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When man is faced with unknown, inexplicable, or a reality that goes beyond understandinghe has an instinctive need for restore meaning where chaos reigns.
This reflex, as ancient as humanity itself, goes through times, cultures and educational levels. Because In the face of unforeseeable anxiety, rational thinking often struggles to compete with the emotional comfort of beliefs.
Even the most educated minds can switch to the irrational when the logical cues fluctuate or the scientific explanation is no longer enough to ease uncertainty. More importantly, when education is lacking, subjective beliefs become refuges, easy answers to complex problems, weapons against doubt.
It is in this interstice, between ignorance and disarray, that superstitions, dogmas, conspiracy theories, and all those who know how to exploit them simmer: gurus, charlatans, extremists and politicians seeking domination. This drift is not only a cultural or religious phenomenon: it reveals a fundamental tension between the quest for truth and the need to believe.
Rationality in crisis
When an individual finds himself overwhelmed by the complexity of the surrounding world, when the keys of rational understanding escape his field of analysis, he tends to retreat into a reassuring rational logic.
In Africa, this phenomenon is on the rise. The rise of beliefs not supported by science, massive adherence to simplistic religious discourses, the resurgence of forms of mysticism, magic or pseudo-science Report a deep crisis: that of free will in the face of fear, poverty and misinformation.
The continent, in full change, is the scene of a discreet but decisive battle between critical thinking and obscurantism.
If the latter prospers, it is less out of sincere faith than through a loss of collective landmarks, an educational bankruptcy and a cynical instrumentalization of beliefs by elites seeking power or fortune.
Broken herritages, erased markers
The history of post-colonial Africa is marked by a sharp break between traditional knowledge and modern rationality.
The school, imported from the West, did not always adapt to local realities. Instead of an educational system rooted in African languages, cultures and social dynamics, it is a technocratic, rigid and sometimes absconsive structure that has been imposed.
This cognitive fracture left a void. People, especially rural or marginalized, do not recognize themselves in the discourse of elites or institutions. Knowledge then loses its emancipation function and becomes suspicious or even useless.
Independence, if it allowed the emergence of sovereign states, failed to build an infrastructure of critical thinking.
Illiteracy remains endemic in several regions, and higher education struggles to irrigate society. The university, a place of thought and debate in other latitudes, is here marginalized, underfunded, sometimes muzzled.
A fertile land for irrational
On this fragile soil, subjective beliefs thrive. The individual, deprived of uncertainty, turns to what brings him sense, comfort, or even illusion.
The fulgurant rise of New Evangelical Churches is a significant symptom of this crisis. Directed by self-proclaimed "prophetists", these religious structures present themselves as spiritual enterprises.
It promises wealth, health and success through the simple strength of faith, through the generosity of the faithful. Billionary pastors preach in stadiums, with a staging modelled on the shows of American televangelists, while their faithful live in extreme misery.
This phenomenon is not without consequences. He turns religion into a product, faith into a currency of exchange and spirituality into a spectacle. Worse still, it helps disqualify medicine, science and personal effort, to the benefit of miraculous solutions that deny the complexity of reality.
At the same time, in Sahelian regions, other forms of proselytism are needed. The jihadist discourse, based on a binary and radical vision of the world, seduces a youth in total loss of landmarks. Recruiters play on social distress, anger, frustration. Again, Irrationality becomes an answer to an unbearable reality.
The return of modern sorcerers
The charlatans are not left behind. Clothes of shimmering boubous, surrounded by fetishes and potions, they claim to heal where modern medicine fails. Cancer, HIV, infertility: nothing resists them. They promise children to those that biology forgets, remedies to those that Western medicine condemns, protections against evil spirits, from spells, against imaginary enemies. And they thrive.
Their clientele is large, faithful, convinced. The danger is immense. These miracle makers divert patients from effective treatments, deter immunize children, maintain the fear of science and the rejection of modernity.
Distrust of medicine is not limited to healers. It has been extended to vaccination campaigns, suspected of occult or neocolonial aims. In some countries, disinformation campaigns on WhatsApp or Facebook have sabotaged crucial health programmes. Vaccines are accused of sterilizing children, spreading diseases, and being used for experiments.
This rejection of science is the direct consequence of widespread mistrust, fuelled by ignorance, but also by the history of medical abuse committed in the name of science.
Religion, power and strategy
This already worrying picture adds a political dimension. In Africa, power often combines with religion to establish its legitimacy. The president is often presented as the "father of the nation", the "gift man". Criticism then becomes sacrilegious. The political debate is crushed under the weight of the veneration of the leader. And when a strong man wants to extend his term indefinitely, he activates religious networks, distributes some bank notes, shakes mystical symbols, and neutralizes intellectual, teacher, journalist.
The Wahhabism, supported by Gulf States, also extends into the Sahel. He challenges local Sufi traditions, promotes a rigorist vision of Islam, rejects secularism, music, art, modern science. He shapes a generation of young believers for whom the world is divided into pure and unclean, lawful and illegal. Again, obscurantism takes precedence over discernment.
A heavy toll on development
This rise in irrationalism is not without consequences for the continent's human and economic development. The rejection of the school, especially in jihadized areas, calls into question any projection towards the future. Schools were burned, teachers threatened, and children deprived of education. Hospitals are deserted for the benefit of fetishers. The state's back. Darkness advances.
Governance itself is affected. When elites refuse to reason, plan, debate, they confine politics to the emotional register. Resource management becomes opaque, economic decisions are made on the basis of personal beliefs or clan interests. Education, health and research are being relegated to the background.
Thinking of a cultural reversal
In view of this, it is urgent to rehabilitate reason, not as an absolute truth, but as a tool of emancipation. Africa needs a new educational pact based on critical thinking, curiosity and knowledge. It is not a question of imposing Western rationality, but of building African rationalism, rooted in languages, stories, local traditions, but oriented towards the world and the future.
Schools must become places of intellectual freedom. Teachers must be trained not only to transmit knowledge but also methods and tools of discernment. The media must popularize science, tell about its advances, its doubts, its successes.
States must protect scientists, finance research, build institutions where critical thinking is encouraged, not punished.
Reconciling man with reason in a world that escapes
Man's retreat to irrational beliefs is neither new nor specifically African. It is an anthropological constant that reappears, with varying intensity, whenever the world order seems to collapse under the weight of its own mystery. When rational explanations become powerless, or when access to knowledge is structurally impeded, the human seeks refuge in myth, in symbolism, in imagination.. And this, even among educated individuals, because instruction alone does not guarantee critical discernment or the autonomy of thought. Rationality is not self-evident. It is cultivated, structured, transmitted.
This is at the heart of today's drifts in Africa, but it also applies to other global contexts where the rise of conspiracy, antiscience, religious fanaticism or authoritarian populism betrays the same dynamic: a deficit of meaning, exacerbated by a crisis of confidence in traditional knowledge institutions.
Modern society, hypercomplex, generates a form of cognitive anxiety. The main questions: pandemic, climate, AI, globalization, economic crises, increasingly exceed the average individual, creating a need for simplified, often misleading, but emotionally reassuring interpretations.
In Africa, this phenomenon is becoming particularly acute. There is double the incidence of widespread poverty,or chronic investment in education, and systematic instrumentalization of beliefs by political or religious elites who find in ignorance a capital to exploit.
The circle is vicious: the more the masses are deprived of access to structured knowledge, the more they become permeable to manipulations ; and the more manipulated they are, the more fragile the educational system is, the less devoid of its critical function, replaced by dogmatic certainties.
The obscurantism then settles not as an alternative to modernity, but as a parody of modernity.
Therefore, the fundamental question is not only to denounce irrational beliefs or those who exploit them, but to understand why they have become, for so many individuals, more credible than established knowledge.
Until we rebuild a social pact around trust in science, critical thinking and collective intelligence, the facts will continue to lose ground in the face of opinions, dogmas in the face of nuance, and freedom to think in the face of ease of belief.
Africa has everything to gain from a rational burst. It is not a matter of faith or identity, but of intellectual and social survival. Obscurantism is not fatal, it is the result of collective neglect.
It is time to think, teach, debate again. It is time to trust the intelligence of the peoples, to break with emotional manipulation,education rather than indoctrinating.
This fight for reason is perhaps the most important of the century. He won't win by yelling at scandal, but patiently rebuilding a cultural, educational, scientific fabric.
Africa doesn't need miracles. She needs education, rigour, and freedom of thought.
