By Godwin Sogolo
This article is a slightly modified version of my contribution to the Toyin Falola Interviews, held on Sunday, August 30, 2026. Following the announcement of the event, many Nigerians questioned the relevance of discussing witchcraft in Nigeria, given the enormous challenges confronting the country. Others asked whether witches truly exist and possess the powers attributed to them.
My response to the question of relevance is that witchcraft has been, and remains, one of the most pervasive and consequential features of life in Africa, both traditional and contemporary.
As for the question of whether witches actually exist and possess the powers attributed to them, I urge a critical distinction between the reality of belief in witchcraft and the objective existence of witches as supernatural agents. The former is beyond dispute: belief in witchcraft is deeply embedded in virtually all African communities and significantly shapes how people interpret experiences such as misfortune, illness, death, conflict, and other events of everyday life. Whether witches objectively exist and possess the supernatural powers attributed to them is a different metaphysical question that belongs primarily to the realm of metaphysics and, as such, is not amenable to empirical verification or to logical reasoning in the conventional sense.
Indeed, attempts to prove or disprove the existence of supernatural beings – including God – through empirical procedures are theoretically and practically misguided. It is a historical fact that scholars, especially philosophers, have sought in various ways to establish or refute the existence of God, but their efforts have yielded no conclusive result.
Thus, the more productive question is not whether witches exist, but whether the powers and activities attributed to them are logically coherent and empirically possible. The same reasoning applies to miracles. Rather than attempting to establish the existence of God by appealing to alleged miraculous events, the more appropriate question is whether such events are themselves logically coherent and empirically possible.
My concern, therefore, is not to prove or disprove the existence of witches, but to examine the concept of witchcraft, the claims associated with the phenomenon, and its explanatory and practical significance. This is particularly important in Nigeria because witchcraft beliefs can – and do – have grave social consequences, including the accusation, persecution, torture, and killing of innocent persons.
Every culture in the world has its own explanatory models through which it interprets experience and constructs meaning – a distinction Robin Horton describes as being between “the world of commonsense and the world of theory.” Although human beings share broadly similar sensory experiences, they do not necessarily interpret or explain those experiences in the same way, even when their explanatory approaches have much in common. For example, all cultures employ both naturalistic (scientific) and supernatural modes of explanation; the difference lies largely in the relative dominance of one over the other.
In a predominantly scientific thought system, events tend to be explained in terms of impersonal natural laws, processes, and mechanisms, with little or no recourse to supernatural agencies. In an African thought systems, by contrast, natural and mechanistic explanations tend to be overshadowed by an emphasis on spiritual, personal, and supernatural agencies.
The differences among explanatory models become particularly evident in the interpretation of extraordinary events – events that appear to violate normal expectations or established patterns of experience. Events such as sudden death, an unexpected recovery from a seemingly terminal illness, and other inexplicable occurrences may prompt people to seek explanations beyond those ordinarily invoked.
Orthodox religions, especially in the Western world interpret extraordinary events as miracles. Christianity, for example, attributes miracles to God or His agents for divine purposes, as in the parting of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21-22) and Peter’s healing of the lame man (Acts 3:1-9). In African thought, extraordinary events may likewise be attributed to witchcraft.
Furthermore, every human culture is a morally polarised space. Just as the devil represents evil in Christianity, so too is witchcraft commonly associated with evil in many traditional African thought systems. There are, however, exceptions. According to anthropological accounts, in some communities – for example, in Benin Republic, Ghana, and Cameroon – witches are believed to use their powers for both malevolent and benevolent purposes.
It is important to emphasise that beliefs in witchcraft are found in almost all cultures, particularly in Africa, although their modes vary considerably from one culture to another. There are, yet again, exceptional cases such as the one reported by James Brain, about the Korongo community of Sudan, where the concept of witchcraft is reportedly absent.
Witches are commonly believed to possess extraordinary powers, including the ability to transform themselves into animals, travel through the air or across great distances, assume spiritual forms, cause illness and death, induce infertility or impotence, and bring about various forms of misfortune. Thus, the dominant activities attributed to witches are evil.
A typical scientific inquiry involves mechanisms, causal connections, prediction and control. Witchcraft, on the other hand, brings in the person: human actions, spiritual agencies, reasons, attitudes, social and moral relations. A useful illustration is the familiar contrast between “how” and “why” questions: “How did it happen?” is primarily a scientific question, whereas “Why did it happen to this particular person?” is the kind of question addressed by a witchcraft explanation.
Neither science nor witchcraft can adequately answer questions that properly belong to the conceptual domain of the other, because they operate within fundamentally different explanatory frameworks. Consider the following practical examples: the sudden death of a child; the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a fatal motor accident.
In explaining these events, a scientist would seek to identify: how a poison caused the death of the child; how a virus caused the Ebola outbreak, and how brake failure caused the motor accident. The scientist would then proceed to examine in detail the causal processes involved in each case. Science sometimes invokes notions such as chance or luck – which, in reality, may amount to an admission of ignorance.
A witchcraft explanation would introduce the notion of human agency and address questions such as: “Why did the poison cause the death of this particular child rather than another”? “Why did the Ebola outbreak affect some individuals and communities, while leaving many others untouched”? “Why did Mr. A’s vehicle suffer brake failure, resulting in a fatal accident, particularly on a road safely used by many others”?
Thus, even though scientific and witchcraft explanations are directed at the same event, each is seeking to explain different aspects of it such that the two sets of explanation provide a more comprehensive understanding of the event. Scientific and traditional explanations need not always be logically incompatible. An event may have several causes, depending on the aspect of it under investigation and the kind of question being asked. It follows, therefore, that witchcraft appears irrational only from a scientific perspective. Within their respective contexts, scientific and witchcraft explanations are rational, compatible, and complementary, offering different dimensions of explanation for the same event.
The distinctions made so far between a scientific explanation and a supernatural explanation are important in understanding African conceptions of health and illness. Orthodox modern medicine generally focuses on bodily organs, physiological processes and identifiable pathological agents, whereas traditional African healing adopts a holistic conception of health, encompassing physical, psychological, social and spiritual well-being.
Illness in Africa involves, not only bodily malfunction but also poverty, unemployment, infertility, hunger, conflict and strained relationships that impair normal social and productive functioning. Consequently, traditional African healing processes integrate the physical, spiritual, socio-psychological and even moral dimensions of illness. It is true that orthodox modern medicine also recognises non-physical influences, as demonstrated by the concept of placebo effect, whereby a patient’s beliefs and state of mind can affect treatment and healing.
The remarkable advances in modern science and technology – including Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – do not fundamentally alter the distinct explanatory roles of science and witchcraft. However sophisticated the new technologies may become, they mainly explain patterns, mechanisms and causal connections – how events occur – but they can hardly answer the culturally and existentially significant question of why a particular event happened to a particular person or community at a particular time.
AI may greatly expand the scope and precision of scientific explanation, but it does not, by itself, replace the culturally embedded framework through which traditional African societies interpret personal agency, misfortune, moral responsibility and the meaning of particular events. The issue, therefore, is not whether Africa must choose between AI and witchcraft, but whether we recognise that they operate at different conceptual levels and address different kinds of questions.
Witchcraft belongs to the metaphysical domain, though its beliefs and practices have real social consequences. Our perceptions of witchcraft are not static; they evolve with changing social conditions. Like other human institutions and practices, our understanding of witchcraft-related beliefs and practices can be reformed to correct misconceptions and curb abuses.
Finally, witchcraft should not be regarded as an obstacle to Africa’s scientific and technological development. Belief in supernatural agencies exists in virtually all societies, including modern Western societies, without necessarily preventing scientific advancement. Indeed, many Africans who have contributed significantly to modern science and technology were raised in communities where witchcraft beliefs remain deeply entrenched.
The causes of Africa’s underdevelopment must therefore be sought elswhere – in political, economic, institutional, educational and other structural conditions – rather than simply in the persistence of witchcraft beliefs. A colleague wondered the other day why we in Nigeria were discussing witchcraft when Elon Musk and his team in the United States were preparing to revisit the Moon. My response is that science and witchcraft can coexist in Africa, just as science coexists with all forms of religion in the United States, because they operate within different conceptual domains and serve different purposes.
The problem with witchcraft in Africa is not the phenomenon itself, but our perceptions and understanding of it. From a psychological perspective, witchcraft could be interpreted as the projection of the evil we harbour in our attitudes and conduct – evil that calls for moral reform. More importantly, witchcraft must neither be dismissed as mere irrationality nor treated as an inferior arm of science. Rather, it belongs to a conceptual framework distinct from that of modern science and serves distinctive explanatory, social, and moral functions.
Ultimately, the more productive approach is to examine the coherence, implications and practical consequences of witchcraft beliefs rather than seek to prove or disprove their existence. Whatever position one adopts on the reality of witchcraft, it is important to recognise the devastating consequences that accusations of witchcraft can have for individuals and communities in Africa. A critical and humane approach therefore requires that no person be persecuted, tortured or killed merely on the basis of an unverified witchcraft claim.
*Godwin Sogolo is an Emeritus Professor who has taught and conducted research in Philosophy for over five decades – at the University of Ibadan, Cardiff University of Wales and currently at the National Open University of Nigeria. He also served as a member of the Editorial Board of The Guardian Newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s.