Five ridiculous but funny ways to commit suicide in Kenya

When I was a college boy, a man woke up and discovered that he was weighed down by the travails of life.

So he boarded the fastest ‘matatu’ to town, looked up a tall building, shuffled up the stairs, found himself a nice window and resolutely parachuted out of the building to the cold, hard pavement below.

Unfortunately, he never woke up in heaven. In fact, what happened is that he opened his eyes and found bystanders hooting with laughter.

You see, in his confusion, the fellow thought he was on the tenth floor, yet the reality was that he merely bailed out of a window on the second floor and consequently did not achieve sufficient ‘gravity’ to promote himself to higher glory. To make matters worse, he landed on (a very angry) businessman’s Mercedes Benz.

As the men in blue led him away, apparently, only gangsters have the right to murder you and it is criminal for you to take matters into your own hands. The mob taunted him, saying, “If you wanted to commit suicide, you should have gone to the top of Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC)!”

That brother is not the first Kenyan to make an unholy mess of the otherwise simple matter of saying to hell with this idiotic world. Every so often, some clown attempts suicide by selecting a tree that is ridiculously close to a police station. Others swallow an under dose of rat poison then start wailing for neighbours to run to their rescue.

The more pumbavu (foolish) ones grab machetes and chop off their wives’ heads then string themselves up the roof. It’s a slow and painful way to die, a bit daft in this mobile phone age if you ask me.

Look, if things are thick and you desperately want to exit the earth, simply wear a ruling party shirt and wander into an Opposition politically rally, or vice versa. If you really want to speed things up, heckle when the party leader is speaking. Your liver will be in ten different pieces in seconds.

Alternatively, all you need to do is to weave your way within close proximity of the president and then behave ‘suspiciously’ for a couple of seconds.

When you notice that the security men have discovered that you are behaving ‘suspiciously’, shove your hand violently into your coat pocket as if reaching for a gun. When they do your post-mortem, they will discover that you were killed by a blunt object, in reality a big, hard fist. They will also retrieve 769 bullets from your body.

But if you find that too complicated, just pick any crowded city street, say River Road. For special effects, pour tomato sauce on your face and clothes then pop out of an alley and sprint faster than lightning down the street.

Ensure to steal furtive glances at your nonexistent pursuers. Unless there is a sudden downpour, even lynch mobs hate the rain, you will be dead in seconds.

If, however, you have all the time in the world, you can commit suicide by acquiring a bank loan or marrying a spouse that everyone in your family is opposed to.

These two will kill you alright, but they take forever and are more painful than rat poison.

Ted Malanda is the Associate Editor, Nairobian

Visit his blog at https://tedmalanda.wordpress.com/