Studies at RSA, and founder/executive director of Music Beyond Borders.

During rituals for a family of spirits called Mama Tchamba, or “grandmother slave,” Ewe people in coastal Togo produce danced histories of domestic West African enslavement. By emphasizing ways West African women use their bodies as catalysts for collectively remembering narratives of enslavement, this talk examines danced slave narratives as ritual technologies of music, movement, and materiality. The testimonies and performances of female ritual specialists reveal grassroots historical narratives in-the-making. Ritual gestures honoring Mama Tchamba demonstrate a mode of remembering enslavement that ties the bodies of ritual specialists to collectively interpreted landscapes as sites of reconciliation with the dead. Based on knowledge gained through apprenticeships with Vodun practitioners, I argue that what I term “spectral geographies” allow practitioners to negotiate current circumstances of need and troubled histories of migration. They do so by conceptually, kinesthetically, and temporarily transposing historical narratives of forced migration onto familiar and accessible places. Togolese ritual specialists describe their rituals for Mama Tchamba spirits in ways that indicate a remapping of often unspoken narratives of the slave trade onto the spaces of home courtyards and family shrines. Using visual and choreographic analysis, personal interviews, and my own experiences learning Ewe performance practices, this talk traces ways Ewe religious practitioners inhabit and remap histories of wealth and debt. This research highlights ways non-elite women transmit unwritten family histories by using “otherwise cartographies” to map the legacies of slavery onto contemporary social relations and local sacred arts practices.

Elyan Jeanine Hill is an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora art history at Southern Methodist University. As an interdisciplinary scholar of African arts, her research interests include festival arts, religious materiality, Black feminisms, and embodied renderings of domestic and transatlantic enslavement in Ghana, Togo, and their diasporas. Her written work has been featured in African Arts, Art Journal, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies, and in the edited volume Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas published by Duke University Press. She also maintains a curatorial practice that embraces experimental ethnography and Black feminist ethics.

This paper examines the role of embodied expressive culture - music, ritual, language, and performance - in Afrodiasporic religious and liberation practices through an analysis of Nathalie Joachim’s Afrosurrealist opera-in-progress, Le présent éternel. Grounded in performance practice as research, the project interrogates how spiritual and artistic technologies function as vehicles for historical transmission, collective memory, and emancipatory imagination. Drawing on bell hooks’s assertion that retrospective reflection is always mediated, this work argues that what is remembered, voiced, and embodied are distinct yet interdependent modes of knowing, with embodiment serving as a critical site of meaning-making within Afrodiasporic traditions. My research emerges from sustained engagement with Black expressive practices in the
African diaspora, particularly those rooted in Haitian history and Vodou cosmology. Centering Bwa Kayiman - the ceremony widely understood as the spiritual catalyst for the Haitian Revolution - this paper explores how Haitian Creole language, song, and ritual operated as unifying forces capable of mobilizing sustained collective action against enslavement. I propose that these practices exemplify how religious expression and artistic form transmit knowledge across generations while simultaneously cultivating regenerative possibilities for liberation. The paper advances three guiding questions: How is the past written? How is it transmitted? And how might these transmissions fuel liberation in the present? Through Le présent éternel, I examine freedom, spirituality, and time as interwoven concerns within Black expressive culture. Musically and dramaturgically, the work rejects linear, finite Western temporal frameworks in favor of Afroindigenous, cyclical conceptions of time that allow simultaneity, dreaming, and ancestral presence to coexist. Ultimately, this paper contends that Haitian liberation practices remain vital sites of inquiry for contemporary world-making. By foregrounding embodiment, spirituality, and artistic expression, Le présent éternel contributes to updated research perspectives that recognize religious expressive culture not as symbolic residue, but as active technology for resistance, regeneration, and future imagination.

Nathalie Joachim is a Grammy-nominated performer and composer. The Haitian-American artist is hailed for being “a fresh and invigorating cross-cultural voice”. (The Nation). Ms. Joachim is Assistant Professor of Composition at Princeton University and is regularly commissioned to write for orchestra, instrumental and vocal ensembles, dance, and interdisciplinary theater. Her landmark project, Fanm d’Ayiti, an evening-length work for flute, voice, string quartet and electronics, celebrates and explores her personal Haitian heritage and received a GRAMMY nomination for Best World Music Album. Joachim’s sophomore album, Ki moun ou ye - an intimate examination of ancestral connection and self - was co-released by Nonesuch Records and New Amsterdam Records in 2024, and deemed “one of the year’s most creatively and personally ambitious albums.” (SPIN Magazine). Joachim is Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia, a recent Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art, and an alumnus of The Juilliard School and The New School.
 

In 2025, Fabiola Jean-Louis, a Haitian and American multidimensional artist, premiered an intricate stagecraft in her exhibition, Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Waters of the Abyss, the culmination of her residency at the Gardner, featured forty scenic pieces crafted from paper, beads, glass, shell, and stone which drew upon the breadth of spiritual practices of Vodou. Jean-Louis draws on Vodou’s current legacy as a collection of African diasporic religions that combine Roman Catholicism and West and Central African religions, emerging in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Built on a query around Black freedom and Haiti’s history, Waters of the Abyss reckons with the spiritual legacy of roots magic and Catholic iconographies through a mise-en-scène of costume, alterpieces, vessels, and sculptural portraits.  The result is an immersive experience that conjures a multivalent approach to magic as spiritual force and transformative technique. 

In this talk, I engage with her illusion-making practice through two costume pieces, Paradise Lost (2024), and Lwa (2021-22). Both pieces incorporate Jean-Louis’ papier-mâché technique that transforms paper into flowing fabric or sculptural material.  Paradise Lost, evoking Catholic saints and the lwa Erzilis, is bright red with a gold lattice bodice, an elaborate curved mask of gold rosettes with a red-backed cross positioned as the face.  Lwa, representing all Vodou spirits, in contrast, is figural, a body of papier-mâché encased in a cape of the same red and gold. Lwa features a heart of crystal, shell sleeves, and a proffered machete.  The work of illusion—the play with surface, depth, and materiality—emphasizes transmutation and the importance of paper in her work.  The scenic and costume design effect thus plays with making the visible invisible, conjuring portals within the artistic object and the gallery space.  

Aileen K. Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance Studies and Affiliated faculty in African & African American Studies and Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University.  As a historian of performance and science, she specializes in the history of technological innovation, magic performance, and Black performance cultures. Her work has recently been featured in Performance Research, Theatre Journal, and in the edited volume Color Protocols: Technologies of Racial Encoding in Chromatic Media (MIT Press). Her book project, Empire Machines: Spectacle and Illusions in Nineteenth-Century British Public Science, examines the intersections between technological, scientific, and theatrical knowledge in early science museums. 

Studies in rites of passage have shown how religion, rituals and cultural practices mesh to describe a people’s life, belief systems and preserve memories. Iovbode festivals among the Iuleha people of Edo State, southern Nigeria, are part of the rites of passage, an initiation rite into adulthood and membership of the communities’ leadership cadre. Iovbode festivals, celebrated every four years, ritually and practically reenact the history of a people’s life, culture and religion, thus preserving the communal memory of the Iuleha people. This paper, through participant observation, interviews and focus group discussion, examines how Iovbode serves to preserve the people of Iuleha’s religious systems in the midst of overarching penetration of Christianity; the culture through traditional symbols, dance, foods and craft; and how storytelling functions to preserve the sacrality of the religious institutions and maintain social cohesion. Through polyontological framework, the paper explores why some Christians participate in Iovbode festivals and yet subscribe to their Christian faith, serially. The paper concludes that inter-religious participation in Iovbode festivals not only opens the vista for inter-religious palaver (technically different from dialogue), but also strongly strengthens the communal spirit or bond between traditionalists and Christians, which results in collective preservation of communal memory, religious cooperation and peaceful coexistence.

Benson Ohihon Igboin is a professor of religious studies at the Adekunle Ajasin University, Nigeria, Professor Extraordinaire, Department of Gender Studies and Research Fellow, Research Institute for Theology and Religion, University of South Africa. He was a visiting scholar at the Princeton Theological Seminary, NJ, USA. He is also a rated NRF C2 scholar in South Africa. His research intersects with philosophy of religion, African cultural values, and African Pentecostalism. Igboin has widely published in reputable national and international books and journals. He is currently the Vice President of the African Association for the Study of Religions.

This study interrogates how Pentecostal worship in post-pandemic Nigeria has become a digitally mediated soundscape where spirituality, commerce, and conviviality intersect. Within the online worship economies of Celebration Church International, Streams of Joy International, and the viral #HallelujahChallenge, gospel and worship are increasingly rendered as merchandised content circulated through livestreams, hashtags, and performances designed for visibility, monetisation, and affective engagement. The study fills a critical gap in digital and the divine by examining how Gen Z–driven Pentecostal practices transform faith into digital performance economies shaped by algorithms, aesthetics, and communal desire. ‎Within the framework of Francis Nyamnjoh’s theory of conviviality, the study theorises these worship environments as sites and spaces of “incompleteness” and relational creativity where youth negotiate belonging, faith, and aspiration through sonic intimacy and digital participation. The study adopts digital ethnography with particular focus on the live-streamed and archived activities of Celebration Church International, Streams of Joy International, and the Hallelujah Challenge. Through soundscape analysis, and semi-structured interviews with worshippers, musicians, and media teams, the study explores how ambient sound, music, and digital interfaces mediate sacred presence while reinforcing new forms of commodified religiosity. ‎The study finds that digital Pentecostalism in Nigeria operates as a hybrid spiritual economy, where divine encounter coexists with market logics and social media virality. The study establishes that hashtags like #HallelujahChallenge, #InChristForChristWithJoy, #WhatGodCannotDoDoesNotExist, #7amFirePrayers, and #DressLikeYourMiracle function as convivial, digital sound-bytes that bridge the liminal space between religious aspiration and consumerist desire, effectively transforming spiritual capital into quantifiable, monetisable digital assets. The study concludes that the digitally merchandised gospel constitutes a convivial moral economy of faith, embodying both the creative vitality and ethical tensions of Africa’s contemporary sacred arts.

Oluwatosin John IBITOYE is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in Ethnomusicology at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. He holds a B.A. and M.A. degrees in Performing Arts (Music) from the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. He currently lectures at the Department of Performing Arts and Film Studies, Kwara State University, Nigeria. His research focuses on ethnomusicology, digital culture/humanities, music performance and cultural studies. He is a 2025 Fellow of the Central European University Foundation of Budapest (CEUBPF); 2025 ASUU-Nigeria Scholar; 2024 Fellow of the Ife Institute of Advanced Studies (IIAS); 2024 Laureate of the LSA/Conventions of Creativity supported by Cadbury Endowment at DASA, University of Birmingham. He is a beneficiary of Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) conference travel grant to University of Bern, Switzerland; TETFund conference travel grant to IOHA, Poland; British Academy conference grant for ASAUK; ASUU Doctoral Research Grant; and European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Contemporary Nigerian Pentecostal worship is adopting creative digital models that resonate with the church crowd as part of its liturgical practices. With such interventions, Christianity is transforming its received traditions into a more performative and theatrical dynamic informed largely by a content-creation modernity popular among urban youths. Consequently, backdrops, decorations, display screens, lighting, LED technology, sound systems, musical instruments, projectors, monitors, and live streaming are new instrumentations in shaping and programming the religion to connect worshippers to the divine. As these innovations reshape spirituality, what forms do prayers and confessions, traditionally considered sacred and private, now take in the public domain of spectacles where likes, shares, and other reactions are the major drivers of digital logic and rationality? With churches increasingly becoming ‘brands’ worship moments becoming ‘contents, new questions of spiritual experience and beliefs emerge. If the digital is the new space for Christianity, what are its implications for spiritual authenticity? How do these syncretic realities intersect with extant practices to reframe Pentecostal Christianity? Using participant observation and questionnaires, this paper interrogates how technological interventions is propagating ‘Performative Christianity’ in new-age Pentecostal churches, at three worship centres in Lagos, Nigeria, namely, Celebration Church International, Harvesters International Christian Center, and House on the Rock.

Deborah Ikeoluwa Jayeoba is a graduate student at Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, University of Lagos. She holds a bachelor’s degree in literature-in-English from Obafemi Awolowo University and a master’s in English Literature from University of Lagos. Her core interests include Cross-cultural and Diaspora Studies, Anthropology, and Digital Humanities.

Historically, African music and art have played out as conduits of the “divine,” encompassing spirituality, cosmology, ritual, and communal identity existing within the frames of movement, visuals and sound. Spanning from the performance of rituals to verbal transmission and sacred imageries, the “divine” has defined African Art as a sacred-social practice. However, the rising issues of commercialization, globalization, fragmented ritual contexts, and cultural displacement in the 21st century, pose critical challenges to these sacred fundamentals. The production, circulation and patronisation of African music and art are being affected by influx of digitalization, namely: social media, streaming, recording, and digital tools. This raises alarms about sacred dilution, originality, and cultural belongingness. What are the perspectives of the African about the digital influx in the divine music and art? This paper examines the “perceived” friction between the “digital” and the “divine”, probing into whether digitalization comes as an opponent to sacred African music and art, or a potential partner, echoing their conservancy, expansion and global reach. Influenced by digital humanities, ethnomusicology, and postcolonial theory, this study employs a qualitative methodology. In addition to document (archival) analysis and case examination of some digitally related sacred music and art performances, semi-structured interviews will collect perspectives from African scholars, musicians, and cultural custodians. The study anticipates that findings reveal that the digital is not “disruptive,” but serving as a bridging partner that appreciates cultural originality and sacredness of the art by upholding ethical frameworks and indigenous heritage. Discussion will possible layouts for safeguarding content originality, spirituality, cultural identity, and ritual integrity in the art within the digital spaces. Contributing to African studies in religion and media, ethnomusicology, and digital heritage, this study offers insights about a possible “sacred-secular” nexus, reimagining sacred African art in a growing digital space.

Ernest Jnr Frimpong, MPhil, is a Religious Scholar, PhD Student and Research Associate at the Department of Religion and Human Development, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, GHANA. His areas of specialization include: African Christianity; Christianity, Culture and the Marginalized; Religion and Health (mental, emotional, and nutritional); Religion and Media, Messianism and Peace studies, Interreligious studies; New Testament Studies, Mother-Tongue Biblical Hermeneutics, Biblical Exegesis and Textual Criticism, Bible Translation Studies; Religion and Environment, Religion and Gender studies, Religion, Science and Development, and Research Methodology for Social Sciences. He is primarily being mentored by Professor Jonathan Edward Tetteh Kuwornu-Adjaottor, at KNUST, Ghana. He is an Associate member of the Institute of Biblical Scholarship in Africa (IBSA), West Africa, and shares additional affiliation with the University of South Africa (UNISA), South Africa.

Victor Micah Bulus renders his gospel music in Hausa, the everyday language of Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim northern region. Performing as “Autan Zaki Ikon Allah” (literally, “Son of Lion by the Power of God”) in colourful Islamic vestments and Fulani royal robes, Bulus fashions himself in audacity and courage to audiences of a broad spectrum. Through this striking persona, he sings political statements in lengthy lyrics to draw attention to the unsavoury experiences of northern Nigeria’s Christian minorities. Framed as singles for YouTube video channels, his songs are mellifluous in the raucous style of Hausa ‘Kalangu’ poetry, often prioritizing performance and spectacle over aural experience. Such controversial and abrasive lyrics endear Bulus to Christian and digital audiences who regard him as the poster boy of contemporary Hausa gospel music. Muslims perceive him as offensive in the way he hitches music to non-religious traditions to make political statements. To the ‘informed’ listener however, his gospel music is sacred noise propagating Christianity of a specific political type which truly portrays religion at a crossroad in a violent multifaith geo-cultural space. How then do religions, often blamed for such social dysfunction, reclaim their ethical force to shape morality? How far and effectively can defiant rhetorics, parody and artistic subversion of the sacred communicate a call for social renewal and religious harmony? This contribution engages with the music and costumes of Bulus as a syncretic package revealing the adversarial relationship of Christianity and Islam, on one hand, while also articulating the inevitability of dialogue for their coexistence, on the other. I discuss his performance as a symbolic and ethical crossroad in a volatile space, where two religions are entangled and seeking a conversation about their roles in framing a return to a harmonious multifaith Northern Nigeria.

Patrick Oloko is Visiting Professor with the Council on African Studies (CAS) at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Centre for International and Area Studies, Yale University. He teaches Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, University of Lagos, specializing in African Postcolonial Literature, Popular and Visual Cultures. His current research is on the Lagos creative and cultural economy, and he works with artists, writers and entertainment entrepreneurs to understand and map their involvement in the current reconfiguring of the arts, performances and infrastructures to serve the diverse tastes of audiences in this city of twenty-two million people. He is the editor of The Fiction of Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo: Issues and Perspectives (2008), In Theory and In Practice: Engaging the Writing of Hope Eghagha (2015), and Peju Layiwola’s Indigo Reimagined: Rethinking Adire in Yoruba Textile and Fashion Modernity (2021).

This contribution examines popular African Christian worship as a performative site of meaning making, where sacred soundscapes, comprising music, rhythm, chant, and embodied ritual, function as creative acts of theological and cultural expression. Through case studies from the soundscapes of some popular Christian churches, such as the Mountain of Fire and Miracles (MFM) Ministry, Christian denomination in Lagos, the paper demonstrates how engagements with the sacred through sonic excesses and embodied spectacles re-imagines connections with the transcendent. To do this, it operationalizes the philosophical insights of Leopold Senghor (Senghorian epistemology) as an epistemological tool within the broad framework of African phenomenology into a structured model for understanding African Christian performativity as a form of knowledge production. In foregrounding the performative, the contribution argues that African Christianity embodies a unique epistemology, in which worship is lived theology, while sound, gesture, and ritual enact meaning beyond doctrinal formulations. Sacred soundscapes become both theological and cultural resources from multiple spiritual heritages that enable communities to enact presence. resistance and articulate visions of hope. This study advances the discourse on Black Sacred Art by showing how sonic excess and embodied spectacle shape African Christian meaning-making, redefining popular worship as a performative epistemic practice that integrates aesthetics, theology, and cultural identity, while also situating African Christianity as a living tradition at the crossroads of multiple inheritances.

Anthony Okeregbe, Ph.D, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lagos (UNILAG) and Annual Theme Fellow (2024/25) of the African Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth. A Principal Investigator at the Lagos Cluster and associate researcher at Institute of African and Diaspora Studies (IADS), UNILAG, his work spans African knowledge production, sonic pedagogies, and social ontology. He has held fellowships in University of Edinburgh, University of Bayreuth, and Moi University. Author (with Muyiwa Falaiye) of Women Sages in Male Epistemic Spaces (Brill, 2024), he is widely published, a member of ASAI and CRVP, and a resource person for Lux Terra. Formerly Assistant Editor (Features) at The Guardian, Lagos.

Among the Igbo of Southeast Nigeria, Catholicism flourished in the form of rigid adherence to Eurocentric traditions. The hallmark being Latinate, minimal use of local instruments and a strict adoption of Catholic liturgies are often the norm. More recently however, knowledge expansion in the practical form of bottom-up decolonization and calls for flexible expressions of faith are gradually driving people to new worship ‘traditions’ that resonate with their cultural identites. In this sense, the popular expression “Omenela ga adi, uka ga di” (translated as “culture will thrive and the church will thrive”), explains a new effort by the Catholic church to introduce innovations that would ease tensions between indigenous cultural rites and the Roman Catholic Church liturgical practices. One way this manifest is employing Igbo epistemologies in the mass to communicate a shared identity and belongingness in the profession and practice of faith. With particular attention to how Rev. Fr. Fidelis Onwudufor’s social media presence promotes “Igbo culture through proverbs, folktales and traditions” in his conduct of worship in his Igbo Parish, this contribution examines emerging patterns of Catholic Mass against the backdrop of Vatican II’s principle of aggiornamento. How do new patterns of timeless syncretism show how indigenous knowledge can shape the preaching of the gospel in African ‘ways’ that neither dislodges cultural practices nor alters the Roman Catholic liturgical traditions? What specific factor(s) are responsible for reliving and practicalizing this historical principle? Observations, interviews and other relevant qualitative methods will be used to examine the situation and document findings to be shared at the conference.

Catherine Uchechukwu Nkulume is a Ph. D student in the Department of English at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. She has a BA in Education/English from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, an MA in English and another MA in African and Diaspora Studies, both from the University of Lagos. Her current research interests include performance and African Popular Cultural Expressions.

A substantial body of research on folk and popular music in Africa explores its utility within society as crucial elements of cultural production. However, more work needs to be done regarding art music as a growing but nascent form of African music. There is a need to examine this music, which draws from sociocultural frameworks for its existence to produce material whose consumption modes lie outside of folk or popular music.

Sacred art music, as a subset of such art music, straddles both the interpretive demands that art music places on the listener and the functional utility of folk and popular music. This tension is mediated through cultural and religious heritage, where religion itself functions as a belonging that provides purpose for the music and impetus for the creative processes that produce it. Though music within this context is often functional, art music of this kind presents itself and the religious commitment that produces it in ways that seemingly ignore—but which in effect fully affirm—the set of social, cultural, and historical identities that produce it.

This paper offers new insights in situating sacred art musical forms such as the mass within a broader framework of religious and cultural production essential for constructing meaning in social life. Using an autoethnographic approach, this paper examines Njane Mugambi’s Missa Amani as a piece of sacred art music in the genre of the mass, produced from within an African urban religious milieu. Embedded within the music’s invitations to the listener are assumptions and impulses that emerge from the negotiation of African urban identities. This paper argues that the musical “mass” as an exercise in articulating multiple belongings is mediated through multiple cultural and religious heritages. This paper aims to contribute to and invite more in-depth analysis of emerging pieces of art music produced within religious themes in Black communities in Africa and the diaspora.

Kyama Mugambi (PhD) is Assistant Professor of World Christianity at Yale Divinity School. His research explores historical, social, cultural, and epistemological themes in African urban Christianity. His most recent book, Christians in the City of Nairobi: An African City and the Future of World Christianity (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), co-authored with Mark Shaw, examines how the diverse Christian traditions in Kenya’s capital engage with and respond to the secularizing forces of the modern city. His current research focuses on oral liturgies within charismatic Christian movements across the African continent.

Njane Mugambi is a leading Kenyan composer creating a home-grown style of classical and contemporary art music. With over 25 years as composer, teacher, and performer, his eclectic work spans classical, folk, jazz, and world music genres. He’s best known for orchestral and choral compositions inspired by Kenya’s folk and contemporary culture, including the symphonic poem Hifadhi and brass fanfare Pumbumbum peh!, both performed at the 2020 Youth Winter Olympics in Lausanne. His work celebrates Kenya and Africa’s immense cultural wealth.

Alfred Patrick Addaquay (Ph.D.) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music, School of Performing Arts at the University of Ghana, Legon. His scholarship operates at the intersection of musicology, music theory and composition, and music education, with particular emphasis on how musical practices function as sites of knowledge production within African and global contexts. His work engages a wide range of repertoires including choral, instrumental, traditional, popular, and sacred music through analytical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary frameworks.  His recent research explores the relationship between music and theological meaning, particularly within African religious environments shaped by the coexistence of Indigenous traditions, Islam, and Christianity. In this regard, he examines how musical practices not only express but actively shape religious thought and communal identity. He has published in leading journals such as Music Analysis, Music Education Research, Philosophy of Music Education Review, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Globalisation, Societies and Education, and African Arts, among others.

Rev. Prof. Frederick Mawusi Amevenku is an ordained minister of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church Ghana and Associate Professor of New Testament and African Biblical Hermeneutics at Trinity Theological Seminary, Legon. He is also a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosh University, South Africa, from where he obtained his PhD. His research and writings seek to illuminate and contribute to diverse perspectives in biblical studies, including interpretation and theologizing in one’s mother tongue in African contexts. Prof. Amevenku has been serving as President of the Trinity Theological Seminary, Legon, Accra, Ghana since 2024. 

Fulera Issaka-Toure (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in Islamic Studies in the Department for the Study of Religions at the University of Ghana, Legon. She holds a PhD from the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and has served as a visiting scholar in the USA, Germany, Turkey, and South Africa. Her research focuses on Islamic philanthropy, family law, and women’s religious authority in Ghana; she has published widely in these areas. Dr. Issaka-Toure has held leadership roles on academic boards, editorial committees, and in international collaborations. She is a recipient of prestigious fellowships and awards, including the Fritz Thyssen Research Fellowship. Dr Issaka-Toure is also Academic Advisor at The Sanney Institute (https://tsinet.org/).

Cosmas Ebo Sarbah (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer at the Department for the Study of Religions, University of Ghana, Legon.  He received his PhD (2010) from the Centre for Christian-Muslim Relations at the University of Birmingham (U.K.) and he is Director of Interreligious Dialogue for the Catholic Archdiocese of Cape Coast. Since 2012, he has been a lecturer of and researcher in Comparative Religion and Interreligious Dialogue at the Department for the Study of Religions (University of Ghana) and St. Peter’s Regional Seminary (Pedu). His research interest includes Religious Pluralism, Interreligious Dialogue in sub-Saharan Africa, Intrareligious Relations in Christianity and Islam, and Religious Conflicts and Christian Persecution in sub-Saharan Africa.

Rev. Dr. Joshua Settles is a Senior Research Fellow at the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission, and Culture  (https://www.aci.edu.gh/) and holds an MA and a PhD in Theology from the Institute.  Dr. Settles is Director of the Gillian Bediako Centre for Primal and Christian Spirituality, and editor of the Journal of African Christian Thought. He is Deputy Director of the Institute for Christian Impact and Senior Ministry Specialist with InterVarsity LINK. His research and writing interests include Primal / Indigenous Spirituality, Christian History, Theology and Arts, and Black American Christianity. He is the author of numerous  ticles and a book Manifesting the Primal Imagination: the Primal Spirituality of Black American Christian Faith (2024).

This paper examines the multi-layered and deeply syncretized Damba festival, a pre-Islamic celebration among the Dagomba, Mamprusi, Nanumba, Gonja, Wala, Kusasi, and Mossi peoples from northern Ghana, which absorbed new significance as a celebration of the Prophet Mohammed. Long after the Damba festival was first established, it became a celebration of the Prophet Mohammed’s birth when it coincidentally aligned with Mawlid al-Nabi due to the shifting Islamic lunar calendar. Although it has adhered to the Islamic calendar ever since the merger, Damba emerged through a historical convergence rather than theological transformation, leaving its core aesthetic and performative elements distinctly pre-Islamic; the music, movement, attire, language, and ritual structure of the Damba festival remain fundamentally grounded in indigenous practices and beliefs. It now functions as a vital site of cultural cohesion, multi-ethnic solidarity, and institutional continuity, often including the installation of regional chiefs and other key community-building activities.

Central to Damba performance are traditional musicians whose drummed and sung praises animate the festival and stimulate participatory dance. Due to the limited availability of qualified traditional practitioners outside their northern Ghanaian homelands, migrant musicians frequently travel significant distances to perform, with the Dagomba lunsi historian-musicians playing an essential role. An effective Damba festival requires extraordinarily capable lunsi, whose encyclopedic historical, genealogical, and musical knowledge is particularly crucial given Damba’s inherently multi-ethnic constituency. 

This presentation offers a historical, lexical, and musical analysis of the multi-ethnic repertoire most closely associated with Damba festivals. It will include a live demonstration of tonal talking drum language phrases by the Madina lunsi, joined by dancers for a full cultural presentation, and will conclude with a brief participatory dance tutorial inviting attendees to embody Damba movement aesthetics.

Nathaniel Ash-Morgan is a scholar-practitioner of Ghanaian traditional and popular music, with a focus on performance, ritual, and sacred sound. A PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of North Texas and Adjunct Professor at Texas Christian University, his forthcoming dissertation focuses on the Madina lunsi - hereditary Dagomba historian-musicians who serve the royal courts of the Dagbon Kingdom. In recognition of his sustained engagement with the Madina lunsi, he was installed by the Dagomba chief of Madina as a sub-chief, receiving the title Silimboma Naa of Madina. He is also a co-founder of Tiwula, a northern Ghanaian cultural advocacy organization dedicated to preserving and promoting northern performance traditions in Accra. His current and forthcoming projects include an article on afro-dancehall within Ghana’s dancehall movement, a planned biography of hiplife pioneer Reggie Rockstone, and a proposed exhibit on melodic and harmonic Ghanaian traditional instruments.

Turmoil, created by overt and covert interventions of the USA and other global powers in Haiti, and the insecurities that come with being migrants in south Florida, where some Haitians escaping the turmoil are living, have precipitated Vodou’s relevance. In Miami, USA, Vodou practice is more a way of surviving the pressures of global powers than a mere expression of faith for these worshippers. Little Haiti, a Haitian immigrant city in South Florida, and a hub of Vodou practice emerged in the 1980s as has acquired the status of south Florida’s Vodou capital. It is the central nerve of the Haitian migrant community, offering access to vodou hounfos (worshipping spaces), Botanicas (Religious shops) where vodou ritual paraphernalia, herbal remedies and gain access to their services of a cadre of Houngas (vodou priests) and Mambos (vodou priestesses) and their serviteurs. (practitioners) Presently, state and national policies, growing public prejudice against Vodou and Haitian migrants, and more importantly, a gentrification of Little Haiti, are threatening the community’s existence, as they are resulting in forced removals, a consequent dispersal of its members, and the loss of vodou worshipping space. This presentation offers an account of these national and state performances of structural violence and the response of the Vodou worshiping community, demonstrating the peaceful and constructive ways in which the Vodou practitioners are creating, living, and transforming Vodou in south Florida amidst an ethos of hostility.

Dr. Albert Wuaku is Associate professor of African/African Diaspora Religions and Ethnography in the Green School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University, in Miami. He directs the graduate studies program in the department of religious studies at FIU. His research and teaching interests include Ghana’s Hinduism, the historic and contemporary global spread of Indigenous African Religions, the convergence of indigenous African religions and religions of the African Diaspora and the second migrating of African religions from the Caribbean and South America to the USA. He is the Author of Hindu Gods in West Africa: Ghanaian Devotees of Krishna and Shiva (Brill 2013) and several essays on the Hindu religious presence in Ghana and Vodou in South Florida. His current research is an ethnographic investigation of the constructive ways in which Vodou practitioners in South Florida are creating, living, and transforming Vodou amid an ethos of public hostility.

The lived religion of the people of Ghana before the emergence of other faiths has historically been under attack from migrant religions, particularly Christianity, through a variety of delegitimizing practices. The primary reasons given, apart from Indigenous religions being savage, are the secrecy of the communication of their purveyors and invocations of the deities, and their often-misunderstood ritual performances. Communication from deities is both verbal and nonverbal; people hear audible sounds around, but their meaning can be understood only through the mouthpiece of the deities, the Bosomfo. What information did the deities give, and do the deities affirm or deny the interpreter’s explanations? Are the attacks on Indigenous religious traditions due to the interpreter’s message? Drawing on ethnographic data, this paper examines the often-misconstrued profound sacred exchanges between the divine and humanity, mediated through sound and the evocative use of musical instruments. Tedlock’s (2001) insights on divination as a mode of knowing are explored in the analysis of the data.

Dr Genevieve Nrenzah is a senior research fellow (religion and society) and the head of the Religion and Philosophy Section of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. Her research and teaching interests include Africa’s diverse Indigenous religious beliefs and ceremonies, as well as their extensions in the African Diaspora. These interests also encompass Pentecostalism, economics, Music, sacred spaces, sexuality, violence and abuse, neo-feminism, and African popular culture. She serves on the editorial boards of the Contemporary Journal of African Studies and the Journal of Black Women and Religious Culture. She has published widely in reputable academic journals on subjects that explore the nexus of Pentecostalism and other religious traditions in Ghana, contemporary expressions of Akan Indigenous religions, Women in Religion in Ghana, African Grassroot Theologies and Churches, to name just a few.

The Regional Manager of the Forestry Commission in Ghana’s Western Region recently told the media that enforcement teams confronting illegal miners encountered unexpected resistance. “We were firing at them, but the bullets were not penetrating them,” he explained, attributing their defiance to “spiritual fortification.” This striking claim serves as a conversation starter for examining the entanglement of traditional spirituality and modern state security in Ghana. Although such accounts often provoke skepticism, they reveal the enduring influence of indigenous cosmologies in shaping criminal tactics, public interpretations of crime, and the operational responses of state agencies. My presentation will demonstrate how Ghana functions within a hybrid security regime where ritual and technological systems co-produce the landscape of crime and governance. This hybridity unsettles conventional assumptions about secularism in a modern African state. Despite Ghana’s constitutional commitment to secularity, security institutions routinely confront (whether by denial, negotiation, or quiet accommodation) popular spiritual explanations of threat. Relying on public testimonies, media discourse, and scholarly research, I will argue that traditional spiritual practices are not residual or symbolic “beliefs” but active forces in shaping national debates on crime, legitimacy, and state authority. I will conclude by reflecting on the implications of this hybrid order for crime control, governance, and secularism in an increasingly technologized yet deeply religious society.

Seth Tweneboah (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for African Studies of the University of Education, Winneba, Ghana. He received his PhD in Religious Studies (with specialization in law and politics) from the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is the author of Religion, Law, Politics and the State in Africa: Applying Legal Pluralism in Ghana.

Songs by initiated, Muslim dozo hunters in Côte d’Ivoire address human rights concerns in surprising ways. Rather than advancing human rights per se, they offer a parallel discourse on human wellbeing—which Aristotle called eudaemonia—in line with “oral traditions” dating to thirteenth-century Mali. This presentation uses ethnopoetic analysis to explore a sung epic by dozo singer Dramane Coulibaly that illustrates Indigenous notions of relational personhood (sababuya) key to what dozos do, in contrast to the individuality and state oversight that typify global human rights thought and practice. Dramane’s song inherently critiques the viability of human rights in West Africa, having emerged when dozos in Côte d’Ivoire where struggling to vindicate their right to security as guaranteed by Art. 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the 1990s, they were responding to crime as unofficial police because national police were neglecting poor, workingclass, and rural areas. Then, from 2002 to 2011, they joined an armed rebellion against a succession of Islamophobic regimes. Like Ake, Césaire, Fanon, and Wynter, Dramane implied that (neo)colonialism—cultural, economic, and political—must first end before human rights can flourish. Because dozos could not rely on the Ivorian state to protect their communities, they drew on their own Indigenous capacities to do so (Hellweg 2011): a regional ritual network shaped by ethical expectations, hunting abilities they transformed to catch criminals, and their skill with firearms that they used against the state. Dozo singers sang through it all, both at dozo funerals, where they called living dozos to hunt in memory of the deceased, and at meetings where dozo security agents and rebels organized their activities. Dramane’s songs thus give access to forms of dozo ethical deliberation and action that can reshape our understanding of the viability and limitations of human rights in Africa.

Joseph Hellweg is a cultural anthropologist and dozo initiate, doing research (in Manding and French) with dozos in Côte d’Ivoire since 1994. He is associate professor of religion at Florida State University and was, in 2025-26, a fellow at Yale’s Institute for Sacred Music to draft a book manuscript on dozo songs. He has also worked among practitioners of N’ko, the Manding alphabet invented in 1949 by Guinea polymath Solomana Kanté, beginning this work in 2008-09 while a Fulbright Teaching/Research Fellow at the Université Julius Nyerere in Kankan, Guinea and in Bamako, Mali. More recently, he has begun research with queer activists in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, coauthoring a grant proposal that won a Rainbow Railroad grant to provide refuge for displaced queer persons. He is a co-editor of the James Currey (Boydell & Brewer) book series, “Religion in Transforming Africa,” and co-editor-in-chief of the journal, ‘Mande Studies’ (Indiana University Press).