Who Do not Practice Witchcraft? Assessing the Relegation of African Indigenous Religious Knowledge Resource by Christian and Islamic Traditions

Abstract

The global intellectual, spiritual and socio-cultural landscapes have been dominated by the asymmetric power structures that have relegated, marginalised and erased the potency of African indigenous knowledge, including witchcraft knowledge.
This paper shares findings on structural and behavioural inconsistencies, and philosophical contradictions, created by the foreign religious hegemonies which are continuously erasing and suppressing the African indigenous traditions by unfairly and unjustly accusing them of witchcraft. The study utilised a qualitative approach rooted in the interpretivist paradigm in which documents were used as sources of data. The findings revealed that the term “witchcraft” was used by Christianity and Islam intentionally to relegate and suppress the power and confidence of the African societies, and that its imposed notion has greatly impacted the perceptions and power of the post-colonial Africa to date. The findings indicate further that the foreign religious traditions accuse the African religious traditions of witchcraft practices in negative sense just to downgrade them, while they themselves practice the same, but in the holy labels of miracles. The paper recommends for  etermined
and committed efforts by the African societies and governments to urgently strategize for an African cultural awakening and restoration by confronting the existing foreign distortions. The efforts have to go along with establishment of mechanisms for controlling, and guiding to proper use, of the practice that came to be perceived as witchcraft.