I’ve written an article for the Psi Encyclopedia about signs and cases of reincarnation in Africa.. That article is based mainly on the work of Ian Stevenson, but I have since learned of these three new cases I will be adding. I would be delighted to learn of others, so of you know of any, please contact me at jgmatlock@yahoo.com.

Wunmi (Nigeria – Yoruba)

Wunmi is Yoruba, a native people who live to the west of the Igbo in southern Nigeria. The Yoruba are matrilineal, tracing decent through the mother’s line, and their reincarnation cases tend to follow suit.
Stevenson studied some Yoruba cases but did not report any in detail. I learned about the case of Wunmi through Facebook.

Wunmi’s grandmother died her 40s, before she was able to have as many children as she would have liked and before she had met other goals (such as education) she had set for herself. On her deathbed, she told her only daughter that she would return as her child, and two months later the daughter conceived Wunmi.

Wunmi was born with an extraordinary greenish mark on her back, exactly where her grandmother had a similar mark. She grew up to have many children and to become educated, satisfying goals her grandmother had been unable to realize for herself.

Yemisi (Nigeria – Yoruba)

Yemisi is one of Wunmi’s granddaughters. She was recognized as the reincarnation of a sister who had died at 22 after an accidental fall in which she hit the side of her head, about six years before her birth.

Yemisi was born with a mark on her ear that matched an injury her sister had sustained in the fall. As a young child she complained of feeling of a hard smack on the side of head, followed by excruciating pain in her ear that took some time to subside. At eleven, she continues to experience this trauma, especially on the anniversary of her sister’s death.

Yemisi was an early talker and when only about a year old began to refer to her late sister’s son (her nephew) as her son. At two, when a niece her sister had trained came for a visit, she recognized her, embraced her and called her by name. Although the woman was a good deal older than she was, she cared for her as if she were ministering to a child.

Shadrack Kipkorir Tarus (Kenya – Kalenjin)

The Kalenjin are a patrilineal people of Kenya whose traditional reincarnation beliefs have largely been displaced by Christianity. Like other unilineal tribal peoples, the Kalenjin expected reincarnation to occur in the lineage, although in contrast to the Yoruba, with the Kalenjin it is in the patrilineage.

All children are thought to be the returns of patrilineal ancestors who died forty or more days before. When a child is born, the elders assemble for a ritual at which they call out the names of patrilineal ancestors who have not yet been recognized as having reincarnated. Upon hearing its former name, the child is expected to sneeze or pee, acknowledging it as his.

At his birth on 21 March 1993, Shadrack ‘Shads’ Tarus sneezed at ‘Bowen’, the name of one of his paternal grandfather’s ‘cousin brothers’ or parallel cousins. He was given this name among others, but chooses not to use it. Consistent with having been Bowen, he was noticed to have a birthmark over his left eye. As a young man, Bowen had accidently fallen from a rock, almost losing his left eye, and leaving a permanent scar. He died of unrelated causes at 82 on 14 January 1993, nine weeks (63 days) before Shads was born.

Shads’ paternal grandmother, who passed in 2011, used to call him ‘brother-in-law’, in recognition of his past life as Bowen.

When he was 21, Shads visited Bowen’s village for the first time. He was recognized as the reincarnation of Bowen by one of Bowen’s sons, who hugged him on meeting him, although he did not know at the time that Shads was supposed to be Bowen come back. Shads looked exactly like his father, he said. As they became better acquainted, Bowen’s children told Shads that he resembled their father in his calmness and other facets of his personality; his gestures and his manner of making eye contact when speaking to people was the same as Bowen. Shads has never had memories of Bowen and Bowen’s children asked him questions he could not answer; nevertheless, they continue to honour him as their father returned.

African Cases in Cross-Cultural Perspective

These three cases have many features we see in other reincarnation cases. Signs such as birthmarks, behaviors, and claims to recall previous lives are basic to cases of this type and I believe may be what suggested the idea of reincarnation to different human populations to begin with. If this is so, then the belief in reincarnation could be very old, stretching far back in human history, and it may be wrong to think of it simply as a belief at all: It may be better to think of it as a conclusion drawn from observations and experiences and thus have an empirical basis, really more of a scientific conclusion than a belief.

However, it is striking that there are comparatively few African cases with past-life memory and that on the whole, African cases are less well-developed than those reported from Asia and other world areas, with the exception of those from other native societies. As I show in another Psi Encyclopedia article, native North American cases, also, are relatively impoverished and physical signs such as birthmarks and birth defects predominate in them too.

Additionally, in both African and North American tribal societies most cases occur within the lineage, meaning that the previous persons were well known to the case subjects’ families. This makes it much harder to make a strong case for reincarnation from them; returns in the family open the possibility of social construction more than in cases in which the subject’s family was unacquainted with the previous person. For this reason, Stevenson concentrated on cases from other world areas, where ‘stranger’ cases outnumber cases with family and acquaintance connections.

Why should there be this cultural variation in the expression of reincarnation signs? Perhaps it has to do with the high incidence of cases with family relationships in tribal cultures, because cases with family relationships are on the whole less well developed than cases with stranger relationships, for reasons unknown. Another intriguing possibility is genetic variation in the ability for past-life memory to rise into conscious awareness. Genetic variation might help to explain the uneven distribution of well-developed cases in different populations, for instance, the abundance of reincarnation cases in North India as compared to South India. North and South Indian populations are known to be genetically distinct. The same could explain why many cases have been reported from the Druze people, but few from surrounding populations in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan. However, at the present state of knowledge, this possibility is at best theoretical.