Akan thought divides a person into parts with different destinations, and the afterlife follows from the division. From the mother comes mogya, blood, which fixes a person in a matrilineage — the abusua — and determines inheritance and identity. From the father comes ntoro or sunsum, the spirit or personality. And from Nyame, the sky god, comes the okra, a divine spark loaned for the duration and carrying the destiny the person agreed to before birth.
At death these separate. The okra returns to Nyame, and because it has existed before and will exist again, much Akan thought holds that it comes back — reincarnating, and characteristically within the same matrilineage, so that a grandmother may be recognized in a newborn. The sunsum disperses. What continues as a recognizable person is the saman, the ancestor-shade, and its destination is Asamando.
Asamando is a mirror of the living world, shadowed, with towns and markets and social rank, and it is reached by crossing water — in many tellings a river or a lake with a current too strong to swim. At the bank sits Amokye, an old woman who receives the arriving dead and takes their beads: an entry toll, which is one reason the dead are buried dressed and ornamented. The crossing is not automatic. The Akan funeral, the ayie, exists to accomplish it, and this is why Akan funerals are enormous — days long, expensive, attended by hundreds, and organized with a seriousness that outsiders routinely misread as extravagance. The obligation runs the other way from what a Western reader expects: it is not that the funeral honours a person who has safely arrived, but that a person arrives because the funeral was done. Someone whose family fails them may not get across, and becomes a restless saman hanging around the living.
Once there, the ancestors — the nsamanfo — are not gone. They are the senior members of the lineage, still holding office, still owed report and consulted on decisions, and still capable of withdrawing their protection. They are honoured at blackened stools, the carved seats that hold a chief's or an elder's spirit after death and are fed with libation. Whether a person joins them is the only thing resembling a moral test in the system: those who lived selfishly, or who died badly or without issue, are not received among the nsamanfo, and the sanction is exclusion from the lineage rather than punishment in a place.
And the ancestors themselves are mortal in the long run. A saman lasts as long as it is named, fed, and consulted; when the last person who knows the name stops, the ancestor thins out. Continuity is a job the living hold.
