Sacred Acoustic Inspectors: The Ghanaian State and Noise Abatement during the Hɔmɔwɔ Festival Open Access
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Published:May 2025
Chapter 5 discusses the establishment and activities of the state-run Nuisance Control Task Force in the aftermath of the Drum Wars as an illuminating entry point into the nature of secularity in Ghana. The Task Force was presented as a secular enterprise designed to curb urban noise pollution, but it was immediately placed in the service of the Ga community to help manage the ban on drumming. Strictly speaking, the activities of the Task Force are unconstitutional because they elevate customary law above statutory law, even though customary law is constitutionally subordinate. The chapter argues that this arrangement sheds light on Ghanaian secularity as a synergy of customary notion of political authority that grants special benefits to the custodians of the land and secularism, a Christocentric institutional and ideological regime that pushes traditional lifeworlds either to the bottom of the religious hierarchy or outside it, as nonreligion or culture.