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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: E34-08. To panel E34.

Title of paper:

Author:

Damilola Agbalajobi (Obafemi Awolowo University).

Long abstract paper:
Towards the end of 2019, Prof. B.I.C. Ijomah Centre for Policy Studies and Research, University of Nigeria, (UNN) organized a two-day conference on witchcraft on its campus. The conference call took the religious public imaginary by surprise. The Christian community of the South-East of Nigeria started a massive campaign and condemned the hosting of such a conference. A number of other religious stakeholders rallied support for the clergy's condemnation of the conference through various fora including the social media. The opposition was so stiff that the authorities of the University initially made moves to cancel the conference. The University, however, made some concessions by changing the topic of the conference and also the ideology of the conference to allay public fears and satisfy the religious community. The ideology of the conference was later modified to that of demystifying witchcraft or the powers of witches. The claims of the current study are that i) the church is by this singular act taking over the control of knowledge production, dissemination and consumption from the ivory tower ii) the church-ivory tower clash is a subjective and political clash of supremacy of different spirituals and iii) the contemporary ivory tower's handlers are scientific brain and religious mind scholars actively participating in the return of the ivory tower to the era of inquisition. This paper, therefore, aims to examine the hidden gender war exemplified in the clash over knowledge production and dissemination represented in feminine spiritual energies called witchcraft within the framework of power relations in higher education. Using agency and group theories to analyze ethnographic and quantitative data gathered from the 2019 witchcraft conference at the University of Nigeria (UNN), it should be convenient to conclude that given the preponderance of scientific brain and religious mind scholars who are the current handlers of higher education in the country, the politics of nationalization of foreign spirituality over African native spirituality is on the ascendancy and the ivory tower is fast disappearing as a habitat of scientific enquiry in which the morphology of the science of all spiritual energies happening in different religious traditions can be subjected to intellectual scrutiny. More than this, it is observed that the scientific brain and religious mind scholar handler of the ivory tower manifests no inherent contradictory tension in himself and as an extension of the church is an educated patriarch.