Visions of modernity in Ghana: Mami Wata shrines, photo studios and horror films

Abstract

This paper contends that modernity is not a monolithic historical phenomenon but rather has many different representations and its own internal contradictions. Visions of modernity as shaped and staged in studio photography differ from those evoked in the Mami Wata shrines of Nigeria, as well as from those in the more recent horror films. In the Mami Wata cult, modernity appears as an allegory. It afflicts people, and their diffuse fascination with the modern is something dangerous which has to be channeled through images and rituals and eventually will be transferred into the sphere of the sacred. Studio photography, on the other hand, celebrates and idealizes modernity. It is much more concerned with making people participate in modernity and in providing them with modern likenesses. In Ghanaian horror cinema, finally, the audiences obsessively confront what their modern mind has not been able to bury or to explain away fully. Here modernity appears as a horrifying and horrific tale, illustrating the price one has to pay for participating in modernity.

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