Yaa, like increasing numbers of the African diaspora, decided to stop practicing Christianity in favor of a religion of African heritage. Raised a Seventh Day Adventist, she spent her childhood questioning Christian doctrine. When she didn't receive the answers she sought from church, she stopped attending.

Michelle Yaa does not feel she converted to Comfa, the Afro-American religion practiced in Guyana. "I call it an awakening." she says. "It's just waking up."

Emboldened by her new found faith, Spence-Adofo decided to shoot Ancestral Voices, a documentary debunking the myths surrounding African spirituality. But people didn't receive her project with the same enthusiastic response that meets most attempts to demystify elements of black history.

The past few years have seen the black community express similar sentiments of "awakening"—or "wokeness," if you prefer. From university education to beauty standards, there have been widespread calls to decolonize our ideas and institutions, and shake off old colonial beliefs and strictures. Traditional African religions appear to be the final and most controversial frontier.

Verona Spence-Adofo, a 30-something year old filmmaker from London, describes a similar sense of clarity after her decision to engage with indigenous spiritual practices. "It was like somebody had taken a veil off my eyes," she recalls.

She began communicating with her ancestors frequently through rituals; her research eventually led her to Comfa, a religion where contact with ancestors is commonplace. "Everything started falling into place. I was trusting myself all the time and I wasn't doubting for once."

"I just did it automatically. And I cannot explain to you why I knew what was happening to me was not a negative thing," she recalls. "When I went back to finish my studies, I [wrote about] spirituality for my dissertation because I wanted to understand what happened to me. I didn't believe I was mad—so what was it?"

It wasn't until the end of university that Yaa reconnected with any form of religion. One day, she says, she began hearing voices. Rather than call her doctor, she called on her ancestors, writing down the names of those she could remember and surrounding herself with the slips of paper. She claims that this took place before she knew what the practice of ancestral worship was.

"I received a lot of hostility from both friends and family members," Spence-Adofo laments. "To this day I have people who kind of distanced themselves from me—they're scared I might try and put some sort of hex on them."

For hundreds of years, colonialism saw Africa—the planet's second largest and second most populous continent—robbed and ruled by a handful of European nations. The only countries considered not to have been colonized are Ethiopia and Liberia—and even they were briefly occupied by others. No African nation hasn't been shaped by the process in some way.

Despite attempts to undo colonialism's effects on the black psyche, the colonial stigma against African religions seems to be hardest to shake off. That's partially because of how aggressive the campaign to wipe it out was—a large part of the colonial defense of slavery was the onus on Europeans to save the so-called African savages, preaching about the blood of Jesus as they gleefully spilt other races' in the pursuit of land and resources.

Indigenous religions were not only outlawed but literally demonized not just on the continent but across the entire black diaspora. In 1781, for example, the Jamaican Assembly passed a law calling for the death of the practitioners of Obeah, a religious practice originating from West Africa that bears similarities to Haitian vodou, known more commonly as voodoo.

It's a direct colonial legacy that we've held on to.

"Any Negro or other slave who shall pretend to any supernatural power," the act said, "and be detected in making use of any blood, feathers, parrots-beaks, dogs-teeth, alligators-teeth, broken bottles, grave-dirt, rum, eggshells, or any other materials relative to the practice of Obeah or witchcraft... upon conviction... [shall] suffer death." Obeah and myalism, another folk religion, remains outlawed in Jamaica under the Obeah Act 1898.