The Question of Postmortemic Existence and African Cosmology

Résumé

The problem of what happens at death, and after death, is a perennial issue that has agitated the minds of philosophers from antiquity. The problem continues to reverberate because death is pervasive. The question is rendered a conundrum by the absence of experience of death such that all postulations on death are comeuppance of mere speculations and extrapolations that have obfuscated rather than demythologize issues surrounding afterlife. The subsisting issue is whether there is anything like post-mortem existence and what it is like if there is. In fact, Western philosophy has reduced the question of postmortem existence to the question of immortality of soul, which appears even more obfuscating because of its identification of the soul with the intellect. This prompted this search for answer to this question in African cosmology. This piece strives to demonstrate that the solution to the question of post-mortem existence can be found in African cosmology. It employs the analytic and hermeneutic methods. Critical exposition and analysis of African cosmology, and the consistency that tailors its conceptions of the world, human person and death, show a better and more assuring solution to the problem of afterlife. For the African, posthumus existence is part of human essence. Everyone is assured of continuous existence but has to work for the level and mode of the existence they wish to live in the materialistic-spiritual world of afterlife.