Nigerians' concept of death and its implications for counselling in Nigeria

Abstract

Motivated partly by the contents of most in memorians and obituaries announced on the pages of Nigeria's newspapers, a study was designed to investigate the attitude of some Nigerian students toward death and related matters. A questionnaire was designed and administered to final year education students in two federal universities and one state college of education. In all, 245 students took part in the study. The results suggest that the Nigerian students involved in the study believe in reincarnation, believe that the dead do see and influence the living, and that death is often caused by the ‘work of evil people’. Among the implications of these findings for counselling is the difficulty Nigerian counsellors and counsellees could experience in trying to relate meaningfully to each other as a result of Nigerians' inadequate conception of death and their unwillingness to place implicit trust in other people not perceived as a member of the society. The need for a reorientation in some aspects of indigenous cultural beliefs is advocated. This, it is suggested, could be encouraged through mass literacy programmes and through a carefully designed programme of counsellor training.