Ladysmith news-budget. [volume] (Ladysmith, Rusk County, Wis.) 1907-1927, 1907-08-08
SUICIDE AMONG SAvAGES.
Just About as Frequent as Among People
OF Highly Civilized Lands

OF H1gnly civilized LanQS.
Explorers rarely mention the fact that
suicide is prevalent among barbarous
and savage tribes as well as in civilized
countries. Many travellers never hear of
it. and what we know about this prac-
tice among primitive peoples comes to
us chiefly from missionaries and other
white men who live long among them.
From all they tell us it seems that
suicide is as frequent among untutored
folk as in highly civilized countries in
proportion to population. We might
think that living on a simpler plane
they were less subject than we are to
worriment and intense nervous strain.
Their troubles may be different from
ours, but they are just as intense; and
here or there a man, woman or child
reaches a point where life is burden
to be got rid Of somehow or other.
We are apt to think that our kind
of civilization develops in us acuteness of
feeling and a degree Of sensitiveness to
which the savage is a stranger. The
fact is that a great many so-called saw
ages are as easily and as deeply hurt by
real or imaginary unklndness, injustice
or misfortune as we are.
A while ago a young man of the Ehk
tribe, in West Africa, was accused of
stealing something from one Of the
white traders. He simply could not en-
dure the accusation. He told a friend
that he did not wish to live any longer
and soon went quietly into the bush
and killed himself.
There are influences we never feel
that weigh heavily upon the lives Of
those less favored mortals. The dark
superstitions that wrap them around are
among them. If we believe many of
the things that are filed with real ter
ror to them the suicidal tendency might
become still greater in civilized lands.
A black man on the Lower Niger
made a good living by turning logs in
to canoes for the white traders. He
was a faithful workman, but in the
course of time it was evident that he
had come to be unhappy, though he
would not talk Of his troubles. One
day he shot himself, but skillful doc
tor kept him alive.
The poor fellow said he didn't wish to
live. He said the spirits of the trees
among which he worked had become hos
tile to him and were bent on taking his
life. The fellow was not crazy, but
his head was filed with the superstitions
that fetichism breeds and his life had
become a burden.
These children of nature also are far
more impulsive than the average civil
lied person. They are often unreason-
ing and do rash things on the spur of
the moment, and on the whole are a
little more likely to do them than we
are. Not long ago a native of east
Africa was scolded by his wife one
morning, wherenpon he hanged him
self from the limb of tree. His ex-
aggerated impulsiveness really cost him
his life.
1t has often been said in civilized
lands that no one can commit suicide
by simply holding his breath. This is
not said in Africa. however. Mr.: Leo
nard, who has lived long on the Lower
Niger, says that one of the commonest
methods of self-destruction there is
simply to refrain from breathing.
Though this seems almost a physical
impossibility, it is accomplished in
Africa by the fiercest determination not
to breathe. and Mr.. Leonard thinks that
the victims of this kind of suicide are
usually persons who imagine that ma
lignant spirits or other evil influences
are trying to ruin them.