Demonizing the Priestess and the Lesbian: The Social Violence of Presbyterian Postcolonial Anxieties and Witch Finding in Southern Ghana

Abstract Bridging insights from ethnographic research with lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender, and gender nonconforming individuals assigned female at birth in Ghana in 2015, as well as historical context, this article explores the colonial history of social violence in Ghana while engaging with chapter 4 of Nathanael Homewood’s Seductive Spirits, titled “Scenes of Struggle.” The chapter focuses on the social violence resulting from Pentecostal “deliverance” work aimed at two individuals assumed to be lesbians. Underscoring Homewood’s account of Pentecostal “public noisemaking,” I suggest that this form of social violence is central to the performance of Pentecostal pastors’ strict Christian heteronormativity and is a neocolonial continuance of the colonial practice of “witch finding,” which relied on white supremacist logics in Ghana’s colonial and missionary history.