Veritatis Gaudium: Multidisciplinary Journal of Postgraduate Studies

Sacred groves are patches of forest or vegetation set apart by local communities and protected through religious belief, taboo and customary law. Across Africa, they have functioned for generations as what contemporary conservation science now recognises as in-situ biodiversity refugia, sheltering plant species, animal populations and hydrological systems that surrounding landscapes have lost to agriculture, logging and urban expansion. Yet sacred groves have been marginalised in formal biodiversity conservation policy, which has tended to privilege state-administered protected areas built on Western scientific models. Recent literature published between 2024 and 2026 has begun to reverse this neglect, with a growing body of ecology, ethnobotany and indigenous knowledge scholarship documenting the empirical conservation outcomes that sacred groves deliver. What the literature has not done sufficiently is examine sacred groves as coherent indigenous systems, meaning not merely as repositories of plants and animals but as integrated regulatory, cosmological and governance structures that produce conservation outcomes precisely because they are grounded in communities’ religious and social life. This paper fills that gap. It employs a historical and hermeneutical analytical method to examine how sacred groves function as indigenous biodiversity conservation systems across Sub-Saharan Africa, with particular attention to West Africa and Nigeria. The study finds that sacred groves deliver measurable biodiversity outcomes, that their effectiveness is inseparable from their cosmological and governance foundations, that they are under serious threat from deforestation, religious conversion, urban growth and climate stress, and that formal conservation policy has consistently failed to protect them because it misunderstands what they are. The paper concludes with targeted recommendations for policy, research and community-level action.

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