“Kaffir” Renner’s Conversion:The Politics of Self-Invention and the Limits to Being Muslim in Public

Recent efforts to understand the acceleration of Islamization in modern West Africa have found utility in the idea of an expanding public sphere in which religious affiliation came to be disarticulated from other forms of particularist identity. This paper suggests that for Muslims in late-colonial Ghana this disarticulation was very limited. Focusing on the career of “Mustafa” Lewis Bankole Awoonor-Renner and his continual self-reinvention, from African nationalist, to international communist, to leader of the Muslim Association Party (MAP), it sets Renner’s life and shifting public identity against the evolution of Muslim political discourse in southern Ghana. As a cosmopolitan, radical, Western-educated convert, Renner’s acceptance as a Muslim leader capped a period that saw a vast proliferation of ways of “being Muslim.” But when Renner’s MAP came into competition with Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party, Renner’s status as a Muslim and his ties to widely-accepted networks of religious patronage were called into doubt. In the end, Muslim identity proved insufficiently universal to mobilize the MAP’s constituents around a common goal, and a crushing electoral defeat in 1954 brought with it a profound narrowing of the ways one could be Muslim in a public sense.