Why African spirituality was buried — and what that cost the Earth
Colonial power did not only seize land and labour. It attacked worldviews that treated Earth as alive — ancestors, nature spirits, and reciprocal obligation to place. Mission and school often enforced forgetting; African rites were policed or mocked.
When the Earth is reduced to resource for domination, ecological crisis follows. Recovering African spiritualities is therefore not only personal healing — it is also about different relationships to soil, water, forest, and community.
The silence is political: imported religions remain highly visible; African systems are fragmented, privatised in families, or surviving more openly in parts of West Africa and in diaspora traditions that refused erasure.
In some West African contexts, shrines and public priesthoods remain visible. In much of East and Southern Africa, practice is more family- and lineage-based — harder for an outsider (or a disconnected urban descendant) to “go somewhere to learn.” That does not mean the tradition is gone; it means access requires relationship, not a ticket booth.