An interview with Dr. Leo Igwe, Nigerian activist fighting against superstition, and the bane of “witch hunting”
Edited and Correct Transcript
Intro
Believe it or not, there are people out there who believe witches are real.
Although the term witch goes back to the Middle Ages, belief in witches, warlocks, and other people with magical powers is as old as humanity itself.
The ignorance and fear that shaped the lives of ancient humans, existing in a world that they fundamentally didn’t understand, gave rise to magical explanations for natural phenomena. And from these magical explanations came the idea that some people were able to tap into that magic and channel its power.
Of course, historically, witches are not just people who are able to tap into this magic. They have been people, usually women, accused of using that power to harm others.
In Europe, under Judeo-Christian influence, people accused of practicing witchcraft were claimed to consort with the devil, selling their souls to him in exchange for their powers. “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live”, claims the Book of Exodus in the Old Testament; and that godly order was used for centuries to justify the incarceration, torture, and murder of thousands of people accused of practicing the so-called dark arts. And although the bulk of this persecution happened during the Inquisition, European mobs were still hunting witches well into the 19th century.
Nowadays nobody would seriously defend the persecution of witches or the beliefs that led to that persecution. While it is true that neither Catholics nor Protestants have abandoned the superstitions and magical thinking that were behind the obscurantism that resulted in men and women burning at the stake, they no longer look at those superstitions as commanding them to kill witches.
Many of the people who participated in the Salem Witch Trials lived long enough to apologize for their involvement in that savagery, and even the Catholic Church, through Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, have apologized for the abuses of the Inquisition. While it’s obviously too little too late, all of these acts of contrition show that, at the very least, people have woken up to the illegitimate and nonsensical nature of the mindset behind witch hunts.
But witch hunts have never gone away. The fear of people who are different and who are suspected of possessing dark powers continues to infect the minds of many who are willing to do anything to destroy that supposed threat. Saudi Arabia still criminalizes sorcery, and people were beheaded for that crime as recently as 2012. In India, just in the 21st century, hundreds of women have been murdered over witchcraft accusations.
In Africa, in places like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania, people are routinely accused of witchcraft and assaulted, tortured, murdered, and banished. The African situation is especially concerning, not just because of the horrendous human rights violations affecting those given the nonsensical label of witches, but also because of the way in which some Western scholars have dealt with what is happening. The same scholars that would never justify or defend the horrors of the Inquisition or the hanging of young girls in Salem become moral relativists when the atrocities are perpetrated by Africans following their own customs and traditions.
Looking at Africans as noble savages, these scholars see them as almost magical creatures whose traditions, no matter how savage or nonsensical, should never be eradicated from their societies. They see a social function in the belief in witchcraft among Africans, and even in the witch hunts that necessarily come from this absurd belief. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities”, and indeed, the absurd belief in magic and wizardry that underpins religion and superstition is the necessary precursor of witch burnings.
Once a society accepts that magical evil exists, that some people are consorting with the devil or with evil spirits, and that they are using evil powers to damage others, atrocities soon follow. After all, if you truly believe that your neighbor is possessed or working with the devil, why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to eliminate them?
Of course, not everybody who believes in magic or religion is bound to commit atrocities, but witch huntings are not isolated events. They are part of a continuum where faith, belief in the absence of evidence, remains the common factor. Once reason and critical thinking go out the window, all bets are off.
I know that as the United States launches another war of aggression and Israel continues to commit a genocide, it might sound silly to focus on something like witch hunts and superstition. But even in those events, we can see the damaging power of superstition and magical thinking as the non-existent divine promises to a chosen people are used to justify the murder and displacement of the Palestinian population, and radical Christian fascism is used to justify the criminal war of aggression launched against Iran rehashing nonsensical crusader narratives.
Religion and superstition might not be the root of all evil, but they can certainly explain a lot of it.
And that is why the situation in Africa is so concerning. Rightfully ashamed by the looting, raping, and genocide carried out by the European settlers, scholars are willing to sanitize and whitewash the atrocities carried out by Africans against each other in the name of their customs and beliefs. It’s a condescending racism of low expectations, treating Africans as less than human, as people who cannot be expected to move away from superstition and savagery, leaving the continent as an eternal zoo for scholars to observe and preserve obscurantist beliefs, knowing full well that the price of that acceptance, the price of that obscurantism, will be paid in the blood of Africans.
That is why I got in touch with Dr. Leo Igwe, a Nigerian human rights advocate, a committed humanist, and the founder of the NGO Advocacy for Alleged Witches. He holds a PhD from Bayreuth University in Germany, where he researched witchcraft accusations in Ghana, and works every day with people on the receiving end of witchcraft accusations.
[J]
Leo, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
[Leo Igwe]
Yeah, it’s my pleasure, and thank you for having me.
[J]
Tell me a little bit about yourself. How did you end up in this field?
[Leo Igwe]
Actually, it was not planned, and even as I speak to you, there’s no plan.
I was born in a rural community in southern Nigeria, shortly after the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970. I grew up in a typical African village, and when I say village I don’t want people to confuse that with a village in Europe or in the United States. When we talk about a Nigerian village then, not now, we talk about a situation where many people were living in huts, people moving around on footpaths. There were a lot of crickets in the evening, chickens crowing, goats moving along the streets, and all that. There was no tap water, no warm water, and we had to go to streams and rivers to fetch water in the morning and in the evening.
In terms of beliefs, people had a lot of beliefs in spirits living in nature. So you’d sometimes see people making sacrifices near some trees or forests or special places. They killed chickens or goats. The funny thing there is that when they killed the chicken, they’d go home with the meat, so they’d just put feathers there for the gods. So gods apparently eat feathers, while human beings will eat the rest of the chicken. The same thing applied to goats, since when they’d kill them they’d just sprinkle the blood, make some incantation, and then prepare the meat for the family.
When I was 12, my mother enrolled me in a seminary, in a Catholic seminary, where I trained to be a priest for 12 year. But very close to the ordination I decided to leave the seminary. During those 12 years in the seminary, living partly in the village, I’d also go to the communities to preach against traditional beliefs and trying to convert people to Catholic Christianity (I have to be very particular here, because it wasn’t just Christianity, but Catholic Christianity, because we were told that that’s the best one, while others were inferior.
After high school I was sent to study philosophy. I’m not sure why they did that, because immediately after you start studying philosophy, a lot of all those religious teachings just crumble. You will have to struggle to really make sense of them, because so much of those teachings are based on dogma, authoritarianism, orthodoxy, etc., so that if you want to really scrutinize, question them, philosophically analyze them, they just crumble, they can’t withstand scrutiny.
So I got into this philosophy training, and by the second year I was already having some problems with the teachings of Christianity and the Catholic faith. I started questioning some of those teachings, because they were not making sense to me.
My problem wasn’t just the Christian teachings, but that they didn’t have any good answers when you asked questions. Sometimes you’d be told that you needed to pray harder, whatever that meant. What does it mean to pray harder? Praying longer? Praying by beating yourself on the floor, rolling on the floor, like some African Christians do sometimes, screaming and shouting? Sometimes they’d say that you don’t have enough faith, so that your faith needs to be stronger… So there’s always the feeling that either you are not holy enough, you are not prayerful enough, or you just need to be more faithful in order for your prayers to be heard.
So at some point, as I was growing up, I realized that it was all being made up. In fact, I thought it was a scam. Religion is a scam. People who have not been to the “other side” come and tell us that how it is, that you’re going to wear white clothes, you’re going to be singing… they describe a place they have not been to, lives they have not actually lived, and asking you to give them money. And they don’t actually have a very strong argument whether that kind of life is possible. So it sounded like there’s something fishy about the supernatural narrative.
It’s not just the Catholic version, but all versions, because while I was training, I did comparative religion. And I tried to briefly study other religions, of course, like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. And I now found out that these are just different versions of human effort to make sense of what they don’t understand, or what they don’t know, and try to come up with ethics of how to live, and things like that.
So that’s when I realized that it’s not just the Catholic faith, and I started moving away from religion, and seeing religion more as a problem. Because religion presents teachings as a dogma, as something that you cannot question, even when it is questionable. And religion is often deployed to justify harm, maltreatment, and abuse.
I realized that it wasn’t just that the teachings were false, or just superstitious, but that they were also used to justify and sanctify harming others. Children, women, elderly persons, and others. “Others” in the sense of religious others, or non-religious others.
I had a problem with it, and I felt that I needed to take a break from the training, and also take a break from religion as a whole. So, that was how I slowly moved away and found out that the humanist philosophy, the humanist outlook, presented me with something I could relate to, and something I could connect with, in trying to make sense of the world in a way that constructively, positively, and progressively took care of some of these issues that religion had failed to address, or that religion was actually addressing in a way I found unacceptable.
[J]
In the context of Africa in general, and perhaps Nigeria in particular, do you think that Christianity, and Catholicism specifically, have been a negative force for Africa? Because, obviously, Christians and Catholics would mention that they have built schools and hospitals there.
[Leo Igwe]
This is a very good question. First of all, I would not want us to throw away the baby with the bathwater. I will not come here to tell you that the influence of religion, or Christianity in particular in Africa, within the context of Christian missionaries, has been entirely bad or evil. But it’s important to put that into context.
Yes, the missionaries established schools, and we have them today. They also established hospitals, and a couple of other institutions that benefited the people, but there is a problem. Somebody presents a school where you get educated, but at the end of the day introduces something that also makes it impossible for you to be fully educated. In other words, yes, you become literate, you can read, you can write, but they’re also creating a situation where you have to use your education to serve a myth, a god, a deity, and a deity of a particular version. They hold you hostage while also claiming to be educating you.
That is why I think Africans are like hostages; they’ve been educated while being held hostage, and it is that hostage aspect that is largely responsible for the problems we have today. A lot of Africans will tell you, “I’m a professor”, but they cannot question the teachings of their religion. A lot of Nigerians will tell you, “I’m a scientist”, but also that it’s justified that anybody who says something critical of Muhammad should be killed, or that anybody who renounces a particular faith should be jailed or killed.
We have some good things, in terms of education and hospitals, but they are ideologically driven in such a way that it holds Africans mentally hostage. And my idea is that Africans should be intellectually free so that they can build their own hospitals. Don’t hold me hostage because you build a hospital for me. I can build a better hospital for myself.
Thanks, but no thanks. Thanks for bringing the hospitals, but can we now take over these hospitals and begin to make sure that the science at the hospital becomes paramount. Not that you build a hospital where in the morning the priest will go around and pray asking God to heal the sick. A lot of people in Africa leave the hospital confused. They don’t know who actually heals or helps in the healing or curing of diseases. Is it the doctors and the nurses who take care of them? Or is it the priest who comes around to utter some words and invoke God and all that?
Many of us Africans are confused because of the mixed bag influence of Christianity. And we need to begin to question this, unpack this bag and remove some of those ideas, the negative and harmful or mistaken ideologies that often do not allow us to make full use of the schools, full use of the hospitals or health centers, because they are tied to the string of religious dogmas and traditions that at the same time subsume these so-called scientific enlightenment institutions to traditions that are dogmatic, authoritarian and supernatural.
[J]
I know that Christianity has famously been a big obstacle in the fight against AIDS as they oppose the use of condoms and contraception, even though condoms are one of the most effective medical interventions against the spread of AIDS.
[Leo Igwe]
Yes. And that’s exactly the same thing. They build the hospitals and make you understand that you have to rely on medicine. But they also have a way of controlling what kind of measures, medical measures, therapeutic measures are delivered in this hospital. They give it to you, but they also take it back or they control it. That becomes a problem.
[J]
At some point in my life, I simply stopped believing in God. Nothing specifically happened. It just didn’t make sense to me anymore.
How did that happen to you? And probably more importantly, how was that experience for you? Because I assume that being an atheist in the African or Nigerian context is fundamentally different.
[Leo Igwe]
This is where the insider/outsider perspective is very important. From the outside, of course, it’s difficult. But from the inside people can negotiate their non-belief, especially as they grow older, as they become independent.
I was born in a rural community, so the socialization was mainly about the spirits that control our lives. And a whole lot of events are interpreted animistically, supernaturally and magically. So you see people invoke those things. But you also see people make fun of that. You see people express disbelief, ridicule it, dismiss it.
Let me just give you an example: There was an incident in my village, and one of the parties went to the shrine to report the case. Others said “I will not go, because I’m a Christian, and it’s not consistent with my faith.” Others said “he has gone to the shrine to use the priest to manipulate the outcome of the dispute.” So a lot of people are also irreligious, even though they identify as religious.
It is not just a very linear thing, with everybody being religious. Sometimes, when people are manipulating religion, people know. But sometimes they still identify as religious.
When I was growing up I noticed that people actually professed traditional faiths when it suited them. They’d go to the shamans or to the traditional priest when it suited them. Like in this case I was telling you about, the person who went to the shaman is a Christian who calls on God, but when he has problems he goes to the traditional priest to intimidate, to instill fear in his opponents. That’s what I noticed; that people practice traditional faith when it suits them, and practice Christianity when it suits them, or Islam when it suits them.
So people are irreligious. Anything goes. It’s a kind of religious anarchism, where anything goes as long as it can help them get what they want.
A friend of mine, who’s also an ex-seminarian, he left the training, he told me that, for he has a pragmatic approach to religion. This means that as long as faith gets him the results he needs, he identifies with it. If it doesn’t get him the result he wants, he doesn’t care about it.
So even though a lot of people see Nigerians or Africans as religious. I don’t see them that way. Yes, when you go around banging on people’s doors and calling them idiots because they’re Christians or Muslims, of course, you are looking for trouble. But you can be quiet about it, which is something that I do I have an issue with, because if you are religious and you are loud about it, you should also be able to be loud about not being religious. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
So what I did, understanding my society, is that I tried to navigate it slowly with my family and never really told anybody. They did notice that I didn’t go to church and that I no longer prayed, so they started asking questions. Of course, I tied to give them some answers, although not all the answers.
And because you have to negotiate your independence, when you no longer depend on them, they are no longer in a position to ask you questions and sanction you. So when I left the seminary I moved to another part of Nigeria where Catholic faith is not as strong, so I could go around without people asking me why I left the seminary or why I was no longer a Catholic.
So what I did first of all was to change my location, move away from what you can call Nigeria’s Bible belt, and moved to the Southwest where people don’t care so much about religious affiliation. As long as you are religious, people don’t care a lot. Muslims and Christians and traditionalists co-exist, albeit with some tensions, but not as much violence.
I have worked so hard to be on my own, because also when you are part of somebody’s business, they also want you to be part of their faith, or at least respect their faith. And sometimes many of the offices and businesses, they start with prayers. So I run my own company, my own organizations, and my own projects. That has made it easier for me to not suffer a lot of persecution or oppression.
Did I ever believe? I used to tell people I never did, because before I could even understand what you call belief, they had already told me what to say and what to believe. So I did what my parents told me to do. I, “believed” what my parents told me to believe; “people are here, gods are here,” just like a child is taught.
When I started to think about those things myself, trying to find out the rationale behind it, the whole thing crumbled. I moved from believing what I was told to believe to not believing at all in terms of religion.
[J]
You said that your parents put you in the seminary at 12. Did they expect you to be a priest since you were a child?
[Leo Igwe]
Yes. Now, my mother told me that it wasn’t really that she wanted me to be a priest, but seminaries were among the best schools. Mission schools are still among the best, comparatively, because the state has not risen up to their duty in terms of making the public schools good enough because of corruption and mismanagement of public resources. Because of this, schools managed by Christian organizations or faith groups are often seen as some of the best. Many parents actually send their children to seminaries or Catholic schools or mission schools just so that they can get the best of education (although, of course, many do eventually end up becoming priests or nuns).
So that’s what transpired in my case. That was why when I told my mother that I was withdrawing, she had no objections, because she felt that if I wouldn’t be able to do the work of a priest, particularly a celibate priest (which I wasn’t in the position to do) it was an impossible task for me. I explained it to my mom and she said that that was fine. I didn’t have any issue leaving the training on my own.
[J]
Having now covered the issue of your religious upbringing and the change that came when you decided to leave the seminary, tell me a little bit about what happened then, because I know that you did your Ph.D. in religious studies in Germany, where you did some research on the issue witchcraft in Ghana. How, what was that process like?
[Leo Igwe]
While I was in the seminary, I noticed a lot of harm being done in the name of religion, and that people got away with that harm, with abuses and violations. The people who were most affected were poor people, elderly people, and people with disabilities.
Yes, Christian institutions established hospitals and schools, and even engage in charity and humanitarian work. But too often all these mechanisms or initiatives prevented the society from speaking out against the abuses committed in the name of religion. They were used to sanctify the religious privilege. It was hurting, deeply hurting, but a lot of people could not speak out, so we had to live with the hurt. We had to live with the trauma of religious violations. And I found that unacceptable.
And yes, I understood that it was going to be quite challenging, difficult, and sometimes dangerous to speak out against religious authorities, but I thought it was necessary. I was motivated not necessarily, not mainly, by the dangers. I knew about the dangers, but I realized that somebody has to, at some time, come out and stick out his neck, because otherwise change will not happen. I saw that my society needed a lot of change if they ever wanted to confront the excesses of religion and superstition.
What I did was that I started the humanist movement in 1996. I founded the humanist movement because I found that trying to protect, defend humanity, trying to promote the humanity of people could give me the anchor I needed to address the abuses, the excesses, the violations that are often committed in the name of religion. Then I noticed that some of those atrocities, some of those horrible crimes are often committed in the name of witchcraft.
“Witchcraft” here is as it was used by the English people that colonized Nigeria or many parts of Africa. But, locally, we also understand what it means. And that is why when I’m speaking about witchcraft I do so as I understand it and as it plays out in my society.
People here believe in the supernatural; they believe that there are supernatural agents, spirits and gods that you make sacrifices to. They could also be unhappy and actually be responsible for bad things that happen to you. But, at the same time, there is also the belief that there are some people that could use their own magical powers to harm, cause problem, cause accidents or death of others.
Too often, when people suffer misfortune, if they think that their misfortunes are not god’s will, they think it’s something somebody manipulated. So they go to places where people claim that they have the power to look into the supernatural world and find out whether this misfortune was actually caused by the gods or caused by those who supposedly have magical or supernatural powers. In many cases, they will tell them that there’s someone in their family who’s behind a particular misfortune, and then they’ll go and attack attack that person. They will beat them up or banish them from the community. This has been going for years. And, of course, Western scholars and anthropologists came and described what they saw as African witchcraft.
And because I got involved when I finished the seminary, I got into trouble with some pastors, particularly a Nigerian pastor who claims to be an ex-witch on a mission to eradicate witchcraft. How do you eradicate something that is not there? It just harms innocent people.
[J]
In the nineties, in the United States, there was a whole industry of supposed “ex-Satanists” that had become pastors and were also eliminating Satanism in the same way. Charlatans exploiting people’s ignorance to get their money.
This type of witchcraft that you are describing sounds a lot like the “evil eye”; something that, for example, existed in Italy side-by-side with Catholicism. Are these beliefs and accusations of witchcraft that you observe in Nigeria or in Ghana, a hundred percent from traditional animists beliefs, or are they also including Christian beliefs in them?
[Leo Igwe]
They are a hundred percent traditional beliefs. But Christianity came as a reinforcing mechanism. African Christian leaders appropriated it because they knew that there is some religious capital in witch hunting. They couldn’t leave it for the traditionalists, so they appropriated it.
That is why today, the witch hunters are mainly Christian pastors and, in some cases, Muslim marabouts and imams and sheikhs. Because they needed to address that spiritual problem for them to be religiously relevant. Because, like I said, Nigerians, and I might say Africans, are pragmatic in their approach to religion. They’re not just confessional in terms of “I profess Christianity and that’s it”. No; they want a religion that can bring results.
So if going to a marabout will get them the healing or the answers to their problems, they go to marabouts. They will come out and say that they still believe in Christianity, but that they’re just looking for solutions for their problem.
[J]
What are marabouts?
[Leo Igwe]
They are Muslim spiritual experts; Muslim diviners. It’s traditional divination, with a layer of Islam. Sometimes what they do is that they will write the verses of the Quran on a slate, then they’ll wash it, and give people the water as a healing solution or whatever.
So we have the Christian pastors and we have the Muslims. Islam and Christianity came with a lot of force, so a lot of Africans embrace this religion, without abandoning or discarding their traditional beliefs. So we have traditional beliefs layered with Christianity and Islam. Sometimes a mix of all of them.
Depending on where you live and depending on the problems you have and depending on the people you can assess. So a lot of Christians go to church during the day, and in the night they go and consult shamans and diviners in case they have problems. Or if they are traveling, they’re embarking on a business, all with a lot of uncertainty regarding the trip, they may not go to church, but to a local diviner for some kind of consultation and for preparation of some kind of talisman.
There’s also “charms”, sometimes against bullets. Many of them will have what they call anti-bullet charms. So they have in all forms, which they prepare and they give them.
So this is how the whole thing plays out with Christianity and Islam and traditional beliefs so fused that they are not as distinct, as compartmentalized as we see it and read about it in the literature.
[J]
To ask the question that I think is very common when we discuss superstition: What’s the harm? What is the harm that African people, Nigerians in particular, for example, believe that there is such a thing as witchcraft? What’s so bad about that?
[Leo Igwe]
The quest for truth is a natural thing. People want to know what is or isn’t real.
If, for instance, somebody is ill and someone says that it has nothing to do with microorganisms, but with their neighbors, and that they are responsible for this. It has nothing to do with your heart condition, your blood sugar level, your BMI; it has everything to do with your neighbors and their evil magic. Superstition can be used to victimize innocent people. It can be used to torture and kill innocent people.
Superstition is used to misinform and mislead people. And don’t tell me that something that misleads, misguides, misinforms people is not harmful. Superstition motivates people to deceive others. It makes people believe something that is not true. It makes people believe falsehoods are truths. But it does not just stop at that. They also motivate people to harm others, to commit atrocities.
This is exactly what has been the focus of my work and activism. I found out that a lot of people want to explain superstition, but they do not want to address, call out and address the harm, and hold those who harm others responsible and accountable. Let me give you a few examples.
In Nigeria there’s a belief that you can cut off somebody’s head, make an incantation with it, and money will start coming out from their mouth and eyes. There’s a strong belief in Nigeria that a lot of wealthy people became rich because they cut off the head of somebody, and they use that idea to make sacrifices. These are sacrifices, like the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, or the sacrifice of the goats and rams by Abraham, or Abraham who almost sacrificed his child. They use this terminology that legitimizes the atrocity.
Last year, a young boy murdered his girlfriend, named Adijat, who had come to stay with him. In the middle of the night he used stones and iron to hit her and drain her blood, for ritual purposes. People found out, and he fled.
A lot of people in Nigeria are murdered by ritualists, people trying to cut their heads off, cut their private parts off, or cut their intestines off. We have had cases in my organization where we ladies went to a nightclub, then went to a guy’s place, and then he killed them to take their intestines and private parts. For what? Because they believe that you can use the intestines and private parts to do a ritual sacrifice that will make you rich and wealthy. Superstition motivates people to commit atrocities.
Superstition also motivates people to victimize innocent human beings. We have a case where some young people had an accident some years ago. They were driving in the night with no headlights, and had a crash. Three of them died. We’ve been also told that they were drunk. But others went to consult about this, and were told that it was an elderly woman who was responsible for their deaths. So what they did is that they dragged that woman out, beat her to death, and dropped the corpse in the bush. In October an elderly woman living alone also disappeared, because a young man accused her of witchcraft, claiming that she was responsible for a lack of progress.
[J]
In medieval Europe, for example, single old women were often the target of these accusations. So I take it that in Nigeria it’s also more likely that old women are accused of being witches?
[Leo Igwe]
Yes, yes, they are targeted. Number one, because they are women, and women are seen as vulnerable human beings, in culturally and politically weak positions. You can always overwhelm them and overpower them.
Women who are also living alone and enjoying their old age, living longer than others, are sometimes assumed to have spiritual powers, so that when they’re about to die they exchange their soul with that of another person. It’s like, instead of me dying tomorrow, a child dies, or a young man dies in an accident.
So when people go to consult the traditional priests and ask them why young people are dying while some elderly ones are not, they claim that the elderly ones are exchanging their spirits or their souls with the young ones.
You can see what superstitious narratives can do. They mislead, they misinform, and they motivate people to commit atrocities. A lot of single women like that are murdered. And there’s somebody that manufactures these narratives, markets them to the people, because they have no real knowledge and explanation to offer them. So superstition becomes what charlatans use to justify the money they extort or they take from people who come to them for help.
[J]
And are these the witch hunters that you mentioned, or is that a different kind of figure in this society?
[Leo Igwe]
To become a witch hunter, you don’t need a special calling. You just need to make the society understand that you have some powers.
[J]
What I mean is: are these witch hunters part of the clergy, Catholic priests or imams, or are they just kind of random charlatans? I mean, I think that priests are charlatans too, but I mean, are they the same people? Like a Catholic priest who celebrates mass also does witch hunting, or would it be somebody else who uses Christian symbolism and traditional animism to talk about witchcraft?
[Leo Igwe]
All of them. Let me tell you why. There are traditionalists who claim to have divine powers. There are elders in the community who think that by becoming an elderly person you are supernaturally endowed with powers, like being able to see into the unseen world. These are the narratives they sell to justify being consulted when there are problems.
And when you are being consulted, they bring you money. It’s an economy. There’s always an economy around claiming to have supernatural powers, because you can help solve problems. And as you are “solving problems”, you’re also solving your own, because they give you money to take care of your needs.
A lot of people are self-styled witch hunters, so when there are problems they volunteer to help solve it. There are people who are more established as witch hunters, and you can go to them and invite them. They will tell you what it will take, how much money you’re going to pay. Then you pay them, and they will come and do that.
There are also priests who also come around. They are witch hunters, but they will not come and say “oh I am Reverend so-and-so, I’m a witch hunter.” No. They will come and say that we need to have a prayer and break the curse in this village. We need to have a prayer and remove spiritual blockage to progress of this community. Those prayer services are witch hunting services.
Two years ago we had to go against a pastor who was organizing what they call a deliverance session or a ministry service, where he said “that witch must die.” That was the title of the session.
[J]
Let’s remember that the Bible says “you will not suffer a witch to live.”
[Leo Igwe]
Exactly. So you can see how it is inspired by that.
But we already know that when you are identified as a witch in the community, because of how we are socialized, others will look at you with cruelty. They will look at you unkindly, without compassion. So this pastor was bringing all the people who suspected someone to come together to that service, so that he could help them identify such people or take measures against them. So witchcraft is like a religious mobilizer. It’s what you use to mobilize people, bring people together, get people to come around you and maybe seek solutions, seek answers to their problems.
That’s what people do, whether they are established priests, members of the clergy, elders in the community, or self-styled exorcists, who volunteer to provide their services if they are consulted.
[J]
When we discuss, for example, the Salem witch trials in the United States, or the burning of witches in Europe, we look at those events as demonstrations of the stupidity, perhaps superstition, lack of education and atrocities of the societies in which they happened. In other words, nobody looks at the witch burnings of Europe as positive in any way, shape or form. Nobody looks at the Salem witch trials and the hanging of those girls as a positive.
When anthropologists and sociologists look at witchcraft and these superstitions in the African context, based on what I’ve read that you have very kindly presented to me, it seems like the bar is different. In other words, they judge this superstition very differently when it’s “those Africans” doing it.
What is the situation there?
[Leo Igwe]
I’m one of those who grew up brainwashed and thinking that the white man knows it all. Just go to him and learn. Let him inform you about everything, including what is going on in your system.
That’s how we were brought up, looking up to white people and thinking that they don’t get anything wrong, so that if they say something, it is true. Even if you think something is true, if a white person says the opposite, you discard what you thought and take his version. There’s this kind of blind belief that if you are European, if you are white, you know it all. You are an epitome of wisdom.
I had a culture shock when I went to study abroad to do research on witchcraft in Africa. I was reading what they were writing and was like “what is this?!” I struggled with it because I came with this idea that these guys were doing the research to the anthropological test. They did the observation. They did all the methodologies. They had everything analyzed. They had a concept. All the words that make you understand that when a white person writes anything, it is the truth. Just take it all. Don’t question it.
So I had to really go through a process of discarding this kind of disposition towards the writing. And it was a struggle that lasted even to the end of my PhD, because I was trying to challenge one of the authorities, Western authorities, Peter Geshiere. I read what he what he wrote about the “modernity of witchcraft.” I had a problem even with that concept. What do you mean by modernity of witchcraft?
I thought that witchcraft and the idea of modernity should be in conflict, should be in contradiction. So what are you modernizing? What are you actually modernizing when it comes to witchcraft in Africa?
Again, I struggled with it. And a lot of people will tell you that you just don’t understand. But I realized in the course of it all that when they want to talk about witchcraft in the West, they speak about it differently than when they talk about witchcraft in Africa. This was a shock.
I had a German colleague in one of our classes, and he said that in the West witchcraft is a form of superstition. But for those of us in Africa, witchcraft is not just superstition. I was mad. I asked what it was, if it wasn’t superstition, but he didn’t tell me.
[J]
It’s the racism of low expectations. It is basically thinking, “well, you cannot expect more from Africans”.
[Leo Igwe]
Exactly. And they don’t want to say it. What I found it annoying is that they don’t want to come out openly and clearly and say “guys, you guys are still living in a primitive stage”.
And this became standard in writing about the topic when it comes to Africa. And when you read Adam Ashford, when you read Peter Geshiere, when you read a lot of the Western authors, you will see something like “oh, for those of us in the West, witchcraft, you know, is an irrational superstition. But for Africans, it is not. It has a logic and a reason. It is a consistent belief.” And they will go on and on about this rubbish.
You’ll finish a book or an article about witchcraft makes sense to Africans. Not to Westerners. They generalize. And that’s my problem.
This was what I noticed, and I started having issues as I read. I found out that it has always been there when I went back to Evans-Pritchard and his explanation of witchcraft among the Azande. It’s just the same thing. “for us in the West it is irrational. But for Africans it is a rational system of explaining.”
[J]
It looks like they’re saying “it’s as good as it’s going to get. We cannot expect more from them.”
[Leo Igwe]
And that is why people who do what I do are outliers. They claim that we are disturbing Africans, who’d otherwise be happy with this superstition.
It’s a disservice. It breaks my heart that people make a career out of writing about witchcraft in this way. And that’s what I told them when I went to the United States. I told them that they should shut down African Studies Department, because what they are doing there is just to recycle and legitimize stereotypes. This idea of talking about Africans in a very condescending way, as if we are different. And I told them that we are not. We just happen to live in one part of the world.
We have some different experiences that make things the way they are here. But I found out that they have made scholarship out of racism or racist explanation of this phenomenon. And it has become the norm, the academic norm. And a whole lot of Africans are now jumping at it because of the funding and financial security.
In a way, I don’t blame Western anthropologists. Because they only wrote what they know or what they think they know, or what they think they saw or what they think they are seeing. But what about Africans themselves? What stops us from challenging and disrupting this explanation?
If you ask me, I put the blame and responsibility squarely on African scholars, because many of them, because of concerns about funding, about jobs, academic jobs, especially when they have to work in the West, in Europe or America. If they want to head African studies department, be paid a good salary, they can’t say “guys, what we are doing here is just racist scholarship. What we are doing here is just rubbish.”
It could help people to rethink what they’re doing. But nobody wants that because they don’t want to rock boat, even though the boat is sinking.
Some African universities also rely on funding from European and American universities, so they don’t want to challenge them. In fact, I visited a director of an African Studies Institute here in Nigeria, and asked him why they are tolerating these things. He told me that these guys bring the funding and they dictate everything.
So African scholars are powerless. They’re just like toothless bulldogs. They just can’t speak.They can’t do anything. And as a result of that, this continues. So there’s a need for us, especially Africans, to begin to reframe, reconceptualize, reinterpret the way African and African cultural phenomena have been presented by the West.
I was disappointed because when I went to the university I noticed that there are sacred cows in terms of authors and books. And I was like “wait a moment. This is not a church.” And meanwhile, these are people who are not Africans, who barely lived here, and who, when they come, stay in the best of hotels, without t actually staying where the accusations take place, and then go back and write a whole lot about it.
That becomes the basis of understanding this. It is no longer about debates. It is no longer about evidence or experience. It’s not about, OK, oh, he’s European, he’s American, and he went to study in South Africa. He’s an authority on witchcraft. And when you read it, it’s so superficial
You can’t make a distinction between religion and witchcraft. In fact, there was a book I read some years ago. It was on traditional religion in Ivory Coast. And I was told that they now changed the title to “witchcraft in Ivory Coast.” So you can you cannot make a distinction between traditional religion and witchcraft, which is rubbish, complete nonsense. Because witchcraft is just like the way it is in Christianity. It is an item of belief within the umbrella of supernatural religion that is traditionally rooted. But for the Western outside observers, they don’t even know it. a challenge.
[J]
I do wonder to what extent there are a couple of things there. On the one hand, Western scholars don’t want to be accused of being racist by saying that African superstition is nonsense in the same way that superstition of any place is nonsense, coupled with a consolation price for a continent that has been looted, raped and destroyed by the West so that we can say, well, “it is true that you suffered all of those things, but there’s some magic in you. There is something about your culture and your tradition that you get to keep and that it has magic and community and all of that.”
Never mind the fact that we in the West have accepted that we need move on from that and that the key to progress comes from abandoning superstition and magical thinking.
[Leo Igwe]
First of all, regarding calling out African superstition and accusations of racism. The West is also founded on superstition! What is the Pope doing in Rome? What about the Archbishop of Canterbury? In fact, now that the Archbishop is a woman, there’s a whole lot of disagreement and Nigerian Anglicans are trying to pull out.
The idea of Jesus is a superstition.
The problem is a bit of racism and double standards. Keeping my own superstitions while calling out your superstitions. The Westerners who came to Africa were not free from superstition. They came with Jesus, with Christian teachers, with stories of turning water into wine or feeding 5,000 people with five fishes, and all sorts of nonsense. They were all magical ideas, but presented as if they were somehow better.
Of course, you can’t expect superstitions to play out the same way everywhere. But superstition is still superstition.
When you see an African priest pouring a libation, putting wine in a cup and pouring it on the floor to talk to to the gods, it’s no different from what the priest does in the church. It’s not different from what imams do in the mosque. But Western scholars have a background on superstitions that they’re familiar with. They come to this culture and observe superstitions they’re not familiar with, and they explain them as if one was better.
It’s not better. You went and wasted resources building a gigantic house to a spirit and called it a house of God, a church or a mosque. Just look at how much Africans waste going on pilgrimages to the Middle East!
[J]
I was recently talking with some friends who didn’t have a Christian upbringing, and they were surprised to know that most of the things that people visit in Israel are just fake. Nobody knows where the burial happened, nobody knows where Jesus was born. The so-called “church of the Holy Sepulchre” is just a church; there’s no reason to believe Jesus was buried there.
So it’s incredible to think of all of the waste that happens in connection to that. And we don’t even need to get into all of the amount of money that Muslims pay in order to go, at the very least, once to Mecca in their lifetime.
[Leo Igwe]
There’s also what they call the Wailing Wall, where people go—
[J]
Yes, supposedly a piece of the Second Temple where people go and do that headbanging thing.
I mean, talking to you I’m trying to play devil’s advocate and ask challenging questions but, frankly speaking, all of this mythology is nonsense to me. It’s ridiculous. And it’s particularly ridiculous when you see political leaders participating in this nonsense.
[Leo Igwe]
Yes. And you see Nigerian political leaders, who are Muslims, going to Saudi Arabia, wearing a white cloth and going to throw stones at the devil. It’s part of the ritual of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the stoning of Satan. And you see adults, picking stones from the floor like children, and claiming that they throw them at Satan. I mean, come on!
People who practice this will come back laugh at African superstitions. Give me a break.
[J]
I remember, years ago, having a conversation with some Catholics, where we were all talking about how silly Scientology is, because of their nonsense space opera mythology. But I mentioned that, at the same time, we needed to be clear on the fact that there were also no such thing as a virgin birth, or people ascending to heaven. They said, of course, that that was different.
[Leo Igwe]
Yes, exactly!
[J]
Whatever you grew up with is not superstition. It’s just true.
But in the African context I think that if people looked at African superstition as nonsense, at least that would be progress. Because, instead, they’re looking at it as an integral part of African culture, something that should not be removed or eradicated from African culture.
[Leo Igwe]
Exactly! Now that makes our work, the kind that I do, so difficult. And you hardly get support.
What we are doing is what has to be done. We are campaigning against witch persecution, trial by ordeal, jungle justice- In fact, I had a meeting with some U.S. officials, and of them was telling me that jungle justice was part of African culture.
I was shocked!
[J]
When you say jungle justice, it sounds like a TV show about lawyers who work in the jungle… So what exactly is jungle justice?
[Leo Igwe]
Mob action. For instance, if you catch a thief, you set them ablaze, or you beat them to death. It’s taking justice into your own hands.
So when this US official said with a straight face that this was part of African culture I was shocked. I used to tease them saying that suicide and gun violence were also part of American culture, so that they should make me a professor of American studies,since I’ve come up with a new theory.
[J]
But this “jungle justice approach” was part of every culture, everywhere in the world. That is why we developed a justice system. So it is it is obscene— I mean, it’s so offensive and obscene to look at this situation in Africa and think “oh, yeah, that’s their culture” It was also our culture! We just agreed that it wasn’t appropriate. Why would it be appropriate for people in Africa?
[Leo Igwe]
Yes!
[J]
I cannot imagine how it must feel for you, as as an African, because to me it is so insulting.
[Leo Igwe]
It is insulting, frustrating, annoying, and disappointing. Sometimes you look up to people and think that they will be of help. But in this work that I do, you often get a kind of surreal silence from people. They’re not interested in getting rid of this.
I came out with this idea of “Vision 2030.” Ending witch hunts in Africa. When I told one of my European friends, he just sent me a laughing emoji, like I was fooling myself. I’m saying that we have to stop killing our mothers, killing our elderly people, murdering our children in the name of witchcraft. Is that a wrong vision to set for yourself? It’s not!
And I expected that a lot of people would come on board, but they haven’t.
[J]
Because they think it’s racist to support eliminating a “part of African culture.”
[Leo Igwe]
Exactly! “How dare you think that Africans will get rid of witch hunting?!” That kind of thing.
That’s the impression that you get. And it breaks my heart. But there are also African scholars who have bought into this narrative. And I can excuse Europeans because they don’t know. This is not happening in their society. They didn’t grow up with it. They only read about Africa in books and magazines, and when they come here, they stay in the best of hotels and come around and look at “those Africans” out there.
But what about Africans themselves? Why is it that they have refused to lead the way? Because when we talk of African enlightenment, who will lead it but Africans themselves? But instead they are ready to play second fiddle.
[J]
Do you think that part of the reason why there is this resistance within Africa to give up on this superstition is the history of colonialism, dispossession and genocide that came at the hands of European settlers? Do you think that that history has made Africans want to preserve everything and try to be as protective as possible of their customs because they have lost so much already?
[Leo Igwe]
One thing about explanations is that if you are not careful, they becomes justifications. What do you want to preserve? Killing your mothers? Lynching innocent women, setting ablaze people who did nothing?
[J]
What is the organization that you are heading, and what is it that you are doing to help the, mostly women, in Africa who are being affected by this atrocity?
[Leo Igwe]
When I returned from my studies in Germany, in 2017, I came back disappointed, unhappy and almost demotivated because I was shocked by what was going on in the name of mainstream scholarship and African studies. I was seeing certain things that a lot of people seem not to pay attention to.
In fact, I felt that what goes on in the name of “African studies” should be stopped. They should disband African studies programs in Europe and America. That’s what I felt. Because when I go to African studies conference, I’m like, “wow, what is this? What’s going on here?”
There are a lot of Europeans and Africans, keeping this face as if there’s something special going on there. And I’ll go from one session to another, and see that they’re either are looking backward at Africans were living before any of them (or me) were alive, presenting how Africans were preserving water, or how Africans were doing one thing or another in the past. I noticed that everything about Africa was mainly about looking to the past, romanticizing the past.
We are making Africans think that academic excellence, the excellence of Africans, lies in the ability to recall the past, represent the past. And you see a lot of professors, white professors, European professors, moving around based on the ability to analyze and present Africa this way.
And I’m like “I’m sorry, this is nonsense, complete nonsense.” But, of course, they have the faculties, they provide the funding, the research grants and research guidelines. So most of the time, what they want me to research is not what I want to research. What they want me to write is not what I want to write.
There is this obsession now with “indigenous knowledge”. And I keep asking some of my friends, what is “indigenous knowledge”?
[J]
It’s the nonsense of “other ways of knowing”. Basically the rest of the world has managed to progress through the scientific method, but maybe gut feeling is going to work in Africa. It’s atrocious.
[Leo Igwe]
So they will now compel Africans to be looking for other ways of knowing, wasting energy that could have been used to contribute to scientific progress, which is always open for revision, re-invention and new discoveries. You don’t see Africans presenting cutting-edge research. In fact, I recently saw a PhD defense where an African came with fire on his cap, and people commented how amazing it was.
What is amazing about it!? They have a way of applauding Africans they present Africa as a place where primitive thought is glorified and celebrated and is topic for PhD theses. And they will "say “Oh, wonderful!”, but the people who are saying this, know better. They’re laughing at Africans.
And now a lot of Africans are falling head over heels trying to tell them how Africa is a bastion of indigenous knowledge. They will tell say that Europeans have all this science, while we need to rediscover the indigenous knowledge. And when they say that, they will put up this face as if you should take them seriously. Instead of telling them to leave the table and get out of the room because they are talking nonsense.
They are presenting Africans in a very racist way.
[J]
It’s not just that, of course .It also condemns the entire continent to being a servant of the West, because you’re never going to develop that way. It creates a new slave class.
[Leo Igwe]
Now I’m trying to roll out a program on critical thinking for African schools. I discussed it with one of my European friends, and they were asking where I got my ideas from. Apparently I can’t think of those ideas myself. I must copy them from somewhere else. I’m not intelligent enough to contribute ideas in terms of critical thinking. The same thing happened when I delivered a presentation in the US. If I talk about critical thinking, I must be getting it from somewhere.
I’m talking about critical thinking as it applies to the society where I grew up. Critical thinking that speaks to the curriculum that I studied, the schools where I studied, and the school programs I was a part of. And somebody who was not part of my society, who didn’t study with me, asks where I’m getting my ideas from. Because I can’t get those ideas on my own; I must be copying them from a white person. Because they know that, as an African, you can only have indigenous knowledge. You can’t talk about critical thinking.
But what about Africans themselves? Why can’t they challenge this? Why can’t they disrupt this? Why can’t they step out?
After I came back and started the advocacy for alleged witches, all my friends said, that I had to change the name because people would misunderstand me and think that I’m a witch. I said that I would not change the name, they they should get used to it, because there are no witches. I’m advocating for people who are being accused and who have been persecuted based on those allegations.
Witchcraft accusations are against the law in Nigeria. So our law allows us to advocate for alleged witches and against witchcraft allegations.
[J]
And what are you doing in this organization of advocacy for alleged witches?
[Leo Igwe]
What I do is I want to fill the gaps that have made it possible for accused persons to be treated with cruelty and denied access to justice, to be persecuted, tortured and killed.
There are gaps in our laws. In Nigeria, witchcraft accusations are a crime; but the law is not enforced. Even many of our police officers and law enforcement agencies do not even know that it is a crime. In fact, some of them are calling for witchcraft to be criminalized so that we can bring some of these witch hunters to come and present evidence in court.
So because of that ignorance, what we are doing is that we fill the educational and awareness gap. We organize seminars and let people know that a witchcraft accusation is a crime in Nigeria. We also try to help them get to safety, especially when they suffer persecution or attacks.
[J]
In the past, you’re referred to witchcraft accusations as silent killers.
[Leo Igwe]
You know why? Because accusers are often in stronger political position. So they can harm, they can kill, they can abuse, they can eliminate the accused and get away with it.
So that is why when I came back I said that we had to go against it, we had to move against the killers and the accusers. I was told that I was not going to succeed, but I told them that the law is against those accusations. So we have a mechanism we can use to fight. So what we are doing is that we try to fill in this gap, legal gap, human rights gap, educational gap, justice gap, policing gap, prosecution gap.
We hope that by filling these gaps, the accusation will slowly decrease, because people will get to know that there are consequences. Because right now there’s a lot of impunity. People think that they can get away with it. So we’re addressing that, so that when you make an accusation, you know that there will be consequences.
[J]
When I studied the issue of blasphemy accusations, for example, in an Islamic context, I remember that the Supreme Court of Pakistan, even though in Pakistan blasphemy is still a crime, issued a report where they mentioned that although there are some people who report others sincerely, meaning that they do believe the person committed blasphemy, blasphemy accusations are often used to settle scores, to try to get financial benefits. Is that the same with witchcraft accusations in Nigeria?
[Leo Igwe]
Yes, but I’m always pointing out that very often we get this kind “academic explanations”. And there’s a tendency to allow that academic explanation to minimize the severity, the force of accusation and the negative impact.
[J]
I mean, just to clarify my point. In the case of Pakistan, these are people who end up getting killed. It’s just that, for example, if I have a brother and we have an inheritance, accusing him of blasphemy and him getting killed means I get the entire inheritance. So I think that they recognize the impact; they’re just saying that often these accusations are used not for religious purposes, but for material purposes. And I was just curious as to whether that also happens there.
[Leo Igwe]
I get the point you’re trying to make. And I want you to understand this. People believe that others can harm them through supernatural means. We’re not discussing here whether it’s useful or not useful. People are brought up to believe that others can harm them through supernatural means. And, as you know, if you’re able to show that somebody harmed you through supernatural means, you can go against them.
In Nigeria, people are socialized to believe that people can harm them through supernatural means. They think that people can turn into snakes, dogs, insects or birds. So that, sometimes, when they see those animals, they see it as a sign that witches are around or that witches are operating. It is a belief system.
Now, do people use it? The answer is yes. But for them to use it, it has to be useful. It has to be forceful. It has to be credible. And that’s number one.
Number two, there are institutions that invest legitimacy on these beliefs or invest these beliefs with legitimacy. Like traditional priests or pastors. So, yes, people use witchcraft accusations to settle scores; but they do that within a society where they believe in the potency of those accusations.
Otherwise, why aren’t people using it in Europe to settle scores? Why are they not using it in America?
[J]
Because it wouldn’t work, of course. But it does work in the case of blasphemy, like in Pakistan, which is why they use it to settle score, because it works in that society.
And that why I was curious as to whether, accepting, of course, that there is this large superstitious belief in Nigeria, whether when you look at the accusations, you notice the sincerity of the accuser. Not the sincerity of the people who engage in the social punishment of the witch, who obviously believe in it, but rather whether people were doing the accusations because it helps them get a secondary benefit. But it’s not really an important distinction, because the important thing is what the outcome is, namely the human rights violation.
[Leo Igwe]
But do not forget that accusations are not always or often validated by the virtue of what the accuser says, but by the fact that the accusation has been certified by a priest or a witch hunter. So what comes from the accusers are just suspicions about someone else.
[J]
How come it would be illegal for me to say that you are a witch, but legal to be a witch hunter?
[Leo Igwe]
That’s an interesting question. The thing is that nobody goes with a badge calling themselves “witch hunters”. That’s the problem.
In fact, when you ask witch hunters if they are witch hunters, they will say that they are not. But you have a problem in your community, people are dying, and we’ve been brought up to believe that when people are dying this way, there must be somebody in the community who is responsible. Meaning we need to go and find somebody who can come and render the service and use his or her ability to help us find who is the one responsible for the deaths in the community. They never mention “witchcraft”.
You are the one putting the label “witchcraft” and “witch hunting” on it. The person is coming in as a spiritual service provider, as somebody who helps the society heal and get rid of sudden deaths. Who would not welcome that?
But that’s why I said that even the terms “witchcraft” and “witch hunting” are very controversial, and often presented in a way that misrepresents the whole thing. These people do not present it as witch hunting. It’s those who are victimized that can present it as witch hunting in order to prosecute, punish, and stop it.
The witch hunters present it as wanting to break a curse affecting a community. They want to get this house, this family, to experience a breakthrough. So they organize a community prayer, they don’t come to “hunt witches,” like you are saying. They come as community service, exorcism, deliverance, praying for the family or community, praying for prosperity, praying against enemies. That’s how it actually goes on.
But when people are identified, beaten up, they can now use witch hunting and witchcraft accusation as a way to frame as criminal what these people are doing in the name of religious service. And by so doing, go after them to try and punish them or let the law act against what they did.
[J]
Leo, as I mentioned to you before the first time that we spoke, I truly admire the work that you’re doing. I will make sure that there is a link to your organization so that people can support it and become aware of the enormous efforts that humanists in Africa in general, and you in particular, are doing to free Africa and Nigeria, in your case, of superstition and magical thinking in a way that allows Africa to develop in the same way that the rest of the world has developed, free from the chains of these manifestations of the same untruth, which is magical thinking and superstition.
As a humanist myself, and as a person who believes in human rights, the only thing I can do is to say I thank you so much for the enormous effort and the sacrifice and the work that you do to help these people free themselves from these chains and saving all of these people who are accused of this nonsense, idiotic term of witchcraft. Thank you so much for everything that you do.
[Leo Igwe]
I also thank you for your time and thank you for creating this platform. It’s not a lot of Europeans and Americans that understand how I am approaching this. And they think that you are not happy with them, or they think you are against them, or you are undermining their own scholarship and authority.
That’s not necessarily the case. But I think that there’s a whole lot of misinformation and misrepresentation out there. And thanks to people like you, and thanks to your platform, I hope that we can call out that misinformation and begin to relate to Africa and the African situation in the way we relate to it in other parts of the world.
For me, that’s humanism. Otherwise, the concept makes no sense if you have to let Africans make science out of superstition, while for the rest it’s something else. We are all human beings, and I’m happy that we can help advance the cause, not just for Africa, but for humanity at large.
