04/07/2026
Where Are The Witches ?
By Bamidele Ademola-Olateju
Each time I drive through rural Southwest Nigeria, the desolate rural countryside bothers me. Many especially among the Yoruba fear their roots because witches will come after them, to kill them and ruin their lives. These witches have not killed the local government chairman, the Senator, nor the Federal reps, instead they are looking for the struggling guy squatting with six others in a room in Ikotun There is a philosophy at work in the African village. It is not written in any text, not taught in any school, yet transmitted with the faithfulness of an oral tradition across generations. It is the philosophy of the Convenient Cause. That is, the metaphysical conviction that every misfortune has a human author, that every calamity is curated, that somewhere in the geography of your suffering there is a woman; old, solitary, eyes carrying the weight of too many years, who assembled your pain and dispatched it to you on the wings of the night.
For example, if an ailment that has resisted diagnosis, the doctors have shrugged, the tests have returned inconclusive, the pharmacist has exhausted his shelves - blame the village witch. A bachelor who married without the commensurate increase in salary, who now finds that two mouths, and then four, and then six, demand feeding from the same pot that once fed one, it is the village people. A tire whose threads are so bare they have become philosophical, that bursts on the Benin-Ore expressway at 120 kilometers per hour on the return from Christmas - na dem! The village. Them! The others. The malevolent assembly of the night. I have always been curious about the economy of this thinking. It is, when you examine it closely, a masterpiece of psychological engineering, a classic abdication of responsibility and accountability. It relieves the sufferer of the burden of causality while simultaneously providing the comfort of an enemy. It is far easier to light a candle against a witch than to examine one's own choices. It is more satisfying to commission a deliverance service than to visit the mechanic. It costs less emotionally, at least to blame the woman who lives at the edge of the village than to ask why you have been eating pepper soup every night when what your body needed was a doctor.
The Yorùbá philosophical tradition, which I carry in my bones and my breath, is far more nuanced than this witch-hunting would suggest. Our cosmology does not deny the existence of malevolent forces. The àjẹ́ are real. Ògún ènìyàn; the war of persons against persons is acknowledged. But Yorùbá metaphysics is not a philosophy of passivity. It insists equally on ìwà pẹ̀lẹ̀ - gentle, excellent character as the armor of a life well-lived. It invokes orí the personal destiny that the individual must work to fulfill. It demands ìṣẹ - effort, industry, the active collaboration of human hands with divine purpose. The Yorùbá elder did not sit in the compound lamenting that witches had stolen his harvest. He examined his soil and consulted the seasons. He asked what he had planted and when. The witch-blaming that has calcified into cultural habit is not ancient wisdom, it is a corruption of a tradition that once demanded accountability from its adherents. Yet, the village is emptied. The young have fled to Lagos, to Abuja, to London, to Houston not only because of economic gravity, but because no ambitious soul wishes to spend their life as a suspect in a crime they did not commit. Every old woman left behind is a potential defendant. Every misfortune is a fresh indictment. The village has become a court in permanent session, trying cases with no evidence, reaching verdicts with no appeals. Who would stay? Who would return?
There is a concept in philosophy called the locus of control. Julian Rotter, the American psychologist, described it as the degree to which individuals believe they have control over the outcomes of their lives. Those with an internal locus of control believe that their choices, their habits, their decisions shape their destiny. Those with an external locus of control believe that forces outside themselves like fate, powerful others, chance, determine what happens to them. The research is unambiguous: internal locus of control correlates with achievement, resilience, mental health, and the capacity to learn from failure. External locus of control correlates with learned helplessness, that devastating condition in which a person, having been convinced that nothing they do makes any difference, stops trying altogether. The witch-blaming tradition is, in psychological terms, the institutionalization of an external locus of control. It is a community-wide curriculum in learned helplessness. And we have been graduating students from this curriculum for centuries.
Now, here is where the story takes its modern twist, and where I must restrain my amusement, though not entirely. The witches, you see, have relocated. They have packed their calabashes, folded their wings, abandoned the iroko tree, and moved. They now reside, and this is not speculation, this is sociological fact, on Facebook. On Facebook, the malevolent assembly of the night has found its perfect habitat. They gather not in moonlit clearings but in comment sections. They do not fly on brooms, they scroll. They do not extract livers and kidneys in the spiritual realm; they extract reputations in the digital one. They do not poison the stream from which you drink, they poison the narrative in which you are discussed. The àjé of our grandmothers' nightmares wore wrappers and kept their powers hidden. Today's witch announces herself in all-caps. She tags; she shares, she forwards without reading, she posts at 2 a.m. because something about the night remains essential to the craft. And the suffering caused is not metaphorical. Careers have ended in threads. Marriages have collapsed under the weight of screenshots. Reputations built over decades have been dismantled in the forty-eight hours of a viral post. Children have been humiliated in comment sections while their parents cheered. Businesses have been destroyed by coordinated campaigns of falsehood presented as concern. The village witch, working alone with whatever powers she possessed, was at best a local menace. The Facebook witch has scale. She has reach. She has algorithms working in her favor.
Yet, and this is the part that truly illuminates the poverty of our self-reflection, we still do not examine our own hands. The same culture that blamed the old woman at the edge of the village for the burst tire now blames Twitter for the failed business. The same instinct that accused the grandmother of the child's fever now accuses "haters" for the uncompleted house. We have modernized our superstition without interrogating it. We have changed the medium without changing the message. The witch has a smartphone now, but our relationship to personal accountability remains exactly as it was.Olódùmarè, in the Yorùbá theological framework that E. Bọlaji Idowu so beautifully articulated, does not create a human being and then abandon them to the machinations of witches. The Creator endows each person with orí - a personal divinity, a destiny to be worked, a potential to be actualized. The Ifá corpus does not instruct the inquirer to go and locate who has bewitched them. It instructs them to make sacrifice, which is to say, to invest, to discipline, to offer something of themselves in the pursuit of their becoming. The witches were always the least interesting part of the cosmology. The self was the subject.
It is time, it is long past time, to bring the witches home. Not to their village, not to Facebook, but home to ourselves. The witch that delays your promotion is called procrastination. The one that sours your marriage is called neglect. The one that burst your tire is called the Bridgestone shop you drove past three months ago. The one that scattered your business is called the audit you never conducted, the partnership agreement you never signed, the books you never balanced. When we learn to look inward with the same intensity we direct outward when we apply to our own choices and habits the forensic scrutiny we currently reserve for our enemies, something extraordinary will happen. The villages will fill up again, and old women will breathe easier. And we will find, beneath all that projected fear and blame, something far more useful: the terrifying, liberating, magnificent truth that we have always been the authors of more of our story than we dared to admit. The witches are on Facebook. But accountability, thankless, unglamorous, utterly transformative accountability is right here. Waiting.
