A PHENOMENOLOGICAL STUDY OF GADALI AND MAGUN AS INDIGENOUS ANTI-ADULTERY MECHANISMS.

• Prof. Samuel Idowu Fabarebo

  Adeyemi Federal University of Education, Ondo

  Author

• Dr. Iyanda Abel Olatoye

  Author

This paper presents a phenomenological investigation of Gadali, a mystical plant in northern Nigeria, its taxonomy, typology, and morphology, and focuses on its affinity with Magun, a Yoruba magic against adultery, as an indigenous anti-adultery mechanism within Yoruba-Hausa religious and socio-moral thought in Nigeria. Among the Jukun and Itchen of Taraba State, and the Hausa-Fulani in the Northern States of Nigeria, there is an ingenious exploitation of the mystical forces inherent in a genre of mystical plans called Gadali. The plant has variegated forms and multipurpose functions just like Magun among the Yoruba, the people of Togo, and its equivalents among the Azande and Bunyoro. Their forces can be geared towards productive, protective, and destructive channels. While it underpins the areas of similarities and differences, the article argues that Magun and Gadali functioned not merely as mystical sanctions but as embodied moral regulators inherent within a cosmology and ontological instruments of social control that integrate metaphysics, sexuality, kinship, and communal honor. It concludes that these two systems should be understood not as relics of superstition, but as culturally coherent moral systems that show the complex interplay between belief, body, and communal ethics in African cosmology.

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