My grandmother’s hands moved like water over cowrie shells, each cast revealing truths no algorithm could decode. She never needed WiFi to access the divine—her connection was ancestral, unbreakable, and refreshingly analog. And yet here I am, three generations later, refreshing a meditation app for the fourth time today, hoping to feel a fraction of the clarity she carried in her bones.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
In an era where Silicon Valley has monetized mindfulness and packaged enlightenment into sleek subscription services, millions of Africans are turning to Western wellness trends in search of what we never actually lost—we just forgot where we left it.
The Great Spiritual Amnesia
We live in paradox. African spirituality—with its intricate rituals, communal healing, and generational knowledge—is the soil from which many global wellness trends have quietly sprouted. From sage burning to sound baths, from crystals to breathwork, the world has borrowed liberally from African spiritual technologies, often without acknowledgment and nearly always without context.
Meanwhile, many Africans scroll past these same practices on Instagram, stripped of their original meaning and dipped in pastel aesthetics, not recognizing the echoes of their own heritage. We’ve become spiritual tourists in our own ancestral homeland, searching for meaning in imported rituals while dismissing our elders’ knowledge as superstition.
Colonialism didn’t just loot our lands—it disrupted our cosmologies. It branded our worldviews primitive, our rituals demonic, and our ancestors’ wisdom unscientific. In its place, we were offered European Christianity or imported Eastern philosophies, often presented as more “civilized” paths to enlightenment. We traded divination bones for tarot decks, libations for lemon water, and intergenerational storytelling for algorithm-driven affirmations.
This isn’t to say all cultural exchange is harmful. Growth often involves synthesis. But somewhere in the remix, we began to believe that true spiritual clarity existed only outside ourselves—outside our continent, outside our languages, outside our lineages.
The Algorithm of Ancestral Intelligence
What the billion-dollar wellness industry won’t tell you is that African spirituality has always been inherently algorithmic.
Long before big data, the Yoruba developed Ifá, a sacred divination system that draws on 256 odu (patterns), each containing dozens of stories, metaphors, and moral lessons. These patterns form a spiritual decision-making matrix, capable of adapting to nuanced human dilemmas in ways rivaling modern machine learning. It’s ancestral AI—deeply coded, rigorously structured, and profoundly intuitive.
Consider also ubuntu, the Southern African philosophy that says “I am because we are.” It maps human relationships not as isolated nodes but as interdependent networks—language eerily similar to the theories underpinning quantum computing and neural networks.
But unlike Silicon Valley’s tools, our spiritual algorithms were designed for liberation. They didn’t predict your next purchase—they guided your next rite of passage. They weren’t built to optimize attention—they were crafted to deepen presence.
The true tech innovation isn’t ChatGPT or facial recognition. It’s a grandmother knowing when to light a candle, what dream symbols mean, and how to pour water in a way that calls your ancestors by name.
Digital Wellness vs. Indigenous Wisdom
This isn’t a rejection of technology. Our issue isn’t with meditation apps or online tarot readers—it’s with disconnection and dilution.
When you open a wellness app, you’re accessing a flattened version of something sacred. The app might ping you to “take a mindful breath,” but it won’t teach you the old songs sung during mourning, or the protocols for asking your ancestors for guidance. A push notification can’t teach you how to pray to a river.
African spirituality is, at its core, relational. It is practiced in groups, passed through story, anchored in land. Healing isn’t something you do alone on a yoga mat—it’s something that happens through drum circles, firelight conversations, and elders’ laughter between sips of tea.
This is why “spiritual influencers” feel so dissonant to many of us. We’re being asked to double-tap for enlightenment while our aunties and uncles—the real wisdom-keepers—are ignored because they don’t have TikTok.
We’ve confused spiritual content with spiritual practice.
The Return to Source
Still, a quiet renaissance is underway.
Across the continent and in diaspora enclaves, young Africans are reclaiming their spiritual birthrights. Some are learning to throw bones or read cowries. Others are reviving mother tongues so they can hear sacred chants as they were meant to be sung. Some are apprenticing under traditional healers, while others weave African spiritual principles into their therapy and coaching work.
They’re building altars in studio apartments in Berlin. They’re streaming ancestral rituals on Instagram Live. They’re remixing sacred knowledge for this era—not to commodify it, but to protect it.
This return isn’t about cultural nostalgia. It’s about spiritual sovereignty. It’s about remembering that we don’t need to import insight when our DNA holds centuries of encoded wisdom.
The rituals may look different now—a WhatsApp group instead of a village square, a Spotify playlist instead of a drum circle—but the intentions remain the same: remembrance, connection, healing.
Bridging Worlds Without Losing Soul
We don’t have to choose between tradition and technology. In fact, some of the most powerful spiritual practitioners I know are tech-savvy, multilingual, globally mobile Africans who can throw bones by candlelight one night and run a Zoom wellness retreat the next.
They’ve learned to code-switch across cosmologies.
They use WhatsApp to stay in touch with elders, Google Drive to document family rituals, and podcasts to share oral histories across continents. They don’t treat technology as a replacement for ritual—they use it as a vessel to carry the sacred.
The key is intentionality. Are we using digital tools to deepen our spiritual practice—or distract from it? Are we collecting crystals or cultivating clarity? Are we broadcasting vibes or actually building spiritual resilience?
The Future Is Ancestral
As artificial intelligence becomes more embedded in our lives—from hiring algorithms to health diagnostics—we’ll need ancient wisdom more than ever. AI may help us predict patterns, but only our ancestors can help us interpret purpose.
The challenge ahead is not to digitize our divinity but to defend its depth.
African spirituality isn’t trending. It’s enduring. It doesn’t need validation from the wellness-industrial complex to be relevant. It just needs us to remember.
The future of African spirituality isn’t binary. It’s braided—combining indigenous insight and digital fluency to meet the needs of this generation without erasing the memory of the last.
This is the call: to be the bridge. To become the ancestors our descendants will look to not just for identity, but for guidance. To honor our grandmothers not with hashtags, but with embodied remembrance.
To stop seeking and start remembering.
🧘🏾♀️ Final Reflection:
What wisdom traditions from your own lineage are you being called to explore?
And what would shift if you treated your spiritual journey not as a search for something new, but as a return to what was always yours?
Comment below: What ancestral practices are you reconnecting with—or yearning to understand? Share your spiritual journey.
Africlout 