Birgit Meyer - Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana

As I passed through Sankara Circle, one of the main intersections in urban Accra, on my motorbike just before Christmas in 1991, my eyes were drawn to a huge hand-painted billboard (see frontispiece). Depicting a lady embracing a snake-mana body of a python with a grinning male headthe board advertised a locally produced movie titled Diabolo (Worldwide Motion Pictures, 1991) as a new sensation. Like many others, I went to watch this movie at the Rex Cinema in Central Accra. The screening was a tantalizing experience, not only because of the movies plot but also because of the audiences boisterous participation in following the evil trajectories and sexual escapades of Diabolomasterfully played by Bob Smith, who established himself with this role as the Ghanaian Christopher Lee. Seeking to produce quick money with the help of supernatural evil forces, Diabolo lures unsuspecting, though morally dubious, women into his luxurious mansion, where he drugs them, transforms himself into a snake, and enters their vagina, making them vomit money. Playing on anxieties about the dangers of city life, fears of the hidden presence of evil spirits, a prurient fascination with transgressions into the realms of sex and the occult, the seduction of money and moral concerns about the dark side of quick riches, and the appeal of popular Christianity with its dualism of the struggle between the devil and God, the movie was a blockbuster (Meyer 1995; see also Wendl 2001).

I was in the midst of my dissertation research on grassroots appropriations of Christianity in the Volta Region (Meyer 1999a), and it struck me that the movie resonated with and offered an audiovisual extension of stories about satanic riches as they circulated as rumors, were published in popular papers and pamphlets, or were diagnosed in prayer sessions devoted to deliverance from the powers of darkness and recounted as testimonies in churches. Conversely, the Diabolo story was embedded in a corpus of narratives about the dangers of occult money. Since this first encounter with a locally produced Ghanaian film, I have been intrigued by the connection between such moving pictures and Christian preachings, especially as epitomized in the Pentecostal-charismatic churches that became very prominent in the mid-1980s. Until the end of my dissertation research in July 1992, I watched Ghanaian films whenever I had the chance on my occasional visits to Accra, noting that many of them attributed central importance to spirits and the spiritual dimension as it affects everyday life. Fascinated by the local use of the cheap and easily accessible technology of video in audiovisualizing popular imaginaries and the crossovers between the spheres of film and religion, I ventured into exploring the phenomenon of what was locally called Ghanaian films once my dissertation project was completed in 1995 (see Meyer 1999b).