HOW SHOULD THE BANTU CONCEIVE DEATH TODAY

Abstract

Death is a phenomenon that by which generally all animate creatures must face. However, death as a fact remains a puzzle. This article presents two conceptions on death: Bantu conception and Martin Heidegger existential conception. The Bantu conceive death to be natural and unnatural. Such understanding sometimes leads them to prevent it not to take its course and most of the time it leads to the denial of death. Today most of the Bantu youths so called “new generation” and early adults are the victims to such belief, a belief that affects their moral and ethical daily life since they think that death is not a part and parcel reality in their current existential project. The youths and early adults are convinced that elderly people are the only ones who are supposed to die. The elders too, do not accept the death of a child, youth and early adult; once it happens such death is understood as unnatural death. These groups are to benefit from the Heideggerian existential conception of death which maintains that death is real and a shadow that man walks with; it is one’s own uttermost possibility which is non relational, not to be outstripped, certain and indefinite. An individual human being should not fear or deny death; instead he or she should anticipate it.