Immortality

The hope for immortality, to adapt a line of Alexander Pope, generally springs eternal in the human breast. But the understanding of immortality varies among the peoples of the earth. In a descending order of materiality and personal specificity, one may note the orthodox Christian conception of the resurrection of the body, the Platonic-Cartesian doctrine of the indestructibility of the soul conceived as absolutely immaterial. Yet, it carries the essence of personal identity and, at the extreme of metaphysical detachment, the notion, encountered in some Oriental philosophies, of the reabsorption of the self into a universal mind upon the extinction of the body. African concepts of immortality in many instances – quantificational caution is necessary in view of the incompleteness of data – fall somewhere between the first and second types of eschatological framework.

Amidst the variety of African eschatologies, two things stand out in bold relief. They relate to the ontology and the...