Afterlife Beliefs in Africa

In some traditional African perspectives on afterlife and burial, it is believed that the dead are nearer to a “singular supreme being” than the living. Certain afterlife beliefs in Africa hold that reward and punishment are experienced in this life and not after death. However, the traditional African beliefs also state that the dead have an effect on the living. It is a negative effect that the living attempt to avoid with rituals, which are considered funeral rites associated with a “correct burial.”

Generally, earthly behavior has no effect on the hereafter in African belief, contrary to Judeo-Christian religious views on the relationship between our behaviour while alive, and its effect on the afterlife. However, it is essential that “correct burial rites have been observed.”

It is believed that if a person is a thief, murderer, has died unnaturally, broken a community code or had an “improper” funeral, that such persons are doomed to punishment in afterlife as a “wandering ghost.”

Some traditional African beliefs claim that witches and wizards are not admitted to the spirit world and therefore do not receive a proper burial; they may even be burned, or chopped up and fed to hyenas. This would mean that they are cut from the community of ancestors in death and (among common African belief) that is the equivalent of hell.

“Some traditional African beliefs claim that witches and wizards are not admitted to the spirit world and therefore do not receive a proper burial; they may even be burned, or chopped up and fed to hyenas”

Some Africans have a custom of removing the body through a hole in the wall of a house and not through the door; it is thought that this represents the impossibility of the dead remembering the way back to the living, because the hole in the wall is closed right after. The individual who has passed is then removed feet first to symbolize pointing away from the previous residence.

Photo credit: www.openplac.es

It is believed that if the funeral rites are not observed correctly, the deceased may come back to trouble living relatives. Some kill an ox at the burial of the deceased, which will later accompany the surviving relatives home; this enables the deceased to act as protecting ancestor. Only after all relatives have gone (and there’s no one left to remember the individual who has passed) is the family member said to have really “died.”

The slaughtering of a beast and the taking of earth to cover the grave in a bottle to bring home are disappearing rituals, though still practiced in some communities. African funerals are communal affairs in which the whole community shares in the grief of the bereaved.

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