A lawsuit recently filed in the Supreme Court of Ghana seeks to ban the teaching in the Ghanaian public schools not only of evolution but also of the idea that Earth is in motion. Filed on November 24, 2020, the lawsuit apparently received no public attention until March 20, 2021, when Emmanuel Ebo Hawkson covered it for The Mirror, provoking a spate of derivative stories in the Ghanaian press. But a perusal of the filings (kindly provided by Hawkson) reveals a profusion of fascinating details absent in the press coverage.

The plaintiff is Johnson Anane (or “Sir” Johnson Anane, as he styles himself in his motion), a lecturer in the Department of Wood Technology—which apparently specializes in carpentry, joinery, and furniture design and construction—at Sunyani Technical University. He is listed on the university’s website as having a bachelor of science degree in wood technology and management. The respondents are the director-general of the Ghana Education Service, the president of the Ghana Science Association, and (nominally) the attorney general of Ghana.

American readers will be surprised to learn from Anane’s motion that “in the United States of America, five states have placed a ban on the teaching of evolution theory in their schools as [of] 2012.” There were not in 2012—nor are there now—any such bans; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Scopes-era bans on the teaching of evolution were unconstitutional in Epperson v. Arkansas (1968). Ironically, on that same page of the motion, Anane complains about “the current status quo [in Ghana] of accepting whatever is being brought from the foreign world.”

Yet of the sixty numbered paragraphs in Anane’s motion, only three focus on evolution. His main target is instead the motion of Earth, including both rotation about its axis and revolution around the Sun, and its use in explaining phenomena such as the alternation of day and night and the succession of the seasons. Although evolution and the motion of Earth are taught in Ghana’s public schools, Anane writes that “these theories … [are] totally false, unproven by science and a total affront to the educational wellbeing of the Ghanaian students and [need] to be abolished or prohibited.”

Anane’s pseudoscientific views are not confined to creationism and geocentrism; he is apparently also a flat-earther. While criticizing classroom models of the alternation of day and night with a flashlight representing the Sun and a globe representing Earth, he insists, “According to the [B]ible, Isaiah 40:22, the earth or the world is circular. The scientific representation of the earth as a globe (curved or raised) is wrong and absurd.” Nevertheless, he seems not to be explicitly asking for a ban on teaching that Earth is spherical.

The bulk of the evidence Anane adduces against the motion of Earth and evolution is scriptural in nature: his motion teems with chapter-and-verse references to the Bible, although he ecumenically refers to the Qur’an once and the Bhagavad-Gita twice. A few sophistical arguments are also offered: for example, Anane quotes one dictionary as defining a planet as “a very round object in space” and another as defining space as the “region beyond the earth[’s] atmosphere,” triumphantly concluding that Earth is not a planet. Conspicuously lacking is any reference to scientific evidence.

Instead, Anane assumes that the burden of proof is on the respondents. He repeatedly asks the court to ban the teaching of the motion of Earth and evolution if the respondents fail to provide proof of them, offers lists of questions that the court should ask of the respondents (e.g., the provenance of “false scientific measurements about the solar system,” such as the time it takes Earth to revolve around the sun), and even fantasizes, Walter Mitty–like, about the court compelling the respondents to testify on a live telecast for the general public.

Such demands are not new for Anane. In 2009, protesting that “the perfect will of God concerning creation has been despised by scientists,” he challenged what was then the International Council of Scientific Unions (now the International Science Council) to defend the motion of Earth and evolution, according to the Daily Guide. Similarly, he complains in his motion that the minister of education failed to attend a conference on the theme of “Revisitation of some scientific discoveries in the light of scripture,” which he organized in 2012, and refused to meet with him afterward.

In the wake of his 2012 conference, Anane filed a lawsuit in the High Court of Kumasi in 2013 asking for the cessation of teaching and testing on material about the motion of Earth on the grounds that it is “entirely false and unproven by science.” The case was eventually dismissed in 2020. In a ruling included in the Supreme Court filings, the court observed that “the plaintiff … seeks no personal right to be enforced on his behalf and so the High Court has no jurisdiction in this matter” and advised Anane to pursue his case in the Supreme Court, which would have appropriate jurisdiction.

In his subsequent motion before the Supreme Court, Anane accordingly alleges that the teaching of the motion of Earth and of evolution infringes his “fundamental human rights and freedoms as a concerned Christian” as well as the educational rights of Ghana’s public school students under the Ghanaian constitution. However, his understanding of Ghanaian constitutional law is questionable; a December 2020 filing from the office of the Attorney General tersely described Anane’s motion as “without merit and an abuse of the court’s process,” asking for it to be dismissed.