When Nigeria’s senior national team coach, Éric Chelle, accused DR Congo of practicing “voodoo” during the penalty shootout that ended Nigeria’s 2026 World Cup dream, many dismissed it as another episode of African football drama. But embedded in that accusation is a deeper and more troubling story about the strange, persistent entanglement between fear and ritual manipulation in the beautiful game in Africa. Across the continent, football is not just sport—it is theatre, aspiration, and national emotion fused into one. It carries the dreams of millions and the pride of nations. Yet even on this sacred stage of hope and joy, we continue to see the shadows of juju, charms, and ritual practices that distort the spirit of fair competition and diminish the dignity of our sporting culture.
The Congo–Nigeria incident is not an exception. In February 2023, Tanzania’s Simba SC found itself in global headlines when videos circulated showing players and club officials engaging in what appeared to be ritual acts during a CAF Champions League match—sprinkling substances on the pitch, rubbing liquids on goalposts, and delaying their entry onto the field until certain rites were completed. Simba denied wrongdoing, but the controversy exposed a deeper malaise in African football. This was not the first time that Simba had been accused of such antics. In the mid-2000s, a BBC report noted that the Tanzania Football Federation (TFF) banned the rampant use of witchcraft and juju to win football matches. According to that report, football clubs in Tanzania spent over $5,000 on witchcraft services in a bid to win matches. In one match involving Simba and Yanga, players cast strange powder and broke eggs on the pitch, and some urinated on the field to reduce the efficacy of the juju (magic) power from the opposing team.
This is a common spectacle in some parts of Africa. Many of the editors of VoiceAfrique remember playing interschool football championships, fearing that the opposing team would use charms to win matches. Sometimes we perceived pungent smells around the players because they had performed rituals prior to a match. So strong is the African belief in juju power that Nigeria’s former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, once called for the use of juju to dethrone the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1980s.
As editor of the seminary’s official magazine The Wisdom Satellite in 1996, I had the sad task of writing a cover story on the ritual killing of an 11-year-old boy in the eastern Nigerian city of Owerri. Little Okonkwo was selling peanuts when he was lured into the notorious Otokoto Hotel, given a bottle of Coke, and then dragged to a location where his head and penis were severed as part of a money-making ritual. This grisly crime was committed by highly placed “Christians” who continued to go about their business as if nothing had happened. Reporting that news as a young journalist woke me from a certain reverie that Nigeria was not quite the religious land I had grown up believing it to be. Rituals of all kinds are ongoing in Africa. The discovery in 2004 of over 60 human skulls—victims of ritual killings for money-making or for violating strange oaths—in a shrine in eastern Nigeria again brought home the point that there is glaring abuse of religion in some parts of Africa.
One of the most comprehensive studies of religiosity in Africa remains the Pew Research Center’s 2010 report, Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa. Based on interviews with 25,000 people in 19 African countries, the study paints a rich and textured portrait of the continent’s spiritual and moral landscape. Pew confirms Africa as one of the most religious regions on earth, with overwhelming belief in God among Christians and Muslims alike, and widespread expectations of divine or eschatological intervention—from the Second Coming of Christ to the reunification of the Islamic world under a caliph. Experiences of spiritual warfare, prophecy, divine revelation, and deliverance are strikingly common, especially among Christians in Ethiopia and Ghana.
Yet, Pew also reveals that Africa’s vibrant Christianity and Islam coexist with enduring traditional cosmologies. Roughly 40% of respondents across the region reported belief in witchcraft, and similar proportions said they visit traditional healers. Tanzania registered the highest belief in witchcraft, while Senegal expressed the strongest trust in sacred protective objects. South Africa recorded the highest participation in ancestral rites and traditional ceremonies. Together, these findings highlight a continent defined by intense faith, complex moral landscapes, and the persistent presence of indigenous spiritual worldviews.
A decade later, a new wave of data from African researchers themselves—most notably Afrobarometer—reinforces and deepens Pew’s insights. Afrobarometer’s 2022 survey in Malawi found that an overwhelming 74% of citizens strongly believe in the existence of witchcraft. This conviction cuts across social lines: Malawians with secondary or post-secondary education were more likely to affirm the reality of witchcraft than those without formal schooling. Many associate witchcraft with the elderly, particularly older women, and 72% support legally recognizing or criminalizing witchcraft—showing how spiritual belief directly shapes debates on law, justice, and social protection.
In Ghana, Afrobarometer-supported research throughout the 2010s and early 2020s found that about three-quarters of the population believe in witchcraft. The persistence of “witch camps” and the vulnerability of elderly women to spiritual accusations reveal how metaphysical fears mingle with poverty, family tension, and local politics. In Tanzania, Afrobarometer’s broader regional findings and national case studies from 2021–2022 show similarly pervasive belief systems. In some rural areas, accusations of witchcraft—often directed at older women—have led to violence or ostracism. Here, witchcraft becomes a moral grammar for interpreting illness, envy, misfortune, and economic hardship.
Taken together, Pew’s continental analysis and Afrobarometer’s country-level studies demonstrate that traditional spiritual worldviews in Africa are not fading. They are evolving, shaping moral judgments, social relations, and even legal debates. Any serious conversation about development, public health, sports or social cohesion in Africa must reckon with the enduring power—and consequences—of belief in witchcraft, sorcery, and ancestral forces.
Alarmed by the growing number of such cases, the Confederation of African Football (CAF) issued explicit regulations in 2023 banning all forms of sorcery, witchcraft, and ritual manipulation during matches. CAF made it clear that such actions violate fair play and will attract fines, sanctions, and suspensions. The fact that a continental football body in the 21st century must legislate against “witchcraft” in order to uphold the principle of fair play reveals how stubborn these practices remain and how even the top brats of CAF believe that the use of African juju in football can give an unfair advantage to the team using it.
I deeply value Africa’s rich and holistic spiritual heritage—a worldview in which the visible and invisible interact. Our ancestors knew that life is not divided into sacred and secular compartments; they understood the interconnectedness of all reality. Yet we must also distinguish between a healthy spiritual cosmology and its distortions—especially when superstition replaces skills, fear replaces freedom, and ritual manipulation replaces disciplined preparation.
What we witnessed in Chelle’s allegation—and what the Simba scandals laid bare—is not merely spiritual confusion. It is a crisis of confidence. It reflects a diminishing trust in human agency. It signals a belief that victory comes not from excellence but from outmaneuvering invisible enemies. This is not only unhealthy; it is un-African in the deepest sense, because it undermines the dignity and creativity that have defined African cultures for centuries.
Worse still, such practices expose players—especially young ones—to emotional vulnerability, psychological manipulation, and economic exploitation. Some so-called “spiritual specialists” prey on the anxieties of clubs and athletes, promising victory for a price. In the process, football becomes entangled with fear, suspicion, paranoia, and even violence between rival fans.
We wish to say that African football deserves better. Our athletes deserve the resources that modern sport requires—nutritionists, physiotherapists, sports psychologists, and world-class coaching and sporting facilities. Our clubs deserve leadership rooted in transparency, not superstition. Our national teams deserve technical excellence, not ritual warfare. And our continent deserves a football culture built on dignity, agency, and confidence rather than fear. We must liberate the African imagination from the tyranny of fear—whether in politics, economics, religion, or sport. The obsession with unseen forces robs people of agency. It feeds a culture of blame. It weakens institutions. And it casts Africa in a narrative that is neither truthful nor honorable.
Most Nigerians know why the country’s national team will not be going to the World Cup for a second successive time. Nigerians know that a country consistently ranked among Africa’s top football nations should not be losing to another country ranked below it by FIFA. The current Nigerian coach is the fourth coach in a chaotic preparation cycle for the World Cup. This created instability. Two days before the knockout game against Gabon, Nigerian players went on strike because of disputes over payment and compensation. Nigerians were disappointed that their country will not be appearing in the World Cup, but they no longer expect great victories or breakthroughs because of the general collapse of the structures and institutions on which nations build success. Without a strong national ethical and patriotic renewal; without any commitment to building the foundations for success in sports and other aspects of national life; with the mismanagement of talents and resources in the land by a very corrupt and inept government, there can be no success in sports or in other areas of our common life. This is the reality of Nigeria and, sadly, of much of the rest of Africa.
During the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, sangomas blessed the fields where Bafana Bafana played in the hope that the South African national team would win the tournament or at least go far. They never made it beyond the group stage. If indeed DR Congo used voodoo on Nigerian players and rely on voodoo for victory, let us see how this will work in helping them qualify in the intercontinental play-offs and in the World Cup proper, if they qualify.
We believe, however, that DR Congo were worthy winners. In the first half, they showed a greater hunger for victory than the Nigerian players, who looked tired and lacking in desire. Someone would say that the voodoo started working on them in the second half; we do not know. But these accusations of voodoo, charms, juju, sorcery, witchcraft and all that in sports and in life are indeed a rich field for further research and discussion. We cannot dismiss them outright because many people in Africa and beyond think that the enchanted world in which many Africans dwell, both at home and in the diaspora, continues to offer challenges and possibilities for understanding the African universe and its complexities, possibilities, and paradoxes—realities which the Church and her theologians and scholars must explore with critical and creative discernment. We believe that we cannot dismiss that world outrightly, but we also affirm that we cannot embrace that narrative in toto as the explanatory path for designing the pathway to our future.
Finally, I wish all African teams that qualified success not only in the forthcoming AFCON but also in the World Cup. I urge them to give more time to preparing for the tournaments than to consorting with juju priests and priestesses whose claims of “action-in-distance” in many African countries have not been able to move any pin in the direction of human and cosmic flourishing in Africa or the actualization of the vast talent and resources of these blessed lands of Africa.
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