Ask most people what comes to mind when they hear "African traditional religion," and the answer — shaped by decades of colonial-era messaging, church sermons, and pop culture — is rarely neutral. Fear, suspicion, and words like "juju" or "voodoo" tend to arrive before any real understanding does.
Dr Princess IvieOkun has spent her work pushing back against that framing. In this episode, she traces where the fear actually comes from — not from the traditions themselves, but from the institutions that needed those traditions discredited in order to replace them — and makes the case for approaching indigenous belief with the same openness afforded to any other faith.
It's one of the more direct conversations in the series, less about a single practice and more about the lens through which all of these practices tend to get seen. Undoing that lens, she argues, is the first step to actually understanding what's underneath it.