Why African Traditions Refrain From Judging the First Act of Harm: Divination, Destiny, Exile, and the Protection of Communal Ma’at
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Across African cosmologies—Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Kongo, Nilotic, and Sahelian—moral judgment was never rushed. Harm was not immediately equated with guilt, and the first act of aggression was not automatically interpreted as moral failing. Instead, almost every ancient African community treated the first harmful act with caution, patience, and profound spiritual inquiry.
This restraint was not indecision; it was metaphysical precision. African societies recognised the eternal distinction between ẹru ẹmi (burden bags—what the soul agreed to fulfill before birth) and ib (self-determined impulses emerging from the heart-soul). Because of this metaphysical clarity, one truth guided traditional justice systems:
Not every harm is born from malice; some harms are written into destiny. Therefore, judgment must be suspended until destiny is consulted.
To judge prematurely would risk punishing what the cosmos required. To punish destiny is to disrupt Ma’at. And to disrupt Ma’at is to stain not only the individual’s Ka, but the entire community’s spiritual balance.
Thus, before passing judgment, early African societies turned to divination, ancestral insight, elders skilled in reading human temperament, and the collective wisdom of the lineage.
Here, I explores why this approach was essential, how traditional justice centred exile rather than pains and sufferings to the body, and how moral conduct was understood as inseparable from lineage, community, environment, and the ancestral order.
1. The First Strike: Destiny or Self-Determination?
In African metaphysics, the first act of harm sits at the intersection of two possibilities:
(A) It may be destiny-driven — prescribed in the individual’s ẹru ẹmi.
The harm may fulfill:
- an old karmic contract,
- a rebalancing of previous-life disputes,
- an ancestral obligation,
- or a burden-bag agreement between two souls before incarnation.
Here, the event is part of the cosmic choreography, painful perhaps, but necessary. To punish such an act would be to condemn destiny itself.
(B) Or it may be self-determined — emerging from the ib.
This includes harm driven by envy, insecurity, anger, arrogance, greed, or fear. This harm was not destined; it was chosen. This act stains the Ka and burdens the future life-path.
Because the first strike can belong to either category, African societies refused to condemn immediately.
The community suspended judgment. The elders observed. The ancestors were consulted. If necessary, divination was performed to reveal:
- Was this event written into the soul’s burden bag?
- Or was it the moral fracture of the ib?
- Will punishment restore Ma’at or disrupt it?
This metaphysical discipline made African justice spiritually sophisticated in a way that contemporary Western systems still fail to understand.
2. Why Divination Was Essential Before Judgment
Divination was not superstition; it was juridical epistemology. It was the only legitimate method to access pre-birth agreements and distinguish between:
- Fated harm (which must not be punished).
- Self-determined harm (which must be corrected).
Divination provided what modern courts lack:
- knowledge of cosmic contracts;
- visibility into the soul’s intentions;
- insight into generational debt;
- clarity on karmic origins;
- understanding of which events are predestined and which are chosen.
Without divination, any judgment risked damaging the spiritual ecosystem.
The priest-diviner, the elder, the lineage head, and the ancestors acted as a combined judiciary—ancestral and living—ensuring that justice aligned with destiny, not with emotion.
3. Why Punishment Was Not Whipping or Imprisonment
Contrary to Western penal traditions—based on corporal punishment, prisons, isolation, and State violence—African systems rejected these methods.
The logic was simple:
Harm often emerges from the environment, not the soul. Therefore, punishment must change the environment, not destroy the soul.
Physical punishment such as flogging:
- humiliates the body,
- stains the community’s moral field,
- and rarely corrects the ib.
Prisons, unknown in precolonial Africa, were considered spiritually grotesque:
- They decay a person’s Ka.
- They sever them from lineage support.
- They create concentrated fields of self-determined energy.
- They incubate future karmic disorder.
African societies understood what modern criminology only recently rediscovered: Crime is environmental, relational, and vibrational—never isolated. Thus, the response to severe wrongdoing was not physical punishment but exile.
4. Exile as Moral and Cosmic Protection
Exile was the highest punishment not because it harmed the offender, but because it protected the community. Punishment was measured not by suffering but by the preservation of collective energetic integrity. Exile functioned in three metaphysical ways:
(A) It protects the community from contamination.
Self-determined harm carries karmic density. This density is infectious—especially to:
- children,
- spiritually sensitive individuals,
- family members prone to influence.
Exiling the wrongdoer removes the spiritual toxin from the communal atmosphere.
(B) Exile forces the individual into a new energetic ecosystem.
A person with destructive ib impulses must not remain in the environment that nurtured or facilitated those impulses. A different land forces a different vibration. It allows the Ka to “breathe”.
(C) Exile does not sever them from their lineage.
This is critical:
African exile removes the person from the community, not from their lineage.
The offender still belongs to a spiritual bloodline. They carry ancestral shadows and will eventually settle disputes in the afterlife at the exchange of burden bags.
Thus, exile is not erasure. It is separation for protection.
5. Why Exile Leads to the Formation of New Tribes
Ancient Africans understood that disagreements of Ib-level morality often lead to permanent divergence. When exile occurred:
- the banished individual or group settled elsewhere,
- established new shrines,
- realigned to their lineage ancestors,
- and formed a new sub-community or tribe.
These were not random dispersions but earthly reorganisations. Yoruba history is full of these migrations:
- Ifẹ to Owu.
- Ifẹ to Ijebu.
- Ọyọ to Egbá.
- Ileṣa to Ekiti.
- countless lineages splintering due to ideological, moral, or spiritual incompatibility.
Every tribe was once a disagreement. Every sub-group was once an exile. The earth remembers.
6. Why African Cosmology Always Begins With Environment
African metaphysics asserts:
The environment one is born into is the greatest driver of self-determined behaviour.
This means:
- Virtue is shaped by surroundings.
- Corruption is shaped by atmosphere.
- Harm is shaped by social pressures.
- Destiny unfolds within community, not in isolation.
Thus, when someone commits harm, the community must ask:
- Did destiny drive this?
- Or did the environment corrupt the ib?
This is why purification rituals exist not only for individuals but for households, farmlands, villages, sanctuaries, and family compounds. To address harm is to address the ecosystem.
7. Exile as a Form of Spiritual Hygiene
Exile was not revenge. It was cosmic cleanliness. A person whose ib had become morally corrosive would:
- pollute the moral fabric of the community,
- influence younger generations,
- create generational karmic stains,
- and distort the spiritual harmony of the land.
Thus exile functioned as a spiritual quarantine. Like removing an infected seed to save a field. Like diverting impure water from the communal well. African societies were not punitive; they were protective. Justice served the living, the unborn, and the ancestral.
8. Why the First Harm Is Judged Slowly, the Second Quickly
Because only the first harm might be destiny-driven. The second almost never is.
This mirrors the metaphysics of the “second cheek doctrine”:
- The first harm requires patience: Is this destiny?
- The second harm reveals true intent: This is self-determined; it must be contained.
Thus:
- The first act demands discernment.
- The second act demands action.
This is why exile often followed repeated transgression: Repetition signalled that the ib, not destiny, was in control.
9. Judgment, Destiny, and the Afterlife
African jurisprudence did not end with earthly consequences. It extended into the afterlife, where souls negotiate the exchange of burden bags.
If a wrongdoer died in exile:
- their Ka would face ancestral arbitration,
- those who opposed their behaviour or karmic stain may refuse to carry overlapping burden bags with them in future incarnations,
- destiny paths would reorganise to preserve cosmic harmony.
Thus the ultimate court was not the village. It was the spiritual marketplace beyond death. Exile protected the living. The ancestors handled the rest.
Conclusion: Justice Rooted in Destiny, Not Punishment
Traditional African justice was neither primitive nor barbaric. It was spiritually advanced, morally sophisticated, and cosmically aligned.
It understood:
- that harm can be destiny-driven,
- that judgment must be slow,
- that divination is essential,
- that imprisonment is spiritually harmful,
- that exile protects the communal fabric,
- that environment shapes behaviour,
- that lineage cannot be severed,
- and that all unresolved disputes are finally judged in the afterlife through the exchange of burden bags.
In essence:
- African societies refused to judge the first harm because they respected the mysteries of destiny.
- They exiled persistent wrongdoers because they valued the purity of communal Ma’at.
- And they understood that justice serves not only the individual but the lineage, the unborn, the ancestors, and the cosmic equilibrium itself.
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