The question of reincarnation has always been treated as an answer to the following question: do Africans believe in reincarnation? And the obvious answer is often emphatically yes.

However, such a question is misleading. It is normal that, as a belief, reincarnation is present all over the world; especially as, due to globalization some eastern tenets are being accepted without any questioning.  

The answer to the question of reincarnation would be different if the inquiry were in terms of: do Black/Africans believe in the law of reincarnation?

To such a question the African spiritual traditional culture and the Hindu Advantin offer two different answers based on their different cosmologies.

According to this school of Hinduism, the good and the evil we see here are an illusion (maya). This illusory nature is even greater in the beyond. Thus, since its solution for the existence is to get out of the illusion, the nature process in this eastern religion requires a return of the dead in this plan of lesser illusion. Therefore, reincarnation is a law is this eastern approach.

Now, according the African cosmology, the good we see here is a prefiguration of a greater good that is among the ancestors. Thus the natural law requires of us the progression toward the plane of a greater good.

It ensues that, according to the Black, reincarnation is a merebelief that befalls in the beyond to the one who didn’t well accomplish his spiritual and ethical demands on this lower plane. However, it can be also a choice of one who comes back on this plane to help humanity solve a problem.

Reincarnation implies the soul living a body to find itself in the company of another body. The first body then ceases to live. This process is called also transmigration of the soul. It should not be confused with the transmigration of the spirit; a process by which an ancestor shares his qualities and protection to one or more person living here.

Generally when the African says an ancestor has come back, he doesn’t mean that the ancestor left the beyond to come here, but rather that he came through the sharing of his protection and  his qualities thanks to a transmigration of his spirit.