Advocacy for Alleged Witches (AfAW) Using compassion, reason, and science to save lives of those affected by superstition.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Cornelius Hamelberg
Here again, yours truly knows next to nothing about all this but I feel that saving alleged witches who are actually innocent or in need of psychiatric treatment, would be saving lives.
Shouldn't this also be an official human rights, government concern , since witchcraft, witches , wizards and other superstitions are so much the warp and woof of Southern Nigerian cultures, of both the East and the West ? I don't suppose that educating people out of their deeply held prejudices , paranoias, suspicions and superstitions will be achieved by mere persistence in the higher, scholarly, academic, and intellectual level where the result is more likely to be what we had here in that encounter between Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin. Obviously, the work will have to be done at the grass roots level, the foundational levels. For the younger intelligentsia the deprogramming could start with the school curriculum where some of us first encountered witches at a serious level, in lower secondary school, in Macbeth is where we first encountered the three witches. My own personal scepticism can be systematic if it wants to, beginning with the idea that once upon a time there was nothing. But who wants to inflict any personal doubts on anyone else or self? It should really be none of their business...
You may take a philosophical , a sociological , or even a Talmudic interpretative approach to the fact that the Bible is explicit about witchcraft . The Nigerian Pentecostals generally know their Bible as literally the word of God and there's no way that you are going to convince them of the opposite when they proclaim what the Bible says, that "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live "
And those are very powerful warning signs outside the University of Nigeria
From St. Paul, the first and most trustworthy Christian theologian the Christian faithful have been given these inspired words : "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” And after imbibing those inspired words of Paul, the Christian Faithful have found plenty of evidence of rulers of darkness and spiritual wickedness in all kinds of places.
The media/ gossip columns inform us that the Christianity Movements/ Christian Mission would rapidly go out of business if there were no witches and wizards around to condemn and hunt down for their wickedness and the evil that they inflict on the community of humankind. So, many oi the Pentecostal pastors , preachers, lay workers aspire to performing miracles like Jesus or to to be doctors of exorcism, casting out demons in Jesus's name, and of course, converting witches and wizards from their sinful ways unto salvation.
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju the African scholar knows that there are all types of practices subsumed by the general term " Witchcraft" and you yourself have talked warmly about "Wicca", and then there's all that white and black magic stuff that continue to thrive in the category known as " the occult" mostly frowned upon or outlawed by the church as " Satanic"
Yours is an uphill task , since the opposition to witchcraft is deep-seated in the Church, including the Holy Roman Catholic Church, no less. This was first unpleasantly brought to my attention as late as 2005 in this article Papal Bull by the late Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir As-Sufi in which he wrote, " The little ex-Hitler Youth, Pope Someone the Something had just returned from his African Holy-day. He made one important announcement for a continent crippled with the doctrines of bankism, poverty, genocide, and sexual anarchy with its pandemic disease. Africa, he declared, had to cure itself of witchcraft and the practices of magic."