Prophets, Psychiatry and Complications

As Ghana's progress unravels a deeper understanding of the nation-state from within its cultural values in relation to the global development process are emerging. Nowhere are some aspects of the traditional values inhibiting Ghana's progress increasingly being opened up for scrutiny than the realm of prophets and other spiritualists.

Exploiting Ghanaians deep inclination to spirituality, over the years there have been sharp increase in all sort of prophets, a good number bordering on the tacky, in relation to the spiritual hunger of Ghanaians. While part of the reasons for such increases may be poverty and psychic disturbances, it borders on the Ghanaians' pull from within their culture in which certain solutions to most of their problems are thought to be found. The reason is that the Ghanaian prophets reflect the Ghanaian environment, where they blend Biblical rituals with Ghanaian ones, some going extra mile by appropriating juju-marabou rituals. The famous traditional spiritualist Nana Kwaku Bonsam has revealed that a good number of the Christian prophets visit him for traditional spiritual rituals to boost their trades.

Over the years, such attempts by the Christian prophets to blend the Bible and the traditional have been creating problems for unsuspecting Ghanaians even including those educated. Buoyed by Ghanaians, the prophets assume ridiculously that they can heal any sickness and this is where they mess up a lot of the sick, poor Ghanaians. The prophets' profiles are also boosted by the degree of pressure put on them by Ghanaians to not only heal all sorts of ailments but also solve all sorts of problems and perform miracles.
This sometimes creates complications, bordering on human rights violations.

It is in such circumstances that the Accra-based Africa Office of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) newly unveiled study, Human Rights Violations in Prayer Camps and access to Mental Health in Ghana, reveals that some prophets “subject mentally ill persons to all kinds of abuses at prayer camps rather need psychiatric treatment.” In wrongly assuming the role of psychiatrist, psychologist, exorcist and healer all rolled into one, the prophets, thinking the mental sickness is evil schemes; further jumble the mental patients, with the ignorant, gullible clients buying into the prophet's spiritual doctoring, where negative superstition explains ailments more than science and reasoning.

As human rights values are increasing being appropriated to refine some of the inhibitions within the Ghanaian culture, the CHRI study argues that “There are revelations that widespread human rights abuses take place in several of the so-called prayer camps scattered around the nation…many of the 'prophets' professing to be spiritual healers take undue advantage of spiritual inclinations to maltreat mental patients at their prayer camps.”

For failing to recognize that they (the prophets) can't cure their mental patients and subjected patients to all kinds of harm, which invariably turn upside down both Biblical teachings and traditional spiritual ethos, Sam Okudzeto, chair of the International Advisory Commission of the CHRI, charges that the prophets rather need psychiatric treatment.

But the situation is more complex that Okudzeto and CHRI think. Such disclosure further makes the Ghanaian spirituality front lousy and calls for protection of the ignorant and the gullible in the face of poverty and spiritual misunderstanding. But the dilemma is that the enticement of Ghanaians to the prophets emanate from their deep cultural believes that practically say most misfortunes are the work of evil spirits. Evil figures have been attributed so much power of destruction, including ailments, that they are even feared more than God, making it difficult over the years, for some Ghanaians, no matter their education level, to extricate themselves from such believes. Such culture informs the power of the prophets over Ghanaians, who wrongly attribute various ailments to evil spirits and the prophets'/exorcists' abilities to cure them.

While human rights could be used to refine such cultural inhibitions, the conundrum is how to separate the interpretation of evil forces from the administering of actual traditional and modern medicine so as to give an enlightened sense of how the disease occurred, and free many a sick person from the grip of the irrational prophets. This monumental challenge has affected many a modern science attempts, as part of the on-going Ghanaian progress, to refine some of the inhibitions in traditional Ghanaian medicine darkened by the battle between evil spirits and diseases.

This makes the situation more complicated than Okudzeto and CHRI envisage.
Pretty much of Ghana's Judeo-Christian tradition, more so the in-your-face, born-again Spiritual Churches form, where the prophets operate freely, have taking on a good dose of traditional spirituality with their preaching of evil spirits responsible for virtually all major ailments and misfortunes.
So from either traditional spirituality or the Judeo-Christian tradition, the hapless Ghanaian is under the barrage of evil spirits that stroll the Ghanaian environment, like “Milton's defiant Lucifer,” causing diseases and misfortunes and “flying children killing people, a tree filled with human body parts and a pregnancy lasting for six years,” as one traditional exorcist, Aridu Sabo Azeez, told the Accra-based Statesman.

In such atmosphere, human agencies, human rights and scientific thinking, as Okudzeto and CHRI are doing, are thrown into the Tano River. And when this happens, prophets and traditional exorcists battle the “rage of witches” to free Ghana from diseases and misfortunes, in the face of human rights violations.