Abstract: Toward the end of the nineteenth-century, British colonial officials began to monitor and suppress indigenous religious shrines in colonial Ghana. The attention to shrines was the result of a colonial discourse that positioned shrines as foil to the colonial state. Important to British officials, chiefs, and locals for different and sometimes shifting reasons, shrines became a key fulcrum for debating, formulating, asserting, and contesting ideas about governance, political authority, and statecraft in colonial Ghana. This article also shows the limits of a colonial regime in regulating African epistemologies, practices, and institutions, as well as the unique position of chiefs in the time of shrine suppression.