When Did Akara and Other Indigenous Traditions Become “Fetish”?

I am not arguing that Africans should abandon Christianity or blindly return to every ancestral practice. Our cultures, like every culture, should be questioned, corrected and allowed to evolve. What troubles me is how easily we are taught to distrust what is indigenous. A woman can fry akara by the roadside and anyone can eat it without concern. But if the same akara is prepared for a remembrance of the dead, it may suddenly be called fetish. The beans and oil have not changed. Only the meaning attached to the food has changed. Many of us celebrate foreign religious traditions without hesitation, yet describe indigenous festivals, masquerades and ancestral remembrance as pagan or demonic. This is not an argument against Christianity. It is a call to examine the beliefs we inherited and to understand the traditions we abandoned before condemning them. A people can follow another person’s path for so long that they forget they once had a road of their own. We may not need to return to that road, but we should at least know where it led.

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