Nigeria, March 10 -- The celebrations last week of the life and times of Herbert Wigwe sent me retrieving some Philosophy books from my study. There had to be a philosophical meaning to it all. How could a man at the peak of his professional career, with a network of friends and associates spread over all the continents, literally vaporise from our midst with his wife and first son in tow?

But the more I combed philosophy, the more fuzzy I was. We are made up of body and soul, right? We leave the body behind when we expire and the soul rises to the afterlife, where we are no longer constrained by the limitations of the physical world. Death, says Seneca, is a release from all suffering, and a boundary beyond which our ills cannot pass. ...