Like Western philosophers, theologians, necromancers, diviners and the lot, many in the traditional African Yoruba society too couldn’t understand the concept of death. One of the short-cuts of explaining this gripping moment of the cessation of breath is by devising what traditional African Yoruba society described as the concept of adiye irana, which survived into its mythology. Elders of the land, on their ways to bury the remains of a good man, with white loins strapped round their waists and the casket of the dead following them in tow, held a big and mature cock by its feet and pulled off its feathers as they proceeded to the graveyard. The cock is believed to be the emissary that buys the right of way for the dead as he embarks on his journey to the land of no return. A dead man for whom the adiye irana ritual is not made, is considered worthless, and it is believed that it is better for a man to die young than to die without this ritual.

During the week that just ended, death stalked humanity like a leopard furtively aiming for the throat of an impala in the jungle. Nigeria, a land for which human bloodshed hitherto meant nothing, quaked as if it had been hit by a thunderbolt. Dancers’ feet suddenly went wary; mourners wore long faces and our strides slowed down considerably. It was a week that dripped of blood, with avoidable but mangled human flesh scattered around a land that has known much of innocent blood spillage. At the end of the day, the bloodshed offered a grim reminder of our collective mortality and the reality of death that could come in the next 60 seconds or 60 minutes; especially the fact that death had always been our next door neighbour.

First to lead the pack was Pius Adesanmi, a professor in Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada with whom I shared this writing space. He and 156 others were killed in a plane crash in Ethiopia on Sunday morning. On Wednesday, a kerosene-laden trailer, which ostensibly lost its brakes, rammed into 19 traders at Upper Iweka Road in Onitsha, Anambra State. Unofficial figures of those mangled by the trailer stand at seven, while 12 others were reported to be in various but critical conditions. As if those were mere eerie icings on a ghoulish cake, on Thursday a building said to have been serially marked as distressed and earmarked for demolition by the Lagos State government but which was still used as a school collapsed in the Itafaji area of Lagos Island, swallowing students said to be in the neighbourhood of a hundred. About 40 pupils were said to have been pulled out of the wreckage alive, while twelve of these priceless wards were, at the end of the whole exercise, confirmed dead. In the same vein, scores of others are said to be currently in the hospital, battling sundry degrees of pain, agony and injury. Perhaps as a fitting closure to the blood-encrusted week, in faraway Christchurch, New Zealand, a lone shooter, identified as 28-year old Brenton Harrison Tarrant, suddenly lapsed into mass shooting at two mosques, in an apparent hate-filled terror attack. At the end of the rat-a-tat of his gun, 49 innocent worshippers had succumbed to the grim reality of mortality.

There are so many concepts of death, from whatever prism we may look at it: religion, tradition, philosophy and the like. There doesn’t seem to be a meeting point. Why does man die? Why do good men, rather than the bad ones, die? Who created death? What is the rationale of its strike? When man dies, where does he go? During the week, we were all forced to contend with all the above questions and then return to that inscrutable concept of the last breath of man. One thing that virtually all the concepts of death seem to agree upon is that our human mortality is shockingly clear, to wit that death is not a thing that lies far off from man in distance. It doesn’t occupy a distance as far as the closing scene in a movie or farther as the final chapter of a book. Its suddenness is swifter than those. Death’s strike can be at any time, in any place. It is the truth that we have had to scoop over time about human mortality.
My music idol, Eegunmongaji Ayinla Omowura, in his last vinyl on earth, did a poetic confrontation of the concept of death. Upon Omowura’s tragic passage a few months after the release of the album, words went round that he ostensibly had fisticuffs with death, which bruised and vanquished him in the process, culminating in that very deep and luscious poetic line about the last human breath. Iku oponu olodi ab’ara dudu hoho (death, you accursed enemy with an abhorrently black skin!), Omowura had begun. He disdained death for always patrolling the nooks and cranny of the earth with a frightening club, with which it clubbers its chosen victim. When another Yoruba music maestro, Yusuff Olatunji died in 1978, Omowura had, in his gripping elegy at his departure, wondered how Olatunji had allowed death to catch him unawares. “Why didn’t you turn your melodic goje musical instrument into an arrow and pierce death into submission with it?”, he had asked.

While seeking an anchor to the concept of death from the African tradition, I spoke with the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi yesterday. Ancient Yoruba traditional philosophy constantly weaves death around human existence, he said. It exploits the fear and uncertainty around the last breath of man to enjoin humanity to do good. It says, among other things, that the capacity to do good enures in the life of man once there is still breath streaming out of his nostrils: B’emi o ba bo, gbogbo ore ni nbe, the Yoruba say, according to Kabiyesi. On the brevity of life, traditional African Yoruba society says, emi o l’ayole. For those who are atop the ladder of power and majesty, Yoruba make reference to the death of tyrannical Bashorun Gaa, himself an Alaafin and the miserable circumstance of his death as lesson for humanity to do good. Ancient Africa too didn’t understand death. For it, death is the cessation of the body but not of the soul. The Yoruba believe that when a man dies, his soul travels to some other land to continue existence. The Alaafin is however of the belief that when a man is about to die, his body, spirit, soul begin to communicate the impending cessation of his existence to him, either through dreams, words that come out of his mouth, the places he goes, etc. “From what I read, Prof. Adesanmi had enough indicators that his life would be brief,” Kabiyesi said. At such moments, traditional Africa employs the services of diviners to interpret strange dreams, incongruous circumstances and the like.

Of all Western philosophical schools, the existential philosophers succinctly talked about the concept of the last breath. One of them said that man is old enough to die the very day he is born. Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Soren Kierkegaard and Albert Camus dwelt extensively on the transformative power of death and made the concept central thematic concerns of their works. To them, death is the only thing that brings life and all the possibilities in it into central focus. Death, for instance, is what reminds us of our being, our human potentials and the need to quickly grab all its possibilities and live up to life before death takes it away.

The Platonic school of death has what is analogous to the Christian theological worldview on same subject. Death is not the cessation of life but a journey into a world beyond, what is called an after-life, where all our acts in this world would be judged, they said. Epicureans hold a contrasting view. To them, death is absolutely insignificant and isn’t something to be taken seriously at all by man since life and death are mutually exclusive.

Professor Adesanmi was apparently conscious of this reality. The way he was in a hurry to maximise life by leaving indelible imprints, he was unconsciously conscious of the brevity of his existence. I never had the honour of meeting Pius, even though I looked forward to it. I lapped up every of his writings, scooping literature, language and the concept of society therein. He founded an online Facebook page he named Doctoral Lounge and made me member. The near-fatal road accident he went through in Nigeria about a year ago must have brought the fact of the proximity of death to him succinctly. Some members of the group, in announcing the accident, claimed that he had been admitted in an Ibadan hospital and enjoined some of us resident in the ancient city to endeavour to seek him out. Before they could find out the particular hospital, he was said to have been ferried out of the state capital. That was the nearest encounter I had with him. He is an ecumenical spirit which can never die. The global celebration of his brief life is a confirmation of the wisdom in Yoruba traditional African philosophy, which celebrates a man who dies young, rather than one who dies at old age without affecting humanity.

Unfortunately for us all, we assume our own immortality, even with mortality staring at us in the face and death clubbing the next man beside us. It baffles me when I see man adorn his perishable flesh in ornaments and housing it in palaces made of gold – a flesh that will someday be feasted upon by irreverent maggots. May the souls of the departed find solace on this sojourn to eternity.