deities were created in Africans’ own image, unseen but with believed awesome powers that superintend over the affairs of man. The deities were worshipped with various objects.
As far back as the early 20th century, Nigerians’ renown for seeking material successes through mystical powers had gained the attention of British colonial power. J. K. Macgregor, headmaster of the famous Calabar-based missionary school, Hope Waddell Institute, which Nnamdi Azikiwe attended, had detected over a hundred mails from abroad in the hands of his pupils.
Unless we want to deceive ourselves, those four headhunter boys who murdered Sofiat in Abeokuta, the hunchback hunters, the albino scavengers of Tanzania mirror who we are as Africans. Centuries of preaching on the sacredness of the human body and the visible monumental strides of technology have not succeeded in impeaching our ancient beliefs in spiritualism and metaphysics and their manifestations in ancient primitivism and barbarism.
It will be naïve, unrealistic, and wrong to say that rituals of human body parts for money are ineffective. Or that the metaphysics of human sacrifice does not have an effective science to it. As Africans, we cannot deny metaphysics like Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who called it nonsensical. A dark practice like this which has endured for centuries cannot be waved aside that peremptorily.