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.

I have been reading a book by Marjorie Woollacott, Infinite Awareness: The Awakening of a Scientific Mind (2015). Woollacott is a respected neuroscientist, the latest to move away from reductionist materialism, which holds that consciousness arises somehow from neural activity, to the view that consciousness has an existence independent of the brain and is transmitted rather than generated by it. Woollacott does more than break with materialism, though—she embraces a particular philosophical position on the nature of consciousness, panpsychism (or more properly in her case, panentheism).

Woollacott is not the only recent writer to endorse some variety of panpsychism. Christof Koch, another neuroscientist and once a staunch defender of the reductionist position, wrote a book called Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (2012) in which he explained why he too had come to accept that the brain does not generate consciousness and converted to a variety panpsychism. Psychologists Imants Barušs and Julia Mossibridge endorse panpsychism in their Transcendent Mind (2017), published this year by the American Psychological Association with a copyright date of next year. Ed Kelly and several of the psychologists and philosophers who wrote papers for the edited volume Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (Kelly, Crabtree, & Marshall, 2015) are also inclined toward panpsychism.

So what is panpsychism? There are several different kinds. The idea can be made to sound rather silly, often willfully so, by those who wish to discredit it. Basically it is the idea that entities at all levels possess some form of experience, mind, or consciousness. This does NOT mean that iPhones and running shoes are conscious in the way we are, much less that they observe the world around them and think about it. Nor does it mean that plants and nonhuman animals possess the same conscious awareness we do. It just means that consciousness, mind, and experience are conceived more broadly, not always in human terms, but in terms appropriate to whatever type of entity is under consideration.

Panpsychism has not always been taken seriously, and in fact until recent years it hardly ever was, so why the rush towards it among those who favor the filter model? There seem to be basically two reasons. One is that panpsychism is consistent with interpretations of quantum mechanics that place consciousness at the center of existence and suppose that consciousness is primary. Dualistic views used to be more in vogue but with a greater understanding of quantum mechanics is coming a turn to idealism, as it is called. Rather than a dualism of mind and matter, mind is considered to be responsible for the creation of matter, from which it follows that some sort of mind may be inherent in all sorts of matter. Panpsychism and idealism are different philosophical positions, but they are compatible and contemporary panpsychists are idealists also.

The other reason for the increasing acceptance of idealist panpsychism is that its world view is very compatible with mystical states of consciousness. This is how Woollacott got there. Alongside her scientific work, she practiced yoga and meditated. She had experiences that she could not reconcile with materialist reductionism and eventually she realized that she needed to bridge the two parts of her life. She found panpsychism—and panentheism, which considers some part of God to inhere in everything—to be in many ways exactly like the Eastern teachings she was following and gave up the materialist world view in its favor.

Now, the reason this turn to idealist panpsychism is important for us, the reason I am writing this post about it, is that many of these same writers embrace postmortem survival and reincarnation. This is very significant. If it were just the reductionist model that were being rejected, then it is more or less obvious why survival and even reincarnation might follow. If consciousness is understood to be independent of the brain then nothing would keep it from surviving the body’s demise. Panpsychism itself says nothing about the survival much less the reincarnation of consciousness and survival is not implied or contemplated by it. Koch does not see a survival implication, yet many people have. Why? And how would it work?

I believe that it has to do with the joining of idealism with panpsychism. Panpsychists as I have said believe that there is consciousness in everything, but not that everything is conscious in the same way. Idealism carries with it evolutionary implications, because if consciousness is the ground of everything, and if it is in everything, then it could have been differentiating and evolving over time, just as the physical and biological worlds have differentiated and evolved over time. Perhaps it was with the emergence of biological life that streams of consciousness capable of survival began to emerge.

So survival and reincarnation are entirely compatible with an evolutionary idealist panpsychism and may be even be logical extensions of it. Survival and reincarnation are also compatible with dualistic ideas of mind /body relations, of course. The question naturally arises, what if anything does panpsychism bring to our understanding of survival that substance dualism does not? Are there advantages to considering survival from the point of view of an evolutionary idealist panpsychism?

I believe that there are advantages. Substance dualism cannot explain why mind, or soul, or whatever one wishes to call the enduring fundamental essence of the self, came into existence, or what it was doing before there were human bodies for it to occupy. An evolutionary idealist panpsychism, on the other hand, presumes consciousness to be the origin of all and that it has differentiated and evolved over time. Evolutionary idealist panpsychism also allows more readily for new streams of consciousness to come into being, emerging from the background consciousness or evolving from more primitive forms, whereas substance dualism seems to require that the souls we have now have been with us all along.

This same process would allow for the creation or evolution of nonhuman spirits mentioned in religious and occult traditions and encountered in NDEs and intermission experiences. Guardian angels are an example. These spirit entities are not of the same nature as our human streams of consciousness, and cannot incarnate in human bodies, but because we share the same evolutionary roots, we can communicate with each other. This we do in extra-sensory ways, using psi, which I believe to be an intrinsic trait of consciousness, one which very likely has its origin far back in time.

No matter what you think of my ideas about these things, it is important to realize that more and more neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers are turning to panpsychism, to an evolutionary idealist panpsychism in particular. The same thing is happening in other sciences, including quantum physics, as the materialist world view continues to crumble. This may be a fad that will pass in a few years but it may very well turn out to be a perspective that is here to stay.

This post is updated from one written for my Signs of Reincarnation Facebook group on July 10, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/groups/965923533422836/permalink/1380005548681297/