African and Western Conceptions of Death and Dying: The Role of Ancestors, the Enduring Past and the Meaning of Life

Abstract In his article, Attoe (2023a) claims that the African conception of death presupposes the meaninglessness of life and in the first section of this article, I outline Attoe’s strong pessimistic approach to meaning in light of our mortality. In my second section, I suggest that Frankl’s comments about the permanence of the past offer a different approach to the meaning of life in light of our mortality. In tune with Frankl’s idea that when we die our completed lives endure as part of the past, I touch upon some of the literature on the “digital afterlife.” Specifically, I look at how the digital age reconfigures our understanding of modernity’s rupture between living and dying, the living and the hereafter. In light of Frankl, I also go on to draw on Deleuze’s reading of the concept of “duration” ( la durée ) and the latter’s idea of a “world memory” to consolidate my point against Attoe’s reductively presentist and individualist approach to the meaning of life. Returning to the African tradition in my last section I argue that death does not take anything away from the meaning of life as Attoe claims and the strength of the African tradition is that it is based on the ambivalence between life and death. In the process, I refer to Baudrillard’s concept of “symbolic exchange” along with his genealogy of the exclusion of death in modernity. I take a cross-cultural approach by intertwining individual representatives of the African philosophical tradition with Western ones. Against Attoe’s individualist stance, I take a relational approach and I pay close attention to social practices and myths, because maintaining a connection between the living and the dead, subject and objects as well as acknowledging the symbolic sphere of the “ancestors” is significant. When we focus exclusively on “how to live” as Attoe (2023a: 13) suggests we should, this does not in my view profit life. Although life is shielded from death it must end in death, a death now devoid of symbolic meaning. In the footsteps of Nietzsche, Baudrillard’s symbolism of exchange contests all forms of self-preservation, as a limit to life-affirmation.