“This is not about personal faith. It is about institutional integrity. These thrones are not decorative, they are sacred symbols of our people’s identity, cosmology, and heritage. When a custodian subjugates that role in favor of another belief system, they effectively renounce the spiritual authority they were entrusted with”
We need a federal cultural protection law, one that draws a clear line between spiritual loyalty and custodial responsibility. Any traditional custodian of African cultural spirituality, such as an Oba, Igwe, or Obi, who publicly prostrates or rolls on the floor in reverence to a foreign deity inside a religious institution, has, by that act, willfully abdicated their ancestral mandate.
This is not about personal faith. It is about institutional integrity. These thrones are not decorative, they are sacred symbols of our people’s identity, cosmology, and heritage. When a custodian subjugates that role in favor of another belief system, they effectively renounce the spiritual authority they were entrusted with.
Emirs, by contrast, serve as religious leaders within Islamic governance structures. But for African cultural monarchs who are guardians of indigenous spirituality, the throne is not transferable into another god’s temple.
Let this be encoded in law: any such public desecration should trigger immediate abdication procedures, and a new custodian instated, one who upholds the sanctity of the throne and the cultural soul of the people.
Africa must stop apologizing for its own spiritual DNA.
