The persistence of indigenous knowledge systems in postcolonial Africa continues to expose unresolved tensions between state-centred legal systems and locally grounded traditions of knowing. These tensions have become more pronounced in an era of global precarity, where accelerating social change, religious transformation and epistemic inequality increasingly threaten the continuity of indigenous institutions. Although African ritual traditions have attracted sustained scholarly attention, they have been examined predominantly through the lenses of symbolism, religion and ritual efficacy, leaving their role in performing and reproducing epistemic sovereignty insufficiently theorised. This article addresses that gap by re-reading Ngigi Owhor—the Ikwerre ritual of innocence proclamation—as an indigenous institution through which truth, justice and moral authority are continually negotiated, validated and sustained. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral interviews and interpretive analysis, the study argues that the enduring significance of Ngigi Owhor lies less in its ritual performance than in its capacity to sustain a moral order whose legitimacy is continually negotiated through communal memory, ancestral authority and public accountability. The evidence demonstrates that the ritual performs epistemic sovereignty by affirming indigenous jurisprudence as a legitimate framework for determining innocence, restoring fractured social relationships and regulating communal life beyond the exclusive authority of the postcolonial state. Rather than surviving as a residual cultural practice, Ngigi Owhor has been refracted through changing religious, legal and political landscapes, enabling it to remain a resilient medium for negotiating justice, preserving cultural memory and reinforcing collective moral responsibility. The article further contends that the continuing relevance of Ngigi Owhor constitutes a form of epistemic resistance against the marginalisation of indigenous knowledge systems and the reduction of African ritual traditions to objects of ethnographic curiosity. By locating the ritual within broader debates on African philosophy, indigenous jurisprudence, decolonial knowledge and epistemic justice, the study demonstrates that ritual is not merely symbolic performance but an enduring social practice through which communities produce knowledge, exercise moral agency and safeguard cultural continuity. It concludes that recognising Ngigi Owhor as a living expression of epistemic sovereignty broadens contemporary understandings of African indigenous knowledge and offers an important framework for rethinking justice, knowledge pluralism and moral governance in an increasingly precarious world.
