Page 321 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

which held its services in the Opera cinema, transformed the theater from a place of
worship back into a cinema by removing various lighting ¤xtures and decorations like
plastic ®owers and plants as well as the screen that rendered invisible the cinema toilets.
The members of this church clearly saw the cinema as a smelly, dirty, and immoral en-
vironment, and it took some energy to transform it to a place of worship.
6. Usually this critique is backed by the Second Commandment’s admonishment
not to make images. Also 1. Cor. 13,9 comes to mind.
7. Stolen Bible is about a man, Ken, who is jobless, and his loving and beautiful wife
Nora. Just when Ken is desperate about his situation, he meets his old friend Ato, who
is fabulously rich and takes him to a secret society, Jaguda Buja, whose members ob-
tain their riches by sacri¤cing the person they love most in life—an ongoing theme in
Ghanaian and Nigerian ¤lms (cf. Meyer 1995). Ken tries to sacri¤ce another woman,
Dora, who turned to prostitution because of poverty, instead of his own wife, Nora, but
his plan fails, because Dora calls the name of Jesus in time. When he is forced to sacri¤ce
Nora in a spectacular scene involving special effects such as a snake coming out of her
mouth, he indeed begins to get rich and even obtains a high position in his church. Yet
when the pastor is about to honor him in public, Nora’s spirit returns and transforms
Ken into a madman—“You cannot go to heaven with a stolen bible”—and makes him
lose his riches. One day Dora, who now works for the Lord, ¤nds Ken in the street and
takes him to a deliverance session, where a pastor (Reverend Akokoto) prays over him
until the evil spirit has left him as well as all the other members of the secret cult.

References

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Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, 217–252. New York: Schocken Books.
Coe, Cati. 2000. “Not Just Drumming and Dancing”: The Production of National Cul-
ture in Ghana’s Schools. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 1999. Occult Economies and the Violence of Ab-
straction: Notes from the South African Postcolony. American Ethnologist 26 (2): 279–
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Dijk, Rijk van. 2001. Contesting Silence: The Ban on Drumming and the Musical Politics
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Gillespie, Marie. 1995. Sacred Serials, Devotional Viewing, and Domestic Worship: A
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Robert C. Allen, 354–380. New York: Routledge.

310 Birgit Meyer