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Yesterday, on the Association of Personal Historians Listserve, someone posted a question asking if anyone remembered an African proverb that was told to us by James Walsh. Walsh, a history professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, presented at the annual APH Conference in Nashville late in 2008. I’ve had this on my mind all day since that inquiry since I was at that conference and I too was struck by the power of that proverb.

The proverb recognizes two spirits. “Sasha are spirits known by someone still alive, while Zamani are spirits not known by someone currently alive.” According to James Loewen in his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: “The recently departed whose time overlapped with people still here are the Sasha, the living dead. They are not wholly dead, for they live on in the memories of the living … when the last person knowing an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the Sasha for the Zamani, the dead.”