The Legal Exorcism of African Spirituality

When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible. We had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible. ¬ Desmond Tutu[1]

What we rarely speak of is that with the Bible came a gradual erasure, not just of territory, but of memory, metaphysics, and the sacred spiritual coding that once made us custodians of the unseen and stewards of mystical authority. That is the true Genesis of African spiritual decline not in the form of a snake in the garden,[2] but in the form of a missionary in a cassock, clasping a Bible in one hand and a statute book in the other, casting out the very soul of a people.[3]

For those with ears trained in scripture and minds soaked in postcolonial thought, the conversation we must now have is not whether African spirituality was valid,[4] but how and why it was buried alive while we watched, praying, fasting, and quoting.[5]

This theme is not a romanticisation of precolonial Africa but employs Buganda as a lens through which wider continental drama patterns unfold. It is a lamentation, a post-mortem of sorts; an analysis of how we lost the very spiritual software that powered our societies. The deliberate branding of African spirituality as “demonic” or “barbaric” which was never a theological argument; a political warfare - disguised as salvation.

[1] West, G., 2015. The Bible in an African Christianity: South African Black Theology. In Routledge Companion to Christianity in Africa (pp. 141-155). Routledge.

[2] Genesis 3:1-15

[3] Smith, J.H., 2006. Snake-driven development: Culture, nature and religious conflict in neoliberal Kenya. Ethnography, 7(4), pp.423-459.

[4] Ter Haar, G., 2009. How God became African: African spirituality and Western secular thought. University of Pennsylvania Press.

[5] Omolewa, M., 2009. Africans, the Bible, and Christianity: pp.87-91.