WHO TAUGHT YOU TO CALL IT DARKNESS?

 

There is a question that has sat quietly at the edge of many conversations for a long time, one that most people feel but few are willing to ask directly. When we look at the practices, knowledge systems, and spiritual expressions of African traditional life and instinctively recoil, labelling them as dark, evil, or demonic, we rarely stop to ask where that instinct came from. Who taught us to call it darkness? And more importantly, were they right?

The honest answer requires us to go back further than our own memories. The wholesale condemnation of African traditional religion and its associated knowledge systems did not emerge organically from within African communities. It arrived with colonialism and missionary enterprise, both of which had a vested interest in delegitimising indigenous knowledge, dismantling existing spiritual authority, and replacing it with imported frameworks. To call something evil is one of the most effective ways to ensure people abandon it without examination. And it worked. Generations of Africans grew up inheriting a deep suspicion of their own ancestral knowledge, a suspicion planted by those who stood to gain from it.

That history does not mean everything within African traditional practice is good or beyond scrutiny. It is historically true that some practices within African traditional society were repugnant, harmful, and rightly abolished over time. But here is the point that honest reflection demands: that process of shedding harmful practices is not uniquely African. Every society in human history has had to evolve beyond beliefs and customs that later generations recognised as wrong. Europe's own record is instructive and humbling. During the infamous witch trials, anyone who possessed knowledge of healing herbs, whether acquired through practical experience or inherited tradition, was relentlessly persecuted by European ecclesiastical and civil authorities, the very institutions that would later claim the moral authority to define what was civilised and what was not, including what was light and what was darkness in Africa. Torture was routine. Death at the stake was the frequent conclusion, if the body had not already succumbed to the cruelties inflicted before the flames. The healers, the herbalists, the custodians of natural knowledge, were branded agents of darkness by those same European authorities. The condemnation of African traditional knowledge therefore did not arrive from a place of moral superiority. It arrived from a civilisation that had itself only recently emerged from its own brutality.

Now let us go deeper, to the question of power itself. There is only one Creator, and from that one Source flows the single power that animates and sustains all of creation. This power permeates every living thing, every element of the natural world, every dimension of existence. It is not African power or European power or Christian power. It is the power of creation itself, neutral in its nature, moral only in its application. What determines whether its use is good or evil is never the tradition it comes from. It is always the intent behind it and the fruit it produces.

The herbalist who heals a child with roots and leaves is drawing on the same creative power as the surgeon who operates with a scalpel. The elder who protects a community using knowledge passed down through generations is working with the same animating force as the pastor who prays for divine intervention. The outward steps may differ greatly. The source does not.

African traditional knowledge, in essence, is a sophisticated system of understanding the natural world, the spiritual world, and the laws that govern both. Like every knowledge system that man is permitted to employ, it can be directed toward healing or toward harm, toward protection or toward destruction. The moral character of any act within that tradition depends entirely on the intent of the practitioner and the outcome it produces. That is the only honest standard of discernment, and it applies equally to every tradition without exception. There are expressions within African tradition, as there are within organised religion, medicine, law, and every other human system, that are directed toward manipulation, harm, and the exploitation of fear and vulnerability. Those deserve to be named honestly and resisted firmly. But the existence of misuse within a tradition does not condemn the tradition itself, any more than the existence of corrupt clergy condemns the entirety of the Christian faith, or the existence of poisonous plants condemns the botanical world.

We were taught to call it darkness by people who needed us to believe that. The deeper invitation, the one that genuine spiritual maturity extends to each of us, is to look again, this time with our inner eyes, and to judge not by the label someone else applied, but by the fruit we can see clearly and intuitively sense for ourselves. After all, a tree that heals cannot be evil at its root. No matter what anyone taught us to call it.

THE MAN WHO SAVED THE CHURCH AND LOST HIS MEMBERSHIP

 

I came across a video recently that stopped me in my tracks. It raised a question so fundamental that I felt compelled to share it and invite your honest reflection.

The story goes like this. A group of kidnappers wrote to a church, threatening to attack. On the appointed day they arrived and chaos erupted. In the commotion, an Elder of the church rushed to the pastor and sought permission to employ native traditional measures at his disposal. The pastor gave his approval. The Elder stepped forward, raised his hand, and within moments a swarm of bees descended on the attackers with such ferocity that they fled. Not one church member was harmed.

Four weeks later, the church committee met and expelled the Elder permanently. Their conclusion was that the power he employed was from darkness.

Let us sit with that for a moment.

The committee's objection was specifically to the native and traditional nature of what the Elder employed. But that objection, however sincerely held, cannot survive the most basic test of discernment: what did the Elder's action actually produce? It produced no casualties, protected every life in that building, and repelled evil without bloodshed. That is not the fruit of darkness. And there is a further point worth considering. Darkness does not typically work against its own. The kidnappers who came to terrorise that congregation were clearly the ones operating on the side of darkness. If the Elder's power truly belonged to that same side, one would reasonably expect it to have aided them, not routed them.

The committee also conveniently overlooked something important. The pastor who authorised the action in the heat of crisis bore equal responsibility for the decision. Yet it was the Elder alone who paid the price.

There is also a biblical dimension worth noting. The sacred scriptures are replete with accounts of nature intervening decisively in defence of the innocent. The plagues of Egypt alone tell the story clearly enough. Frogs, locusts, flies, hail, and darkness were all mobilised against an oppressive force to protect a people under threat. None of those interventions were labelled as darkness. They were recorded as deliverance. The record is widely known and needs no elaboration.

There is a deeper truth worth pausing on here. There is only one Creator, and from that one Source flows the single power that animates and sustains everything that exists. This neutral power permeates all of creation. What determines its effect is how it is employed by the one who wields it. A knife can heal in the hands of a surgeon or harm in the hands of an assailant. The knife itself is neither good nor evil. The hand determines that. In the matter before us, the Elder directed that pervading neutral power toward the saving of lives. He put it to good use. And a power put to good use cannot, by any honest reckoning, be condemned as evil.

What this story ultimately reveals is the danger of confusing the unfamiliar with the ungodly. Is it that whatever is native and traditional is automatically to be suspected? The Elder possessed knowledge that others did not. He used it to serve others and to protect lives under threat. To label that darkness is to punish a man for the very gift that saved his community.

The fruit of an action is its truest testimony. A tree that produces good fruit cannot be evil at its root, regardless of how unfamiliar its branches may appear to those who have never climbed it.

The Elder deserved gratitude. He received expulsion. And that verdict says far more about the committee than it does about him. But let us be honest. That committee does not sit in one church alone. It sits wherever people judge what they do not understand, wherever the unfamiliar is condemned without examining what it produced. Perhaps the real question is not what happened to the Elder, but how many of us have, at some point, been the committee.

WHY ORDINARY LIFE IS BECOMING EMOTIONALLY AND FINANCIALLY HEAVY

 

There is a quiet shift happening in ordinary life that many people feel but struggle to name. Life is not necessarily collapsing, yet it no longer feels light. The effort required to maintain a basic standard of living now feels disproportionately high, both financially and emotionally, and simply getting through a normal day carries a weight that did not exist in the same way a generation ago.

Three layers explain this heaviness. The first is financial compression. Income rarely expands at the same pace as expenses. What used to be routine decisions now require calculation. Transportation, food, rent, education, healthcare. Each carries more uncertainty than before. The result is not always visible hardship, but constant mental arithmetic.

The second is psychological fatigue. Modern life demands not only labour but attention, responsiveness, and emotional availability around the clock. Work, family, social obligations, and personal ambition now overlap in ways that leave little space for genuine recovery.

The third is the pressure of dignity. Many people are managing significant strain without allowing it to show. The effort to appear stable becomes an additional burden layered silently on top of everything else.

Yet when we step back from the surface, a deeper question emerges. Could this condition reflect something more fundamental about how we have collectively organised life? When heaviness touches nearly everyone, even in different degrees, it invites reflection on whether certain underlying principles have been neglected.

The condition we are describing is not simply bad luck or poor economic management. It is the accumulated consequence of choices made collectively over time. A society cannot endlessly invest its best energies into competition, conflict, and extraction without consequences in the quality of everyday life. When disproportionate energy flows into speculation and inefficiency, less remains for foundational needs such as food systems, education, health, and meaningful work.

The response therefore is not only personal adaptation but collective reorientation. We must begin to sow differently: mindful contribution rather than unchecked consumption, cooperation rather than fragmentation, long-term thinking rather than short-term gain. Prosperity is not merely a financial outcome. It is a reflection of alignment with deeper laws of balance.

The weight people feel today is uncomfortable but instructive. It invites a return to what sustains life, not just what accelerates it. Ultimately, what secures true human welfare is the recognition and faithful adherence to the fundamental Laws of Creation, which govern balance, consequence, and renewal in all things.

The heaviness is a signal. The question is whether we are listening.

YOU WILL OVERCOME: NINETEEN YEARS LATER, I STILL BELIEVE IT

 

Nineteen years ago today, on Friday the 1st of June 2007, I published my very first blog post on a platform I called Spiritual Activism. The words were simple, the audience was unknown, and the reach was modest. But the conviction behind those words was real. I wrote about gratitude, about perspective, about the tendency we all have to assume that everyone else is living more easily than we are. And I ended with three words that felt less like a conclusion and more like a prophecy: You will overcome.

Much has changed since that quiet Friday evening in Dundee, where I was pursuing my Masters degree with my family. The world has grown louder, faster, and considerably more anxious. Social media has turned every opinion into a broadcast and every setback into a public spectacle. We are more connected than any generation in history and yet more isolated in our struggles than ever. We drown in information while thirsting for wisdom. And we still do what I wrote about in that very first post, we look across at other people's lives, see only the highlights, and conclude that our own burden is uniquely heavy. It was true in 2007. It remains stubbornly true today.

But here is what nineteen years of writing, living, failing, rising, and paying attention have confirmed for me: the original insight was right. Someone, somewhere, has always been looking at your life and wishing they had your problems instead of theirs. The grass still looks greener on the other side. And help is still nearest at the moment of greatest need, even when, especially when, you cannot see it.

What the road has taught me above everything else is that faithful showing up is its own form of wisdom. You do not need to go viral. You do not need a massive platform. You need the courage to keep speaking truth as you understand it, to keep refining your understanding, and to trust that the words meant to reach someone will find their way there.

I have also learned that gratitude is not a feeling you wait for. It is a discipline you practice. On the days when the work felt pointless, when the audience was silent, when circumstances were difficult, choosing to look up in calm confidence was never weakness. It was strategy. It was faith in motion.

So tonight, nineteen years after, I return to where it all began with the same conviction, only deeper. Life will test you. The road will surprise you. But above all, place your total trust in the Almighty. His wisdom rules the world and it shall remain so forever. Stay faithful. Stay grateful. Keep showing up.

You will overcome!