Suicide in Late Colonial Africa: The Evidence of Inquests from Nyasaland

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 nonexistent, so while there are reasons to suggest the need for a reevaluation 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 British colony of Nyasaland (now Malawi) in the late colonial period. In contemporary 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