By Toyin Falola

Conference delegates posed many questions to me regarding my intellectual interests, work habits, career experiences, spirituality and magic, obsession with work and music, and many more. I promised that I would respond, but not to all of them. I was worried about the meta-narrative of a celebrity stature being accorded. I am just TF!  Since the conference is focused on religion, let me respond to the question: Why do you write on religion?

I have spent decades writing about Africa—with Africans, about the past and the future of the continent. And in my writings about the continent, the presence of religion is at the center; in fact, it is the first thing one sees from all sides. Writing about the continent without writing about religion is like charting the continent without the water. You could paint the continent in such wonderful detail, the mountains and the land and the grasslands. But the water holds the shape.

One of my personal philosophical beliefs has been to accord due respect to the African Traditional Religions. They had long been labelled as “primitive,” “pagan,” or “superstitious” modes of thinking. And this has been purely false. The African religions have metaphysics, ethics, rituals, and philosophies. These deal with questions of fate, morality, society, and reality. These religions have complex ways of defining the relationship that exists between humans and nature, as well as the spiritual realm. When I refer to the African religions, I fundamentally go against all the years of misinformation. I equally apply the level of intellectualism to African systems of knowledge just the same way that Western theology or Islamic jurisprudence is applied.

I do not speak about religion because I am a critic of it. I speak about religion because religion is amongst the greatest tools the world has ever invented. Religion is the technology with which we create our world of meaning. The world of our bodies. The world of our morals. The world of our view of the world of the seen, and our worldview of the world of the unseen. In Africa, religion is not a part of our lives.  I follow religious studies, and this paradigm that I follow pertains to the religious phenomenon and its relation to politics, economies, laws, and social forms of identity.

My previous publications on religion include the co-published Religious Militancy and Self-Assertion: Islam and Politics in Nigeria in 1996 and Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies, published in 1998. More contemporary works from Yorùbá Metaphysics: Spirituality and Supernaturality in 2025 onwards show the transition to a shift from the ideological dualism of the separation between the religious and the secular to an enhanced understanding of metaphysics from an epistemology standpoint.

I have also continued to remain involved in the study of religion as a scholar, researcher, and thinker because I recognize religious systems in general, and specifically African Indigenous Religions, Islam, and Christianity, as being less apart from history but a ground for knowledge, logic, as opposed to being a universe in itself that is history. For instance, in Yorùbá Metaphysics, instead of being under the epistemological hegemony imposed through European philosophy, my interest is in indigenous metaphysics, rather than an interest in how religious metaphysics influence human behavior, or in rejecting sociological discourse.

It is partly because it’s under this paradigm that religion can be defined as something that is not only about faith, but also about the way the world perceives and constructs itself through human perspective. Almost all my initiatives are based on this paradigm itself.  A cognitive perception based on religious signs, histories, and practices rests on a certain cognitive paradigm that shapes its views in terms of morality, politics, and imagination itself.  In effect, I have called upon scholars to recognize that it is imperative to understand that religion is more than rituals in that it is living knowledge expressed through law, politics, and economics. The convener of this conference at Lead City University finds it pertinent to present a topic that borders on “Religion, Culture and Politics” as issues that I have studied show how religion (its determinants) frames concepts of justice, legitimacy, leadership, and crisis in Nigerian politics.

Religion in Nigeria is inseparable from our culture and from our history. My research explores this dynamic between religion and culture. Scholarship shows that religious histories and cultures in practice are always so deeply rooted in indigenous systems of knowledge, shaping the identities of the people in a particular way on account of the dynamic of religion and culture. For instance, it can go into how the local traditions meet Islam and Christianity to make public morals. I have shown in writing the shape of the Nigerian public sphere as not exactly the locus of purely ideological politics; rather, it is an engagement of moral meaning where religion actualizes justice and memory.

Religion in Nigeria is not only an aspect of religious belief and practice but an assemblage of empirical existence in relation to language, kinship, ethics, festivals, and politics. In this matter, it would be safe to consider that religion in Nigeria and Africa does not really function in relation to spiritual choice and practice but rather in relation to cultural systems, constituting total worldviews that determine how individuals and collectivities think, act, remember, and belong.  What I bring out as a historical reality, when I say that the religious systems are intricately woven into cultural practices, social identities, and cultural memories, is that to be Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Tiv, and Ijaw in Nigeria is not merely to be an ethnic nationality but to carry a religio-cultural tradition that informs one’s worldview from the first moment of one’s existence. This includes naming ceremonies, marriage ceremonies, burial ceremonies, cultural celebrations, monarchies, healing rituals, and even greetings.

One of the most important notions developed is that religion in Nigeria acts as a repository of the people’s historical memory. Each African indigenous religious system preserves the concepts from its foundation regarding creation, sexuality, power, justice, and the invisible world. Islam and Christianity are world religions in the globalizing sense. Both have been indigenized in such a way as to appropriate African values and African social organization. In this way, I have contemplated the dynamics by which this cultural legacy affects modern society. To put it another way, even as there are some Muslims or Christians in Nigeria, they nonetheless hold morals, responsibilities, and ideas concerning the supernatural realm that are infused with this cultural heritage of indigenous ideas. There need not be a contradiction between a Christian who believes in witchcraft, nor need there be a paradox for the Islamist who visits healing shrines; nor would there remain a single politician without visiting holy shrines for vows.

I have been able to engage intellectuals and policymakers in dialogues about the religious foundations of society. You simply cannot, in fact, understand the politics and the conflicts, the friendships and the disagreements, in Africa without understanding the religions of Africa. I am thus writing, and will continue writing, about religion in Africa because it is where history and identity intersect, and culture and politics meet, and memory and future converge. That is because in Africa, religion is not only what one believes in, but also how they live, how they remember, and how they dream.

I am grateful to Lead City and the conference participants.