The Curious Phenomenon called Reincarnation.
A Tale of 3 Stories.
Today, my uncle told me 2 stories about him that gave me the same chilling feeling as if I sat in front of a screen watching a budget horror movie.
It was about his daughter now eleven years old. Many years ago when she was just two, he’d been rushing out of the house one day trying to keep up with an appointment, and she quietly pulled him to a corner and asked him to sit down.
Then she went into her mother’s room and returned with a hair brush and ran it over my uncle’s hair, a disheveled mess as it was, because he’d left it uncombed in his haste.
What she said next shook him. She said, “I’ve always told you to take care of yourself and always brush your hair.”
Now, this sounds simple by itself. But what was eerie about this was not that his toddler spoke with such eloquence or authority. No.
Just a little over a year before then, he had lost his beloved mother; his first love, the only person he ever truly felt a connection with until he married.
As a younger man with a burdening sense of responsibility for his younger siblings, he would often forget to comb his hair and would leave the house many times to hustle, looking disheveled. It was his mother who would drag him quietly to a corner and say to him; “Always take care of yourself and brush your hair.”
One year after her unfortunate death, his wife delivered of their daughter. 2 years later, she was repeating to him the words her late grandmother whom she never met, often said to him while she was alive.
The second event happened a few years after this. He’d been driving with his family in South Africa when the famous hit, “Sweet Mother” by the Cameroonian Highlife crooner, Prince Nico came on the radio.
Prior to this time, he swears that this same daughter of his had never heard this song. She was six at the time, had spent most of her earlier years in the UK where they lived, and they’d never played the song in their home.
Now, here’s another backstory; When his mother was alive, they would often sing this song together, belting at the top of their voices, miming each solo word for word. It was their ultimate bonding ritual.
That day, his six year old who’d never learned the lyrics to this song began to sing along as it came on air. He steeled. Then he finally gathered the strength to ask her where she’d learnt it.
“I used to sing it when I was in another country, far, far away,” she’d replied him coolly.
He said he and the wife turned to look at each other before he broke down in tears.
I’d always heard stories of reincarnation, and while I found most fascinating, I’d never paid the phenomenon much attention; there was no space for it in my theology as a Believer.
Perhaps, it was because much of the stories I heard about it were steeped in our African cultural cosmologies, a body of knowledge seemingly at perpetual variance with the Christian faith.
I have always been a lover of our indigenous African cultures -chiefly, my Igbo culture — but to the extent that they didn’t veer off into the ungodly, or the unjust. But when it came to reincarnation, I just wasn’t sure- until I had this conversation with my uncle.
That day, after he told me these two stories, which by the way, were not in an effort to make a case for reincarnation, I got intrigued. He left me with a last story; this time, it wasn’t about him.
It was the story of the Pollock Sisters.
