Tempels documents Bantu belief that deceased kin seek rebirth through pregnant women’s dreams

Evidence

Tempels refers to women’s reproductive roles only in passing: Sometimes a pregnant woman is herself able to know the individuality of the child whom she is bearing through a revelation made in her dreams. I asked a Christian woman to tell me how the child that she was presenting to me for baptism was Monga. She replied, “While I was carrying I dreamed several times that the deceased Monga was following me and saying to me, ‘Unsele, Unsele’ (‘Bear me! Bear me!’) and so I knew it was he who was following me to be reborn in me”. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 956

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The dream-driven reincarnation of a named ancestor through a specific woman is a strong seed for fiction around naming, ancestry, and identity — who the child is believed to be and how that shapes their life.
• SHARE: Worth sending to someone interested in comparative rebirth beliefs or African cosmologies.