“The scientists say that elephants are descended from Dinosaurs”….laughter erupts. “But the bible says God created all the animals at the same time”, Charles always makes a point of driving home exactly why something is funny.

I say something about how dinosaurs have been extinct for a long time, but tip toe around any conversation about evolution and creation…there seems no point, no use and no common ground for discussion.

As far as I am concerned Galileo killed biblical literalism 500 years ago, but I guess not. Sure Darwin put another nail in the coffin, but that doesn’t seem consequential at this point. I laugh thinking of the apology the Catholic Church just issued for Galileo for all of these years. None of my friends are Catholics, and they probably haven’t heard about the apology but I have a feeling it wouldn’t matter anyway.

I usually feel like I fit in well, have culturally integrated, but conversations like this always make me feel that no matter how much I do there will always be a space between us…the space between belief and science.

The earth is around 5 billion years old, dinosaurs became extinct around 60 million years ago and humans evolved from ape’s in Africa. To me these are facts, proven time and again by science – there is no question, no doubt – Carbon 12 tells me everything I need to know about how far back our past goes.

My co-workers also believe - God created the world in seven days; it’s in the bible, it’s a fact, indisputable. Perhaps what makes this situation more difficult, more uncomfortable and more confusing for me to understand is that fact that I am sitting with a group of well educated people, many of whom have scientific backgrounds.

We both believe, believe in something to be infallible and factual. I am a believer in science and my friends are believers in a higher power, the God of Christianity and most importantly for this story they are believers in the absolute truth of the Bible.

In the west many (most?) avoid this conflict; most Christian Theology has given up on strict Biblical literalism, allowing the bible to be interpreted allegorically, at least where science has effectively disputed its grip on ‘the truth’.

For an atheist the answer is easy – this absolute belief is silly, illogical, backward and harmful. A few of my friends who have come to Africa express this view.

For me it’s more difficult. I consider myself a spiritual person, not religious - I can’t say I’m a believer in any theology as such, but I believe in something – more than anything in searching for this mysterious thing we call truth. For me spirituality is about this search, about challenging myself and my own beliefs and learning about other ways of thinking about the world.

Ghana is a country of believers – people not only believe (and believe unshakably) in the absolute truth of Bible or Koran, but also in spiritual powers, or in the common parlance ‘JuJu’ (better known to the west as voodoo). I have yet to meet a Ghanaian who doesn’t believe in the power of Juju, that people can and do curse, maim and kill through spiritual means. Most of the local movies deal with Juju related ills and it is very much a subtext to daily life.

I was surprised that when I asked my co-worker to come with me to see a river just outside of Tamale a few weeks ago and he turned me down. Manan is always complaining that I don’t hang out with him outside of work, so I couldn’t understand why he didn’t want to come or what was so important that he couldn’t come.

I found out later that he had made an appointment with a spiritual ‘advisor’ to solve a problem for him. I figured it was just a minor health problem, but I later learned that he was seeking spiritual protection from his step mother, who he believed was trying to kill him.

This to me is incomprehensible – your step mother is trying to kill you and this spiritual advisor can arrange protection in the spiritual realm? The story may seem wild to a westerner, but what makes it strange to me is that this somehow fits in right alongside Ghanaians very devout belief in either Christianity or Islam. My impression is that these beliefs would be incompatible with the idea of an omnipotent, creator God. Most belief that prayer to God can help protect you form these spiritual, but even that seems a pretty wide interpretation of monotheistic religion in terms of accepting the existence of other spiritual powers.

It seems to me that most of my Ghanaian friends and colleges more than anything ‘believe’, in most cases the more belief the merrier. I remember driving down the highway in a chartered Van with my co-workers, watching a little whirlwind cross the highway. As we approached our driver violently swerved and grazed the edge of the whirlwind, everyone starts yelling and screaming at our driver. I figured they were mad because he almost drove us off the road, but it soon became clear that they were angry at the fact he hadn’t done more to avoid the whirlwind. You see the whirlwind is actually a dwarf running across the road. You can’t see him of course, but he was there and we very well might have hit him – which is very bad luck.

Mystery and Magic are very much alive here. One can certainly write much about the effect of belief on the development of this country, but for me the issue at hand is how I can interact with my friends while staying respectful to beliefs which I must admit I find often incredulous. The gulf between the believer grounded in…belief and the searcher grounded in science can be hard to gap – at least this Obruni has yet to figure out how to build a bridge.