A processual perspective on utopia as a lived social project: the case of a Ghanaian ‘Christian Town’

ABSTRACT

How can we understand the concept of utopia when looking at a religious social utopia in practice? To unpack this question, the article retraces the motif of the ‘Christian Town’ or ‘Salem’ in the Apenkwa congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana through more than a century of narratives and practices. Drawing on historical and ethnographic data, the article demonstrates how the utopian religious ideal can function as a powerful symbol for the self-identification of a religious group in practice. It shows how this motif is perpetuated by actors across different cultural and religious backgrounds and over several generations. Most significantly, it shows that all this is quite independent of the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the utopian social project itself. Based on these observations, the paper proposes to theorize utopia, in the case of lived social utopias, as both a vision and a process.

KEYWORDS:

• Lived utopia
• Utopia as a process
• religious plurality
• African Christianity

Acknowledgments

The publication of this article has been supported by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Lucerne. I (Anne Beutter) would like to thank all my contacts in Apenkwa for our conversations and their willingness to share aspects of the history of their community with me and to grant me access to the written records. The same goes for the staff of Akrofi-Christaller Institute and the keepers of the C.C. Reindorf Archives and Special Collection Unit at Akropong. For comments on earlier versions of this paper, I thank my colleagues at Polenz Workshop on African History and Culture and at Lucerne as well as the two anonymous reviewers who have provided valuable feedback for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 ‘The world is always ripe for new creations and improvements. There is a renewed genesis for all things. The eternal incompleteness of forms requires their constant reinvention’ (Felwine Sarr, Afrotopia 2019, 102). The French original makes the active and processual nature of this more evident.

2 We use ‘processual’ instead of the more common adjective ‘procedural’ to avoid the latter’s juridical connotation and instead foreground the idea of process.

3 The differing founding narratives that foreground different events as the founding date are detailed in Beutter (2022, 87–91).

4 The 1890 congregational census lists 50 members and 8 candidates for Apenkwa congregation (Annual Report 1890).

5 Language barriers were treated as a challenge in the early stages. Later and up to the present day, Apenkwa developed into a multi-lingual community with, for example, church services combining Gã, Twi, and English.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne Beutter

Anne Beutter completed her Master’s degree in the Study of Religions and Sociology in Basel and Leipzig. She received her PhD from the University of Lucerne in 2020 with a thesis on law in religious organizations, drawing on sources from the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in the 1950s. She has been working as a post-doctoral researcher in the Department for the Study of Religions, University of Lucerne, since 2021. Her main research interests include Religion and Law, Religion and Diversity, African Religious History including the history of missions. Her publications include ‘Concepts of “Law” as Both Tools and Objects in the Study of Religions’ published in Method and Theory in the Study of Religion.

E. Sasu Kwame Sewordor

E. Sasu Kwame Sewordor teaches African History at the University of Basel. His research on the Basel Mission Society, the predecessor of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, has appeared in the Journal of West African History and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.