Africa

From: Near Death Experience in Indigenous Religions - The Next World: Extraordinary Experiences of the Afterlife - Gregory Shushan PhD

Anthropologists’ worldviews were challenged by inexplicable phenomena they encountered during fieldwork. Evans-Pritchard and Edith Turner, for example, could not explain “spirit events” they witnessed in Africa. So prevalent are such cases that there have been two collections of scholarly articles on the subject.

According to Mbiti, souls were often believed to consist of four components: the Breath, or animating life-force that dissipates at death; an Ancestral Guardian Spirit that simultaneously inhabits the individual on Earth while remaining in the spirit-land of the ancestors; the Destiny Spirit, a “spark of the Creator” that returns to the deity at death; and the Self, Personality Spirit, or “Real Man,” which survives consciously and becomes either an ancestor spirit or a ghost.