The news of South Africa’s ambassador to France and former police minister Nathi Mthethwa’s bone-crushing exit has come and gone, yet the gap in information it leaves lingers.
No doubt those closely affected will feel the pain more acutely, especially now that officialdom is done with the funeral processes that tend to overwhelm families.
It is especially at this point that thoughts will rush to the mind about Mthethwa’s chosen, though unusual, way of exit. Questions will abound. Did he, in fact, choose suicide, or was the choice imposed on him by circumstances beyond his control? If so, what circumstances? If not, what, for him, informed his choice of suicide?
In Mthethwa’s case, the official cause of death is still under investigation by both the South African and French investigators. The Sunday Times reported a few weeks ago that video footage at the Hyatt Regency Paris Étoile hotel showed that no-one went into Mthethwa’s room before or after he checked himself in.
That a French prosecutor said Mthethwa had sent a message to his wife, Philisiwe, expressing his intention to kill himself and that she had also reported receiving a message from an apologetic Mthethwa seem to suggest that he most probably killed himself. The question is why?
Some speculated about how his name was mentioned at the Madlanga commission of inquiry. He was alleged to have tried to influence the inspector-general of intelligence on matters relating to Richard Mdluli, the former head of police crime intelligence. Far worse things have been said about other politicians, and they still walk our streets. I will be Ramaphosa-shocked if this so troubled Mthethwa that he decided to toss his flesh from the highest floor he could get to. I don’t buy it.
For many, suicide is an immoral, unethical and ungodly display of weakness. They argue that whatever the reasons pushing one toward the cliff — or the 22nd floor — they are hardly permanent reasons. One’s poverty or emotional pain is temporary, requiring short-term solutions such as therapy.
For many, suicide is an immoral, unethical and ungodly display of weakness. They argue that whatever the reasons pushing one toward the cliff — or the 22nd floor — they are hardly permanent reasons. One’s poverty or emotional pain is temporary, requiring short-term solutions such as therapy.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher, deems it absurd. “The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his uncertainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention, and this fascination liberates him.”
And many, of course, can relate. There are many people who are afflicted by various forms of cancer, for example. Some have funds to fight it, while others don’t. But it’s no reason to kill themselves. They want to live, Sartre says, without a future, without hope — but also, importantly, without resignation. They want to live. Not Mthethwa.
Some are the wretched of the Earth, unable to afford a room in a hotel with 22 floors, yet they face their grinding poverty with “passionate attention” and, again, without resignation either. Remember the ladies, Maria Makgato and Lucia Ndlovu, shot and killed on a farm in Polokwane and their bodies thrown into a pigsty? Before the cowards (Zachariah Johannes Olivier, 60, Adrian de Wet, 19, and William Musora, 50, shot them, these ladies embraced their poverty, sneaking into the farm to share, as it were, food thrown away by other people and considered good enough for pigs. Even when they were shot, they were trying to run away. They were trying to live, despite the vagaries of life.
In Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, Immanuel Kant argues against suicide because it cannot be universalised, while Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, says committing suicide to avoid pain or other undesirable circumstances is cowardly and unlawful.
But what if life is so burdensome or so painful and meaningless? If dying is what many fear, isn’t its embrace a show of bravery? The Confucians believe suicide is morally permissible, even praiseworthy, compared to a life of failing to follow certain values.
In The World As Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer notes that the world as we know it (objects in space, time and causality) is not reality in itself but merely our representation of it. He says all human existence manifests as endless — or insatiable — desire for what offers temporary satisfaction.
It explains, in part, why Hangwani Maumela, the Thembisa Hospital contractor who was raided recently, couldn’t help himself. The satisfaction after buying one supercar is temporary and makes way for a craving for another supercar. Another corrupt tender. Then a salon and car wash at home. It is ridiculous, but, explains Schopenhauer, suffering is an inevitable condition of life. In other words, Maumela’s spending spree is an outward manifestation of his suffering. Look where it got him.
The corollary of this view is Schopenhauer’s explanation of what underpins suicide. He views it as a failed attempt at a better life and rejects the moral arguments against the act. “They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice … that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”
Whatever one’s views about the utility or self-defeating nature of suicide, it affects many families today.
While many continue to look at those who give up on life as cowards, as selfish, or immoral because they appear to pay no attention to the pain and damage they unleash, one thing that seems to emerge is that those who give up do so because they, in fact, wanted more of life, of happiness and temporary satisfactions that appeared, to them, perpetually out of reach.
As a general explanation this makes sense. It doesn’t explain, however, many things about Mthethwa’s exit. It remains a mystery until the investigators unearth more information about why a man who had accomplished so much, who had no resource issues, had a beautiful, rich wife, could end his own life in so brutal a manner.
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