Yes, someone can be living and dead at once

Prof John Mbiti, who passed on in 2019. [File, Standard]

Prof John S Mbiti, who passed on in 2019, is accepted in scholarship as the father of African theology. The iconic Mbiti was a paradox.

An ordained Anglican priest, he also believed strongly in traditional African values and their place in religion, including in Christianity. One of his seminal contributions to theosophy is the notion of the living dead. But how could a person be at once living and dead?

In the 1969 volume titled ‘African Religions and Philosophy’ (note the plural in religions and singular in philosophy), Mbiti casts the notion of the living dead in the prism of memory. This can be what these people remember and pass on to subsequent generations.

But more significantly, it is about what is remembered of the dead and, more important, who remembers them. Accordingly, the living dead are the dead remembered by the living who knew them. 

Death, in African context, is incomplete for a long time. Provided that at least one person who knew the departed is still alive and remembers them, the person is dead but alive.

Their death will be complete the day the last person who knew and remembers them, dies. By the same token, they contribute to our daily affairs through the influence of their memory on the living. 

The value platform is the chief sphere influenced by the living dead. While they lived, they passed on to us a certain orthodoxy of social mores and norms. They did things in a certain way that we have probably dropped.

But, from them we received a set of social binoculars, through which we see and interpret the world. Hence, very often, we may look about us and wonder what those who have gone would make of our situations.

Sometimes we look at the material advancement around us and marvel how so well we have done. Dr Martin Luther King, whom I wrote about last week, wrote a famous essay which he christened “Paul’s Letter to American Christians.”

This 1956 narrative questioned the intersection between America’s scientific progress, on one hand, and her social value platform, on the other.

Even that early, America was in a place to make Africa in the 21st Century look like a back-of-beyond pre-Stone Age society. 

King’s Paul wrote, “Through your scientific genius you have been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains . . . you have been able to carve highways through the stratosphere so that, in your world, it is possible to eat breakfast in New York City and supper in Paris, France.” 

And there were many other things, of the kind that we marvel at in Emanyulia, such as a tarmac road here, a street light there, and a water pipe elsewhere. We wonder aloud how my grandfather, Samuel who went to sleep 39 years ago, would marvel, were he to return.

In King’s letter, St Paul returns with the words, “You can do so many things in your day that I could not do in the Greco-Roman world of my day.

In your age, you can travel distances in one day that took me three months. That is wonderful.”

Yet he quips, “But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress has been commensurate with your scientific progress?”

In African cosmology – and indeed everywhere else, even where they don’t think that Africans are also philosophers – the dead don’t need to come back to review our circumstances for us.

We who remember them remember too, the times they lived through. Our biggest challenge is in the spaces of norms and mores, which I will advance next week, from the perspective of the living dead.   

Dr Muluka is a strategic communications adviser. www.barrackmuluka.co.ke