ON FEBRUARY 2 2015 I had an opportunity to attend a radio programme called ‘Hot Sit’ to discuss the escalating suicide cases affecting Zimbabwean universities students across the nation.
The discussion which I shared with two representatives of young university organisations was triggered by the recent suicide case of one UZ Electrical Engineering student.
His death by apparent involuntary suicide sent tongues wagging because of its extremely bizarre nature.
The parents of this brilliant asset ascribed his death to the rabid influence of hip-hop on him as well as what they termed as ‘Satanism’.
It is my wish to share some of the points I raised in the discussion for our patriotic readership as well.
The hope is to prevent such cases in our esteemed institutions of higher learning.
Admittedly although each suicide case calls for circumstantial circumspection to establish its unique merits, an attempt at a generic assessment can have more universal relevance.
The French sciologist, Emile Durkheim established two concepts, integration and regulation, as the major explanatory causes of suicide in a universal way.
Durkheim uses the cross as the symbolic representation of the two key concepts. The vertical axis represents integration by which he meant that too much of integration or too little of it can cause suicide.
What Durkheim meant by integration is social cohesion which can result in altruistic suicide such as in the case of religious suicide bombings.
An Africa-centred understanding of suicide does not privilege religious fanaticism as a cause except as witnessed in borrowed religions such as Islam and Christianity in their current forms in Africa.
Yes Al Qaeda connections and fundamentalist Christianity have and continue to wreak havoc in our mother continent mainly as proxies of larger foreign agendas but Africans do not understand these carnages as of African origin.
They are imported carnages.
Such commitment to carrying out murder in the name of religion is far from African religion which in essence perceives it as nothing short of pathology. Unhu/Ubuntu does not accept the taking away of life for any reason save in self-defence or in defence of birthright as in the liberation struggle.
I need not overload your attention with more detail on altruistic suicide for it is hardly an African explanation of what is going on in our universities.
What can be derived from Durkheim’s model in our case is anomic suicide which is a result of either complete absence of integration or regulation.
‘Anomie’ is a state of lawlessness which arises out of too much freedom.
It is true that our young university students have too much freedom unleashed upon them on joining universities, and some do not know what to do with it.
The current university structure has been inherited almost without amendment from colonial times.
The colonial education system regarded the young university student as an adult with full individual adult rights to self-determination.
Today the gospel of individual human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and heavily endorsed by United Nations conventions and protocols allow the young people to stand alone as individuals determining their own lives, thus disabling traditional cultural institutions to continue exercising oversight over the children.
These conventions and protocols give the inexperienced youths sexual rights, freedom of expressions, freedom of choice, right to education (any education), freedom of that and right to that ad infinitum.
Such rights and freedoms are part and parcel of the current fallible Zimbabwean Constitution.
The overall effect is more unbridled freedom leading the young to adventurous sojourns into various areas which finally bring miseries of one form or another.
These include unplanned pregnancies, contraction of deadly diseases, consumption of toxic drugs, venturing into barely understood lifestyles as taught by proxy parentages in the form of foreign media menus, the internet, foreign religious and dogmas as well as the pursuit of alienating curricula (both official and unofficial). In the end their African mindset are replaced by alien mindsets which alienate.
Unfortunately, the gospel of rights that gives these young and inexperienced children offer no lessons about responsibility, and when they reach un-navigable cul-de-sacs, they become confused having injudiciously followed the call of the false honey-bird.
When this happens they lose both hope and themselves by taking their own lives.
Of course some of our universities have departments or organisations offering psycho-social support services unfortunately developed in foreign lands as usual and as usual when the inflicted turn to these modern structures for counseling in moments of mental crises they are like square pegs turning to round holes.
Even where the modern structures can provide some palliative, the task is overwhelming given the ballooning universities enrolments.
What is worse, the young students are now ‘educated’ and consider themselves too modern to turn back to Africa’s cultural pillars which their new education has relegated to ‘tradition’ and ‘inferiority’.
Unfortunately, the African institutions too have accepted their relegation and become too shy to offer advice to the learned.
Hence the inflicted victims realise there is no other way out than abandon life.
Suicide is such a selfish decision.
It arises out of the new belief that society is nothing.
Only the individual matters.
Such ideas come with alienation, with rights and freedoms which boomerang.
Our youths have become elders and we have become children.
Our mores and our norms are anathema to them.
So are our cultural values.
They value pornography, homosexuality and lesbianism.
They replace taboos with tattoos which they engrave as testimonies on their physical geography to demonstrate their inner transformations.
They attend satanic churches which their parents never attended.
Yes they now have new parents.
They are born again in different directions.
They value and celebrate difference.
Not unity, not the oneness of Africa, little knowing that in their unbridled pursuit of alien values and practices, they invite too many demons, foreign demons which compound other demons from a past they try to run away from.
They know not how to deal with their new condition which they claim to command and cherish.
The parents, the clan system, the community and the whole African cosmos which are part of the larger hospital are diminished and they turn their backs and with them their therapeutic efficacies, leaving the sick minds to drown in their false wisdoms.
It is time we restructure the education system to ensure the continuity of guidance, supervision and control even in universities as well.
This is the hard truth.
It is too early to leave these children of our groins the jungles of adventure.
They are too young to know where to put their feet let alone their minds.