This essay traces Charismatic preaching and the moral importance of the fake pastor across public spaces and genres in Accra, Ghana. I argue that fear of the fake pastor creates a local theory of moral performance that sets the conditions of possibility for the legitimacy of the pastor as a public figure. Although rapid circulation generates anxiety about spiritual sincerity, it also produces continual hope for the miraculous and the potential for morally legitimate agency. The specter of the fake pastor provides a symbolic nexus for the transformation of spiritual into economic value in privatizing Ghana. This transformation occurs in the language of public moral belonging. A pastor's moral authority relies on public style and performance to connect spiritual power, moral sincerity, and economic potency. Fakery appears as the margin, the horizon against which a moral center is clarified. The fake's centrality to public moral discourse is rooted in the possibilities and dangers of individuated agencies associated with Ghana's liberalization.

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Azonto is a Ghanaian urban dance craze whose popularity is built through its global circulation. I trace its production and flow across studios, radio stations, dance floors, and digital platforms in Accra and among Ghanaians in London and New York. I argue that, as a technologically mediated style, Azonto is the embodiment of being Ghanaian in a mobile, digital world. This dance reveals both the potentials and the hazards of digital repetition and copying for self‐recognition. Ghanaian musicians and fans creatively use the repetitive aspects of digital technologies, making this dance a style of symbolic appropriation that links Ghanaian youth both in Accra and abroad into a dispersed community of musical participation that valorizes mobility itself. The dance's sudden ubiquity, however, creates “digital fatigue,” an uncertainty among participants about belonging in an era of digital replication that threatens to unmoor signs of recognition from the cultural registers that empower them in the first place.

The FOKN Bois are an irreverent, cosmopolitan hip‐hop duo from Ghana. They came to fame as part of the digital‐music boom centered in Nigeria that has dominated African popular culture since the mid‐2000s. Their most popular track, “Thank God We're Not a Nigerians,” mocks the national rivalry between Ghana and Nigeria and the idea of national allegiance itself. The song's production and circulation reveal that digital parody is increasingly central to how a rising generation of urban Africans live. Through sounds and images circulating on social media, young cosmopolitan Africans rely on a smartphone‐driven social media–scape to reimagine national territorial identity in virtual terms. The FOKN Bois’ work shows that uncertainty and contradiction can be modes of knowing.

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