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CHAPTER VII - Suicide: A Hidden History
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CHAPTER VII Suicide: A Hidden History Megan Vaughan In the extensive literature on the history of suicide, the societies of the African continent barely feature, except in brief discussions of folk beliefs and practices.1 A simple explanation for the relative lack of attention given to this issue is that historically African societies have been assumed to have very low rates of suicide. But that assumption itself needs historicizing. The statistical evidence for suicide in most African countries is extremely weak, and longitudinal data is almost non-existent, so while there are reasons to suggest the need for a re-evaluation of suicide rates in Africa, it is not currently possible to provide one. However, the intellectual history of suicide in Africa can shed light on the issue, as can some evidence from the Malawi in the late colonial period. In the first part of this chapter I present this evidence and analyse it in the context of that intellectual history. In contemporary central, southern and eastern Africa, concerns over apparently rising suicide rates are being expressed both by mental health professionals and in the popular press. It is tempting to argue that these parts of Africa are experiencing the equivalent of the intensification of anxiety about suicide that surfaced periodically in early modern and nineteenth century Europe – a kind of ‘moral panic’.2 As in early eighteenth-century discussions of the ‘English malady’, so in many of these recent reports on Africa suicide is represented as a symptom of a wider social and moral crisis, as a challenge to ‘traditional’ values, a sign of the ‘anomie’ consequent on modernization. I review these contemporary discussions later in this chapter but first I want to explore something of the intellectual history of suicide in Africa, because it is against this background that one must view both the historical and the present-day evidence for suicide on the continent. Although there is a genealogy of colonial thinking underlying analyses of suicide in Africa, it would be oversimplifying it to argue that these issues are confined to questions of ‘race’. Arguments around the interpretation of suicide are complex, and form part of a much more extensive intellectual history. Suicide can be interpreted as a supreme act of will and defiance or as a fatal gesture of despair, as a mark of the autonomy of the self or as evidence of the subjection of the individual to forces beyond his or her control.3 In modern times, and particularly since the publication of Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, it has been the subject of sociological analysis, supported by the collection of social statistics.4 At the same time, the development of modern psychiatry has contributed to a ‘medicalization’ of suicide and characterizations of the suicidal mind as sick, despairing or overwhelmed by inverted anger, depending on theoretical orientation. Meanwhile, some historical and cross-cultural analyses call into question the status of suicide as a single category of analysis.5 But there is a specific trajectory to thinking about suicide in Africa. The current interest in the subject of suicide in Africa is all the more striking when viewed against a longer history of colonial thinking on what came to be known as the ‘African mind’.6 In both professional and lay colonial writing on African psychology, ‘Africans’ were generally held to be a happy-golucky ‘race’ of people with few cares in the world, and what 234 megan vaughan [3.95.233.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:51 GMT) cares they had they were likely to attribute to the actions of others, via the medium of witchcraft or the intervention of spirits, rather than to their own actions. African people, it was argued, did not suffer from introspection and guilt, and so one rarely encountered depressive illness among them. And since suicide was linked to depression in this literature, rather than to aggression, it followed from this that they rarely killed themselves. This was less a theory than a discourse, but it has had a long and vigorous life.7 The political utility of these ideas in the context of colonialism is clear. Africans were not fully formed individuals, and were incapable of taking responsibility for their own actions. Their fears and anxieties were externalized, their own misdeeds and harmful thoughts projected onto others. Unfamiliar with the experience of guilt, lacking the internal world of introspection, they rarely fell into anything approaching suicidal despair.8 In 1967 Raymond Prince published a review of...