Suicide in an African context.

This is something that I have thought about for a year.
About a year ago, I lost someone close to me to suicide. It is something I do not think I can ever get over seeing as I believe I was the last person to talk to them(I will stick to using a neutral pronoun).
Anyway, I’m not here to go on about missing my loved one. Rather, I want to talk about my observations on suicide in an African context.
Suicide in an African context is seen as a curse to the family and the larger community. In my community, the Luo , bodies of suicide victims are flogged to ‘stop his evil spirit from returning to the homestead’. The victim was also buried in the middle of the night and was not mourned. It is also notable that the burial place of a suicide victim was far away from the homestead on an abandoned lot of land referred to as ‘gunda’.
While some of us have moved past most of these practices, there is still stigma associated to suicide. I find that part of the stigma in our present day can be attributed to our interpretations of religion.
During my loved one’s funeral, I saw that my relatives had to keep on explaining their action. They kept on talking about how the deceased was saved, in a bit to counter people’s whispers of how my loved one was going to hell because of their actions.
I kept on hearing people say things like, “This family should be prayed for to get rid of this curse”.
As with many other suicide cases, there was a lot of blame passed around. What we all failed to do was address was the topic of mental health. We should have taken the time to dispel beliefs like ‘Mental illnesses are curses’ or ‘Depression is only a thing that wazungus ,white people, go through’ and ‘The African lifestyle does not allow for depression because we have huge families’.
We should have taken the time to talk about the need to take people’s cries for help and suicide threats seriously. We should have talked about how survivors of attempted suicide are treated with hostility, mocked and called attention seekers. How they are often asked why they did not finish the job properly. How by 2016, 9 African countries ,including Kenya and Ghana, still criminalized attempted suicide and did not regard it as a mental health issue. According to this study, people opposing the decriminalization of suicide cite the common belief that suicide is sinful as their defense for these cruel laws.
Lastly, we should have also acknowledged the fact that taking care of people with mental illnesses needs lots of patience and care. This is because from my experience, as soon as people feel like a burden to other’s they tend to hold off from venting and sharing their feelings. In addition to this, when people sense like others are tired of listening to them they put on a happy facade to convince people that they are doing okay.

