I have a Nigerian friend I joke with all the time, insisting to him that I might decide to move to Nigeria. While he brags about Nigeria's economy- he constantly warns me about going. "If the Women want you- they will seek to get you!" He said. Naturally he says that because of his terrible experience. He broke a Nigerian Woman's heart so she decided to bury some of his items along with a loc of his hair in a cemetery. Don't get him started on that story, he'd scream about it until his eyes turn bloodshot red. And it happened about 7-8 years ago. He said it turned his life upside down, "I felt like a deadman walking." He said.
What eventually rid him of the spell, was a series of very expensive interventions of behalf of some very power African psychics that instructed him on what he had to do to clean himself off. He never told me what it was he had to do. I assumed it had to something horrible why he never mentioned it.
Bro. Sekhemu- great information and questions.
Even though I was raised up the the Shango Spiritual Baptist tradition, I didn't pay much attention to it. I was usually upset whenever someone was possessed by a spirit, no matter what area of the room they were in they would always some how make their way over to me, and fall on me. Even at five years old it's still embarrassing.
But to say I didn't pay attention to it means I wasn't conscious of how what was going on around me was being absorbed. I know a part of me is always angry that history calls my Ancestors Christians, just as the European religious census calls much of the Afro-Caribbean Christians, along with South America on up through the south. My mother tried to beat the Shango out of my because I was trying to set the house on fire.
Now to be uninitiated in anything of this magnitude is an unsettling thought.
Just for the mere fact that you are dealing with Spirits that require a certain level of attention. Certain rituals. Certain meals. Certain comforts. And I imagine we have so many broken contracts as African people, that perhaps even our Spirits that we no longer honor, have in a hand or had a hand in our enslavement.
Christianity is supposed to cure us of our African beliefs. Purge us of the sins of magick, conjuring, summoning and feeding the dead. Some will say, we are better off without those traditions. Even in Africa many converts are saying it. And I've asked Native Africans this question. "Has converting to Christianity allowed you a better system to control Europeans and Africa, or has it allowed Europeans a better system of controlling Africans?"
If Women and Men like Sholanda mastered their craft better, I don't see how any type of oppression or imperialism could be possible. I believe it does come down to the honoring of the dead, and respecting the "library." For the same reason it is about honoring our Elders, because they also have vast libraries of knowledge. At least the Asians have figured out that much.