How to mitigate the horrific consequences of witchcraft belief in Africa

Abstract

It is pertinent, at this point in human intellectual history, to address the pervasive but misleading position among Africans that witchcraft is necessarily feminine and cruel. The medieval era’s untenable conception and detection of witchcraft as an absolutely callous and womanly affair filtered into colonial and then contemporary Africa to become full-blown via Pentecostalism, with horrendous social consequences. From personal research, I foreground two fundamental theses: (1) for ancient Africans, witches are neither necessarily malicious (since they can be benevolent sometimes, if propitiated correctly) nor essentially feminine (since it is possible for men too, to engage in the “craft”); and (2) there is no conclusive evidence from revealed scriptures which endorses Christianity’s understanding of witches as predominantly women. I arrive at this finding by employing the methods of philosophical and hermeneutical analyses of the Ifá literary corpus and the Judeo-Christian Bible. These findings do not, however, excuse the evil done in the name of the craft in contemporary Africa, hence the urgency for intellectual intervention. As a panacea, this study posits that with proper medical and scientific explanations, the horrific scourges induced by the belief in witches among contemporary Africans can be tackled almost effortlessly.