Guest Post: Gbenga Adewoyin: Fighting superstition in Africa
A young Nigerian podcaster describes his latest efforts to fight superstition and its negative consequences in Africa
Several years ago I appeared on a podcast by a young Nigerian podcaster, Gbenga Adewoyin, who was also trying to set up a panel event with me in Nigeria to help combat religious superstition there. The panel never came to pass, but most recently he contacted me again to describe a new effort he is embarking on to continue his efforts there. I asked him to write about his effort and in turn The Origins Project Foundation gave a small donation to his program. Attached here is the unedited piece he submitted. He does ask for support for his program, but the purpose of including his piece here is not to solicit funds on his behalf, but to provide information on how pervasive, and damaging ongoing superstitious rituals in the African continent can be.—LMK
_______________________
My name is Gbenga Adewoyin. I investigate supernatural claims which sometimes are disregarded by people in the First World but in Sub-Saharan Africa, are woven into the fabric of the daily existence of every individual. Animal rituals, human rituals and witch trials are not outdated ideas. Children are abandoned by their parents who declared them a witch for having imaginary friends, human organs are still being harvested for prosperity rituals, and people are still being lynched for imaginary crimes such as witchcraft and blasphemy. By modern standards, these are issues that should leave humans with a blood-curdling reaction but about two weeks ago, a man confessed to killing more than seventy women for human prosperity rituals and that did not make the evening news. The bloody consequences of the belief in the supernatural in Sub-Saharan Africa, including my country Nigeria is nothing more to people other like the weather, something they can all see but cannot do anything about because it’s just unfathomable to people how these claims cannot be true.
Yet the state things are now is so much better than the way things were two years ago. This was at a time people were being accused of stealing women’s underwear for human ritual. Human genitals were believed to be disappearing in the streets and young men were kidnapping people for prosperity rituals. In 2022, after conducting numerous investigations to expose many juju priests as frauds and the killings were not abated, I launched a nationwide challenge for any evidence of the supernatural which got lots of TV appearances, radio, and face to face meetings with propagators of these beliefs which shifted people’s sensibilities further towards the disbelief in the Juju. For the first time, someone was willing to openly confront these priests at a safe location to record whatever evidence they had of the supernatural which was indeed shocking to a country where it is believed someone with juju could cause you an instant xerostomia just by steupsing at you. This made a dramatic difference, and the dynamic of the discussion has since changed. My work basically has been going undercover to investigate these juju priests and testing their charms on camera, but it has not stopped at that. There was a major Christian Charlatan in Ghana: Nana Agraada I exposed to be a fraud which took the country by storm. I have in four years exposed more than twenty-five juju priests, Imams, Christian religious leader and frankly, I could have done more.
The most tragic situation I have encountered in my years is the practice of banishing accused witches if they survive the first onslaught after a trial that’s even more ridiculous than the one in Europe happening today in Northern Ghana. Women and sometimes men are accused mostly of murder by witchcraft and are made to face a trial of fowl slaughtering. After a brutal agonizing night of isolation, the women are made to face the gods. A fowl is killed. If it dies on its chest, they are proclaimed innocent, but if it dies on its back, they are declared guilty of murder, banished to a camp from a society where the stigma is so much, you cannot live anywhere else in that region. You can neither earn nor do you receive any benefits. So most spend their whole lives in these camps, believed to be able to neutralize the power of witches while slaving away on a nearby camp. And a witch can be recognized just by looking at her face.
These beliefs in the supernatural are also inextricably linked to the Great Filter of my part of the world in form of tribalism. Ethnic groups are divided either by their origin stories offered in form of Christianity or Islam, the immutable traits of each ethnic groups provided to them by their traditional beliefs, their morality handed down by divine right and their superhuman beliefs of each ethnic groups in form of human achievements. These problems that seem to me like I am the only person actively debunking in the field and seeking an alternative answer to are what my investigations are oriented towards, and I am low on funding.
If you’d like to support my work, you can please donate to my current project. I am organizing a conversation with actors in Nigeria’s film industry as they are the best at proliferating these archaic beliefs. Alternatively, you can buy the image of one of the women in the camps. The belief is that there is something imprinted on the faces of the alleged witches any indigene born in those places the witch camps are situated can in an instant recognize a witch. So, I took portrait images of these women as an instrument of their liberation because their story is all they have. Only one is available for sale now capped at two thousand dollars as I would just like to sell one make a video of a new life for her and use that to promote the sale of the rest. Sixty percent will be enough to relocate the woman and the forty percent will be enough to host the conversation.
Useful Links:
Documentary about the women at the camp:
Playlist of my investigations:
Video of the victim: https://youtube.com/shorts/7JeBs7UQ80E?si=bKlH0M-Lbv-ExgRD