TITLE:
Thanatology: The Igbo/African Metaphysics Sense and Value of Death
AUTHORS:
Matthew C. Chukwuelobe
KEYWORDS:
Death; Thanatology; Igbo/African Metaphysics; Value; Life; Rebirth
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.4 No.1,
February
27,
2014
ABSTRACT: This work aims at exploring the Igbo/African metaphysical sense of death
and its traditional value and inter-communality. In this study, I intend to use
the Igbo as a paradigm for an African experience of death. I begin by
explaining that while thanatology is
the systematic study of death, metaphysics is a study of reality as it concerns
the phases of human existence from life to death. In doing so, I want to
examine the African being in its wholeness. Interestingly, African philosophy
conceives of being as dynamic and a force to be record with. The African world
itself is best described as one of becoming: it is a world where there are constant interactions
between the dead and the living, between the spirit-land and the human world.
Thus, existence-in-relation aptly depicts the African view of life and reality.
For the Igbo, however, life and death are intimately connected. To the extent
that the latter paves the way to the ancestral dwelling, it is an urgent
longing to join his forebears. Ultimately, the Igbo/African attaches a great
value to ancestral abode which death makes possible. Through initiation the Igbo
anticipates death. Only then does death become a phenomenon of life, entering
the Igbo ontological being. Thus
death for the Igbo does not constitute an end. Rather it intimates an authentic
being (another beginning), which expressly embodies eschatology. I argue that
eschatology aims at overcoming time.