Disability raises questions that extend far beyond the body. It reveals how communities construct personhood, negotiate belonging, and affirm or deny human dignity through their cultural and religious worldviews. Despite growing scholarship on disability and African Indigenous Religions, limited attention has been given to how Ikwerre religious thought contributes to contemporary disability theory through its indigenous understanding of personhood, communal ethics, and human dignity. This article addresses this gap by examining disability within Ikwerre religious thought through the analytical lens of relational precarity, arguing that disability is a negotiated social and moral experience shaped by the interaction of cosmological beliefs, communal responsibility, and opportunities for participation rather than by bodily impairment alone. The study adopts an interpretive qualitative approach that combines indigenous philosophical analysis with critical engagement with disability studies and scholarship on Ikwerre religion. The analysis demonstrates that although some interpretations within Ikwerre religious thought may associate disability with spiritual imbalance, ritual limitation, or social vulnerability, the tradition simultaneously preserves ethical resources grounded in kinship, reciprocity, compassion, and communal responsibility that affirm the dignity and social worth of persons with disabilities. To explain these dynamics, the article develops the Ikwerre Relational Model of Disability and Human Dignity, comprising four interrelated principles: relational personhood, participatory belonging, communal reciprocity, and transformative religious interpretation. The model advances disability scholarship by demonstrating that indigenous African religious knowledge systems are not merely objects of cultural analysis but important sources of theoretical innovation for understanding disability, inclusion, and human dignity. The article concludes that the ethical measure of any community lies not in how it explains disability, but in whether it enables persons with disabilities to experience genuine participatory belonging within its shared moral life.
