Life after Death. Most West African traditional religions teach that there exists life after death. "Spirits" by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop expresses the animist belief that the spirits of the dead remain among the living:

Those who are dead are not ever gone;
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker.
The dead are not down in the earth.
They are in the trembling of the trees,
In the groaning of the woods,
In the water that runs
In the water that sleeps.
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd.
The dead are not dead.

Death may claim the body and disintegrate it into primordial matter, but the soul—and perhaps the mind or spirit, too—is believed to persist either in the...