Teaching A Corpse A Lesson

Time now is 0927 nohours East African Time 

The date is 16th June 2020.

Culture plays an important role in our lives. Our performance and how we look at life will in a big way depend on cultural practices of where you hail from.

A corpse is a term used for the dead body of a human being. A carcass  is the body of a dead a animal. The death of a human or an animal usually brings mixed feelings.

If an animal which is normally eaten dies, people become happy as they look forward to eating its meat while for a human it may bring sadness and mourning.

 

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In my culture, somebody who commits suicide is never mourned. If he hangs himself, they sought a person from far to cut him down. The corpse is then thoroughly thrashed by the villagers. The corpse received heavy strokes of the cane.

The person who committed suicide is never taken to the mortuary but is buried at night. No rituals pertaining to the diseased is done. His body and that one of a carcass are disposed in a similar way. Here I mean the carcasses which are buried and not eaten.

Suicide, the taking away of ones life, has never been condoned in the African culture. Suicide was cowardly and the most abominable death which a person could die.

 

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The person who cuts him down and those who bury are rewarded handsomely. Whatever they were given, be it money or livestock was not taken to their homes but was used outside the homes.

Suicide was an abhored act and was heavily shunned and condemned by the society. Cleansing ceremonies were done as a way of ensuring  peace reigned in the society.

 

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Why we're all these done?

First, it was to deter people from undertaking the abominable act of suicide. Suicide was treated in a way that proved to all in the family of not being an admirable thing. It was something to be feared and detested.

Secondly, it was to chase away any ghost of the suicide victims from coming back to haunt the family. Suicide was an act which revolved in families where a person committed it. This was due to the spiritual influence of the victim. The rituals we're done to ensure the spirits were bound and threatened not to recur in the society.

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Thirdly, this was a custom. Some customs were blindly followed by the society. They were passed down from one generation to the next.