'A child's illness is better cured at home’, the introduction of the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement in Wa, Gold Coast (Ghana) during the 1930s

Dr Hanson researches the history of West African Muslim communities and also serves as an editor for Africa Today. His publications include articles in the Journal of African History, two books (Migration, Jihad and Muslim Authority in West Africa (1996) and After the Jihad: The Reign of Ahmad al-Kabir in the Western Sudan (1991)), and the CD-rom, ‘Friday Prayers at Wa’, in Patrick McNaughton, John Hanson, Dele Jegede, Ruth Stone and N. Brian Winchester, Five Windows Into Africa (2000).

The Ahmadiyyat, a Muslim missionary movement with origins in late 19th century India, became a focus of local controversy and British colonial intervention in Wa, a town in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, during the 1930s. Ahmadiyya missionaries arrived in the southern Gold Coast in the late 1920s and established a range of Ahmadi institutions including schools, medical clinics and mosques. Wala Muslim migrants working in the southern Gold Coast heard of the Ahmadiyyat, converted, and returned home to proselytize the new movement in Wa during the 1930s. The ensuing conflict illustrates how converts appropriated the Ahmadiyyat and British officials became involved in a local religious debate. The seminar will analyze continuities and ruptures associated with the Ahmadiyyat as a new religious movement in colonial West Africa.