2003 Volume 2003 Issue 62 Pages 3-30
In 1884, an illiterate fisherman who lived in a village near Dakar began to preach to his neighbors. The fisherman belonged to the Lebu ethnic group. Many Lebu people thought him a fool, but some followed him. His followers believed him to be a Mahdi and the reincarnation of Prophet Muhammad. After three months' imprisonment by the French administration, the preacher became an Islamic brotherhood's founder and people called him Limamou Laye. Issa Laye, Limamou Laye's son, succeeded to his father's mission, and followers believed him to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.
This article focussed on the reincarnations. There are two points of them. First, Muhammad and Jesus were reborn from the white race to the black race. Second, Muhammad came first as the father and Jesus second as the son. Why did the two white prophets recincarnate black successively?
As for traditional religion, the Lebu have inherited cults of possession. These traditional beliefs have been fused with Islam these 150 years, with its general expansion. And after the French colonization of West Africa, most of the Lebu's land in the Cape Verde peninsula have been urbanized drastically by overwhelming European civilization which white christians introduced.
The urgent problem the Lebu have to solve is, to establish their moral independency without converting to christianity and to accept European civilization.
I proposed a hypothesis about the reincarnations as follows: the prophets' reincarnations mean the black integration of Islam and christianity, both of which came from the white race; the successive reincarnations mean the superiority of Islam over christianity, for the father-founder is superior to the son-successor to Lebu's traditional way of thinking. They respect their father and family ties.
