ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the possibility of explaining a local religious experience using an indigenous frame of reference or conceptual scheme. From the late 1970s and early 1980s, some purveyors of Hindu spiritual power started to capitalize on the situation to organize their growing clientele into Hindu worshipping communities. The chapter reconstruct the early history of one of Ghana's Hindu Temple communities, the Radha Govinda Temple, also called the Hare Krishna movement, drawing on Ghanaian folk theories about outside spiritual power as an important analytical frame in explaining the appeal it held for worshippers when it emerged on the scene in the 1970s. Shiva and Krishna, icons of Hindu spirituality currently involved in a global circulation of ideas, images, and people, are establishing homes in the religious fields of Ghana and her neighbors in West Africa. The heart of the matter is the handicapped geopolitical locus of African scholarship within the scheme of academic knowledge production and dissemination.
