Historians and anthropologists have extensively documented and variously interpreted discursive practices which, in the variety of colonial situations in Sub-Saharan Africa, mobilized the spiritual forces of both "traditional" religious forms and Christianity to make sense of the balance of power during the colonial era. Many of these discursive practices have been interpreted as conspiracy theories. This paper does not aim to provide an exotic overview of such conspiratorial discourses but rather to trace the main paradigms that have been used over time in African studies to interpret them. The objective is to highlight heuristic strengths and limitations of these paradigms and to show, through them, the mutual influences and exchanges between African studies and the historiography of religion in Europe and North America.