Suicide is not a new, recent phenomenon in our community.
In countless conversations over the course of my life, the only time my compadres and I agreed on ending our lives was if the alternative was physical enslavement.
I hold to that thought-still. I would have leapt out of the slavery ship of death into my own watery grave.
According to Royal Musems Greenwhich:
Enslaved men and women killed themselves for a number of different reasons. Many were unable to cope with the long and traumatic journey, which regularly involved beatings, murder and rape. Some hoped that death would take them back home to Africa. William Snelgrave, an unapologetic English slave trader, claimed that Africans believed ‘if they are put to death […] they shall return again to their own Country’.
Committing suicide was also an act of rebellion. The crews of slave ships were always anxious to prevent enslaved people from killing themselves because each person who managed to take their own life reduced the voyage’s profits.
Suicide on slave ships took on various forms. There are moving descriptions of enslaved Africans jumping into the sea together, holding hands or embracing until the end. Weapons that could not be used against the ship’s crew was then turned upon themselves, thus ending in suicide. Starving oneself to death wasn’t unheard of.
A (true) story we don’t hear often is the one of mutiny declared aboard New Brittania in 1773. After escaping their shackles and making their way to the gun room, enslaved Africans figured death is better than being enslaved. The men set fire to the gun room, killing almost everyone on board. They had decided death was better than what they’d experienced aboard that slave ship.
A thesis submitted by Linda Kay Kneeland entitled: AFRICAN AMERICAN SUFFERING AND SUICIDE UNDER SLAVERY, is replete with story after story of completed suicides in addition to attempted to suicide.
Suiciding while black isn’t new, novel or something to be ashamed of. In the case of our African ancestors it was a way to take back one’s power. It was a way out of the untold stories of brutalities & torment endured and/or witnessed.
Read here about the courage of Slavery Rebellions, here.
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