admin
In the past three months, two young people took their own lives, causing a great deal of trauma to the respective communities in which they had been living.
One of those suicide cases was committed by an emerging young, entrepreneur in the Malalume area of the Bulilima District. The other involved a young pregnant lover of a policeman in the Masvingo Province about a month and a half after the Malalume one.
About a year before that, another young man had hanged himself in the Dombodema area of Bulilima district. Reports about similar suicide cases have been received by various police stations in the country.
The first question most people ask when they hear about a suicide is: What drove that person to kill himself or herself?
The actual meaning of that question, which can be in various words other than those quoted above, is: What really made the person choose death than life?
Psychologists have identified about three major causes of suicide: protest, anger and despair. We can add to those a fourth one: an irreversible, exaggerated feeling of self-esteem which leads one to fail to accept either adversity, frustration, an insult or “no” for an answer.
An example of “protest” suicidal cases is people who go on hunger strike to draw the attention of whomever to their issue. A few such hunger strikes have gone the whole hog and ended up in coffins.
Some have called off the strikes; others who have been forcibly fed have ended up giving in to hunger. People who protest against whatever by taking their own lives would be exhibiting either powerlessness to correct or acquire whatever is at stake, or they would be expressing a very negative, self-defeating form of cowardice.
They would be telling the world that they are too powerless mentally or physically, politically; economically; socially or culturally to face or correct whatever adversity they were facing on the practical stage of human existence, and have opted for self-imposed permanent departure from that stage.
That is usually the case with suicide cases involving business people with large debts such as tax arrears or court-imposed fines for whatever business offences.
Failure to manage one’s anger invariably leads to violence either against oneself or against that or those against whom one is angry. If one is unable to hit back for whatever reason against the cause of one’s unmanageable anger, one is likely to hit violently at oneself. This may be in the form of self-immolation or plain suicide by those with suicidal mentalities.
In many oriental cultures, self-immolation or self-sacrifice has assumed a religious characteristic and is thus not frowned upon but is viewed as virtuous.
In Western Christian culture, however, self-immolation is a cardinal sin in that the core of the Christian faith is that the last human sacrifice to atone for the sins of all faithful humanity was Jesus Christ.
Traditional Zimbabwean religious culture also condemns suicide. It believes that the spirit of a suicide should be exorcised from the survivors because it seeks death rather than life.
That is why in Zimbabwean tradition, the body of a suicide is not brought into or inside his or her home as part of the burial process. It lies in state outside the fence or hedge of his or her home.
That apart, unmanaged anger causes either murder, destruction of property, divorce and or suicide. It can also lead to the disintegration of families or households.
Despair contributes to suicide particularly in business communities where debt payment conditions may involve somewhat intolerable or socially risky demands on the debtor. This is especially so where usury is practised.
In some matrimonial disputes, desperation can occur in one or the other party, leading to extremely emotional behaviour that ends in suicide. Cases of this type seem to occur mostly among people who marry their very first lovers. If a disappointment is caused to one party by the other, the disappointed party is likely to snap mentally and act most irrationally.
Such people can hardly face the world without the presence of the other although the degree of inter-dependence differs from one person to another. It would appear that men are more likely to act most passionately than women, some of them going to incredibly violent extremes.
In 1961, an employee of Saunders Quarries at Wankie Colliery, called Chinyama, killed his most beautiful wife known as MaNgwenya by stabbing her with a knife 24 times at about 6pm at the Number One North Compound (Cinderella) after she had told him that she no longer loved him.
Chinyama, wearing some of MaNgwenya’s clothing, including her doek, later hanged himself in the nearby bush that very night. He had repeatedly told MaNgwenya that she was his first lover. He too was MaNgwenya’s first lover.
In another incident, this time in Salisbury (now Harare) in 1963, a young man who had married his first lover went virtually mad after she died giving birth. The author of this article still sees through his mind’s eye, the young man sobbing pitiably in the Federal Hotel lounge every Friday evening, telling all and sundry about his departed wife who was his very first and most probably last lover.
He had met and fallen in love with her at Goromonzi Secondary School, married her in Harari (now Mbare) Township in 1962 where their parents of Malawi origin were living. She died a puerperal death the following year, living behind a pretty baby girl who was a spitting image of herself, he would say, between sobs, always ending with a most depressing promise that he would one day commit suicide to end “all this agony and anguish” he was experiencing.
The man was truly desperately depressed. In 1964 his parents wisely decided to return to Malawi and took him and the little girl with them. We who knew him and empathised with him prayed and hoped that the change of the physical and social environment would help him start a new life instead of committing suicide.
Another cause of suicide is an exaggerated feeling of self-esteem. This feeling is stronger among introverts than extroverts. The reason seems to be that extroverts talk boastfully about themselves, telling everyone within earshot how intelligent, how great, how successful they are. They blow up vociferously should somebody say that they are talking absolute balderdash, and that would, more often than not, be the end of the story. They would have told all those who would have verbally frowned on their empty self-praises how unimportant they are, or how dull they are not to recognise genius or talented person even when one is staring blood and flesh right in front of them. That would satisfy their inflated ego.
l To Page 6
But an introvert would feel deeply insulted and rejected by a mere contradiction to their view or assertion. They would feel belittled and would either physically hit back in self-defence or if they cannot do so for whatever reason, they would eliminate themselves from the community some of whose members are of the opinion that the views of the introverts are nonsensical.
It is, of course, true that not all introverts have suicidal tendencies. Some are more so than others. It depends on how deeply hyper-sensitive the individual is.
In the United States, there is a school of thought that suicide tendencies are inherited, that is to say they are genetic. Some US insurance firms will not sell a life assurance policy to anyone in whose family there has been a case of suicide.
A little research carried out by this author indicates that in two families, two paternal cousins committed suicide. They shared a paternal grandfather. A grandson of one of the two also killed himself (by hanging) decades later. A decade or two after that, a son of a brother of one of the first two suicides also hanged himself.
The grandson hanged himself following an argument about socialism. His comrades told him during the discussion that his basic understanding of socialism was out of touch with reality. That upset him so much that he saw no reason for continuing to live.
In another family, a man shot himself rather than be captured alive by white settler soldiers in the Mangwe District in 1896. Some 10 years later his sister hanged herself rather than marry an old man chosen for her by the father instead of the other much younger lover.
A couple of years later an aunt who was quite elderly hanged herself after a witchdoctor had accused her of bewitching and subsequently killing her two young grandchildren.
More than a century later her granddaughter hanged herself after somebody had told her she was a witch. A couple of years later, her brother killed himself for unknown reasons, leaving behind a most loving and lovely wife and a village full of amazingly healthy daughters and two sons.
Some eight years later, one of the sons hanged himself for apparently no reason whatsoever. How else can we explain that except to say that the suicide tendency is in the genes in that family?
Well, that controversial aspect of this discussion apart, can suicide ever be justified? Only in war to avoid highly sensitive security information falling into enemy hands, it can be. One could be expected to take one’s own life lest one’s enemy could extract most vital security information from one by means of physical torture which cannot be bodily endured.
That is why in some countries soldiers take an oath to commit suicide rather than be captured alive by an enemy in times of war.
In normal civilian life, suicide is utterly unacceptable simply because whatever the problem one is facing, it is bound to be resolved as long as there is the will to do so. That is why they say “where there is a will, there is always a way”. A will exists only where there is life. An old truism among the people of Zimbabwe says: “Hhakuna nlandu usingapele”, “Hakuna mhosva isingapere,” (Shona); “Akula cala elingapheliyo,” (IsiNdebele); in English the equivalent would be “every crime (case) is eventually resolved”.
Another most important truism we should all remember when we are confronted with what may appear unyielding odds is the old English saying: “There is no dark cloud without a silver lining”.
That means in practical terms that however bad, disadvantageous, frustrating, a situation might appear to be, somewhere in it or because of it, where is an advantage for those involved in it.
Suicide is certainly never an option for a level-headed, selfless person who values human life, including first and foremost his or her own.
l Saul Gwakuba Ndlovu is a Bulawayo-based retired journalist. He can be contacted on cell 0734328136 or through email [email protected]
Online Reporter