Suicide in Igbo-African Ontology

Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death, often committed out of despair. The cause is frequently attributed to depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse. It is alleged that around 800,000 to a million people die by suicide every year, making it the 10th leading cause of death worldwide. In this paper, the researcher studies the problem of suicide from an Igbo-African perspective. “Igbo” is a language and the name of an ethnic group or tribe in Nigeria. It is referred to as Igbo-African because it is an ethnic group in Africa and relates culturally to other ethnic groups in Africa. The paper investigates the African concept of life, which sees life as the highest good, as given and sustained by God, as belongingness, as a stage, as a circle and as everlastingness. For the Igbo-African, life is a sacred thing, thus a meta-empirical reality and not a mere biological thing. These understandings of life vis-a-vis suicide would bring about an African perspective of suicide. This understanding of suicide from an Igbo-African perspective is believed will help enhance the value of human life and thus save the world from being plunged into a silent crisis of the value of life. Keywords: Suicide, African, Igbo, Ontology, Life, Suicide, God, Everlastingness, Metaphysical, Nigeria