AFRICAN COSMOLOGY AND THE QUESTION OF POSTMORTEM EXISTENCE
The problem of what happens at death, and after death, is a perennial issue that has agitated philosophers from antiquity. The problem continues to reverberate because death is pervasive. The question is rendered a conundrum by the absence of experience that all postulated on death is a mere comeuppance of speculations and extrapolations that have obfuscated rather than demythologize issues surrounding afterlife. In fact Western philosophy has reduced the question of post-mortem existence to the question of immortality of soul, which appears even more obfuscating because of its identification of the soul with the intellect. However, a critical analysis of African cosmology, and the consistency that tailors its conceptions of the world, human person and death, shows a better and more assuring solution to the problem. For the African, post-humus existence is part of human essence. Everyone is assured of continuous existence but has to work for the level of the existence.
Keywords: african, cosmology, existence, postmortem, question