For most of the last century, practising an indigenous religion in much of Nigeria has come with a social cost. Christianity and Islam arrived with schools, colonial administration, and eventually national identity itself — and the traditions that predate both were pushed to the margins, often labelled backward or dangerous.
That's starting to shift. A growing number of young Africans, many raised firmly inside one of the two dominant faiths, are asking questions their parents' generation rarely voiced out loud: what did we lose when we left the old ways behind, and is it too late to go back?
This episode sits with some of those young people directly — not to make a case for or against any religion, but to understand what's pulling them toward Ìṣẹ̀ṣe and away from the faiths they were handed at birth. For some, it's curiosity about ancestry. For others, it's disillusionment with institutions that never quite felt like theirs.
It's the question this whole series keeps circling back to: religion in Africa was never a two-option menu, even if it's been taught that way for a long time.