What C K Dovlo Actually Covers in That Text
The book is structured around the tension between traditional Ghanaian family norms and what the churches have been preaching since the colonial period. Dovlo traces how missionary education, baptismal records, and marriage registries changed who counted as a legitimate family member. He doesn't romanticize it. The church didn't arrive as a sudden cultural reset. It was negotiated, resisted, adapted, and sometimes ignored entirely by families who kept their customs intact while attending Sunday service. One thing that catches people off guard when they start reading this is how much space Dovlo gives to the Catholic vs. Protestant split. They didn't just arrive at different theological conclusions. They set up competing hospital systems, different school curricula, and in some regions like Volta and the Eastern areas, they were literally vying for the same villages. That rivalry had a direct impact on family structures because each denomination had its own ideas about divorce, polygyny, and whether extended family obligations took priority over the nuclear unit. When I was cross-referencing Dovlo's findings against my own field notes from Tamale and Koforidua, I found a gap he doesn't fully address. His work leans heavily on church records and missionary correspondence. What you don't see in those documents is the quiet noncompliance. I remember talking to a pastor's wife in Hohoe who told me plainly that half the congregation she serves maintains two households. One registered with the church, one living according to custom. She wasn't being dishonest. She was navigating a system where excommunication carried real economic consequences.
How To Actually Use This Book
If you're a student looking at this for a course, start with chapters three and five. Those cover the transition period from the 1920s through the 1950s when most of the structural changes happened. The earlier chapters on pre-colonial family systems are useful background but dense. The later chapters on post-independence developments are thinner and sometimes repeat points already made. For researchers, the bibliography is where the real value sits. Dovlo cites a lot of primary sources from the Society for Christian Missionary Archives in Basel and the Catholic Secretariat records in Accra. Those archives are not digitized and accessing them requires formal permission. I've seen students waste months trying to track down citations that Dovlo himself never fully sourced. If you're going to build on his work, assume he is your starting point, not your endpoint.
Common Misreads People Make
A lot of readers come away thinking Dovlo argues that Christianity destroyed the traditional Ghanaian family. That's not what he says. He argues that it transformed it, and that the transformation was uneven across regions, classes, and denominations. The urban elite in Accra and Kumasi adopted a very different model of Christian family life than subsistence farmers in the northern savanna zones. The differences weren't just cultural. They were economic. Churches that offered school placements, medical care, and social safety nets attracted different demographics than those that didn't. Another misread involves the polygyny question. Dovlo discusses how churches handled polygynous marriages during conversion, but he doesn't fully grapple with the fact that in many rural communities, polygyny persisted alongside Christianity without anyone formally acknowledging it. The church records will show one husband, one wife. The household might have had three. This isn't hypocrisy. It's institutional accommodation. Many pastors turned a blind eye because enforcing strict monogamy meant losing tithes and community influence. I've sat in meetings where church elders debated this exact issue and the conclusion was always the same: doctrine stays clean, practice stays flexible.
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Where The Book Falls Short
Dovlo doesn't cover the Pentecostal and charismatic movements that exploded from the 1980s onward. That's a significant blind spot. Those movements have had a more immediate impact on family life in contemporary Ghana than the mainline denominations he focuses on. The prosperity gospel, teenage pregnancy rhetoric, divorce stances, and tithing expectations from Pentecostal churches reshape family dynamics in ways that Dovlo's framework can't fully explain. If you're working on something about modern Ghanaian Christian families, you'll need to supplement this with more recent ethnographic work. Authors like Kwame Twum-Danso Imoh and Deborah Yu Lippy have written extensively on how Pentecostalism reconfigures gender roles and parental authority. Dovlo's book is still the foundational text for understanding where these tensions came from. It's not the last word.
Practical Takeaways
If you're teaching this material or writing a paper around it, the most productive angle is the regional variation. Ghana is not a monolith. Family practices in the Ashanti region differ from the Ewe areas, which differ from the Northern region. Dovlo acknowledges this but doesn't always follow through analytically. Bring in census data and demographic surveys to back up his qualitative claims. The numbers tell a different story than the narratives he constructs from mission records. Also worth noting: the book was published by University Press Ghana and has gone through multiple editions. Make sure you're citing the right one. The later editions include some added material on the post-independence era but also reorganize chapters in ways that make certain arguments harder to follow. I prefer the first edition for clarity. The updates are useful but the structure gets muddled. There's no open access version of this book. You'll need to find it through university libraries or secondhand bookshops in Accra. The price on new copies runs high for students. If your institution doesn't have it, check JSTOR and African Journals Online for related articles that summarize Dovlo's key arguments. Some of those summaries are more accessible than the full text and actually correct a few of his errors.
