Africans, Traditional Religions, and Colo-mentality

(By Peter Adeosun Keyz) - Yesterday a lady greeted me "As-salamu alaykum" to which I responded "Wa'alaykumu as-salam". We both laughed about it. She's a staunch Christian, a devoted RCCG member and we've been friends for many years now. So we both knew we were just catching fun. 

Then I took the fun further and greeted her "Eríwo yà!" Instead of responding, she exclaimed "God forbid that I should respond to a greeting like that". I told her that if we could exchange pleasantries the Islamic way when she's not a Muslim, why couldn't we exchange pleasantries the Yoruba traditional way? She said she can still cope with Islam. Traditional religion is the one she can never cope with. Why? According to her, Islam is still close while traditional religion being idolatry is far away. 

I shook my head and walked away. I kept thinking about how the two of them successfully made us embrace their traditions and see our own tradition as dirt, a taboo, the forbidden.

Thoughts on Juju, Jazz, and Related Issues

As I might or might not have mentioned before, growing up as a kid I was more afraid of Nigerian movies or Nollywood movies as they are now called than I was of your typical Hollywood horror flick. I was more afraid of the witches, wizards, evil spirits, demons and witchdoctors (aka babalawo aka dibia) that were common in that period of nollywood history than I was of Freddy Kruger, Jason, Candyman or Chuckie (ok maybe Chuckie freaked young me a little bit). Why is this you ask? To my younger mind the threat of witchcraft, someone using native medicine to make you go mad, kidnapping you and using your body parts for rituals was realer (more real?) than Freddy Kruger who I knew was not real and seemed to only attack oyibo children (oyibo translates as white but refers to ‘western’ people). I was safe in Nigeria from Freddy Kruger I thought but was not safe from the Nigerian occult. Why did I think that? Growing up and this is still true today, the Nigerian society has stories of occult happenings floating around, stories perpetuated by people that never witnessed the original event or the real reason behind the event.

I remember stories about children who collected sweets from their nursery school teacher and the sweets turned into human fingers. How did they know this? Well apparently one of the kids did not consume his sweets when he was given and left it in his pocket. When his mother took his trousers to go wash them she felt something in his pocket and lo and behold it was a human finger.