Abstract

This essay examines African understandings of life, sickness, death, and life after death by concentrating on the Ndebele people of Matabo in Zimbabwe who are part of the Nguni people of Southern Africa and who have a strong Zulu cultural basis. For the Ndebele of Matabo, dying is a physical, medical, and spiritual phenomenon. Healing through medicine is always prioritized when there is a sickness, but all medical treatment is subordinate to the spiritual world. The Ndebele understand that when people eventually die, despite medical attention, it is a sign that the spiritual world is more powerful than the medical world. Those who die are said to have responded to a call from their ancestors. For them, death is a transition from the world of the living living to the world of the living dead. This essay will briefly explore the African Ndebele concepts of life, death, the ritualization and medicalization of death and dying, and life after death. It will argue that, for the Ndebele, death is not a medical phenomenon but a response to a calling by ancestors to the spiritual world at the fulfilment of one’s time on earth as determined by the abaphansi. Death, therefore, is ritualized, not medicalized.