The boy stood barefoot in the ochre soil, eyes fixed on the smoldering thatch of what had been his grandmother’s home. Around him, neighbors whispered in hurried tones. The scent of burned millet and scorched clay lingered in the early evening air. It was 1931 in what was then the Gold Coast, and the villagers of Kpando had just witnessed another cleansing. The missionaries said it was necessary. They had spoken of spirits and darkness, and of God’s light that would drive it all away.
For weeks, the women of the village had gathered in hushed meetings, not to conjure but to consult. The elder who had fallen ill was said to be under attack. It was not unusual for such events to call for divination. In their tradition, sickness did not begin in the body. It arrived through imbalance. To heal, one sought not only herbs, but harmony. The consultation was brief. The oracle’s message was clear. A ritual offering was made beside a sacred tree. There was no spectacle, no frenzy. Only silence, motion, and reverence.
The British officer who arrived days later did not ask for explanation. He had heard from the mission station that the people were practicing witchcraft. An example had to be made. A warning. The home of the oracle, a woman nearing seventy, was torched. She was detained but never tried. The village was told to abandon “fetish” practices and report suspicious behavior. Her tools were seized and displayed in the mission yard. Years later, the boy would recall that no one ever said where she had gone.
Throughout the continent, similar stories unfolded under different skies. In French West Africa, reports surfaced of local priests arrested for performing ancestral rites. In the Congo Free State, young initiates were made to denounce the spirits of the forest before receiving Belgian schooling. Across the territories of German East Africa, sacred groves were cleared for coffee plantations. The pattern held steady. It did not begin with violence, but with suspicion. Belief systems that had ordered life for centuries were labeled as primitive, then dangerous, then criminal.
Missionaries had arrived long before formal colonization, and their work was not limited to conversion. In many cases, the goal was not simply to spread the gospel but to uproot entire ways of being. The priests and ministers, both Protestant and Catholic, were often trained in Europe where African cosmologies were already viewed through a lens of condescension. Animism was a term used to collapse a wide range of complex spiritual frameworks into a single category of irrationality. Any form of communion with spirits, ancestors, or nature was interpreted as superstition. Ritual was equated with sorcery. Reverence became heresy.
Colonial administrators reinforced these attitudes through law. In Southern Rhodesia, the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1899 criminalized not only the act of harming through supernatural means but also the accusation itself. This served a dual purpose. It undermined the social function of traditional healers while silencing those who relied on them. In Kenya, similar ordinances banned possession of charms or participation in ancestral ceremonies. The terminology was imported. “Witch doctor” was not a native expression. It was applied indiscriminately to diviners, herbalists, midwives, and spiritual guides. In public records, no distinction was made between healing and harm.
The consequences of this flattening were profound. Families who once consulted elders in times of crisis began to fear their own traditions. Public rituals disappeared. Sacred knowledge was buried. Children were taught in mission schools that their heritage was an obstacle to progress. Entire communities were left without the spiritual scaffolding that had guided them for generations. In some cases, trauma followed. Mental illness, grief, and misfortune, once treated with culturally embedded care, became stigmatized. The spiritual vacuum did not go unnoticed. But to fill it required courage that few could afford under colonial rule.
In Nigeria, the story of the Osun priestesses offers one such account. The Osun-Osogbo Grove had been a site of pilgrimage for centuries, its river goddess believed to offer protection and fertility. By the 1940s, missionaries had labeled the site a center of idolatry. They discouraged visits, destroyed shrines, and accused devotees of demonic practices. Yet the priestesses continued their rites in secret. Oral histories from the area describe how rituals were moved to nightfall, songs were softened to whispers, and symbols were hidden in plain sight. By 1965, the grove was nearly abandoned. But a resurgence began. It would take another generation before the site was recognized as a national monument.
In South Africa, the Zulu sangomas, respected for generations as conduits between the living and the dead, were pushed into the margins. Colonial authorities viewed their trance states and ancestral communications as signs of instability. Many were forced to operate outside the law. In 1957, apartheid officials passed the Suppression of Witchcraft Act, which, while designed to prevent accusations, was applied primarily to traditional healers. They were arrested for possessing bones, mixing herbs, or accepting payment for spiritual work. Those who had once been protectors were now watched as suspects.
In Uganda, similar efforts took place under British rule. The Buganda Kingdom had long relied on a network of mediums and spirit shrines. These figures provided guidance not only on personal matters but also on issues of governance and land. The arrival of the Church Missionary Society in the late nineteenth century marked a turning point. Shrines were labeled as centers of backwardness. Converts were made to burn their ancestral altars. Some did so willingly, believing they were entering a new era. Others wept as generations of memory went up in smoke.
The legacy of these campaigns did not end with independence. In postcolonial Africa, the fear of witchcraft remained. In many places, it deepened. Without access to traditional systems of understanding, communities turned to sensational explanations. Rumors of child witches spread in parts of Angola, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Pentecostal preachers, some trained in the West, offered deliverance for a fee. Beatings, exorcisms, and abandonment followed. In these moments, what had once been a sacred system of ethics and balance was reduced to a spectacle of fear.
What remained were fragments. A carved mask in a museum in London. A calabash labeled “sorcery tool” in a Belgian archive. An old photograph of a shrine in flames. In academic texts, African spirituality was recast in terms of power dynamics and political resistance. The metaphysical aspects, the quiet conversations with wind and water, were lost. Scholars debated classification while elders watched their grandchildren forget the names of the river gods.
Yet survival took many forms. In the backrooms of Accra and Lagos, in the forests outside Bamenda and Kumasi, in the margins of city life from Abidjan to Johannesburg, the rhythms never completely stopped. Drums still called. Shells still spoke. The spirits, it seemed, were patient.
In Benin, the seat of Vodun, rituals continued despite centuries of pressure. The religion, often distorted by outsiders, was preserved through migration and secrecy. It traveled to Haiti, to Brazil, to the American South, where it was renamed, repackaged, but never erased. Its gods wore new names but kept their essence. What the West had tried to extinguish, it had also carried away, unknowingly preserving what it condemned.
The story of how the West reduced African spirituality to witchcraft is not only about what was destroyed but also about what was misunderstood. In many African traditions, the spiritual world is not a separate realm. It is embedded in the soil, the air, the family. There are no heretics, only imbalances. There are no demons, only ancestors who are forgotten or wronged. Healing is not conquest but restoration.
To label such systems as witchcraft was not merely a linguistic error. It was a deliberate act of redefinition. It gave moral cover to campaigns of cultural erasure. It allowed colonial authorities to present themselves as saviors. It told the colonized that their own beliefs were a threat to their future.
This transformation was not immediate. It happened over decades, through sermons, statutes, and schoolbooks. It passed through pulpits and courtrooms, classrooms and kitchens. By the time it was complete, many could no longer tell where the forgetting had begun.
But memory, like spirit, is not easily silenced. In recent years, a quiet reckoning has begun. Scholars, artists, and spiritual leaders are piecing together what was broken. Not to return to an imagined past, but to reclaim meaning. In Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, and beyond, young people are asking questions their parents were taught not to ask. They are finding that the stories did not die. They were waiting.
What was once condemned as witchcraft is being seen again for what it was. A system. A language. A way of knowing. Not infallible. Not perfect. But human. Alive. Whole.