2023-08-26 08:00:00
Three teenage girls twisted with laughter at the back of a classroom… A priori, nothing unusual. But on January 30, 1962, in the girls’ boarding school in Kashasha, Tanganyika (now Tanzania), the affair degenerated.
In a few minutes, hilarity wins the row, then the whole class. Under the dumbfounded gaze of the professor, the din reaches its climax, the chairs overturn, shouts mingle with laughter… The room is evacuated. Bad idea: like wildfire, the laughter spreads throughout the courtyard, igniting the other classes. Young people bend over backwards, fidget, cry. The situation has ceased to be funny. Of the 159 students in this school, 95 of them are affected by this strange illness that never leaves them. The seizures sometimes stop for a few days, before starting once more. In March, the school is closed and the students are sent back to their villages. It only takes a few weeks for the phenomenon is spreading to the whole of the Lake Victoria region. Everyone is hairy except the authorities: activity is paralyzed. In addition to hysterical laughtervictims suffer severe pain, fainting,Rashesor even respiratory problems requiring hospitalisation. Several thousand people are affected, mainly young people. The epidemic will die out on its own following 18 months.
Many assumptions are made
At first, the medical authorities consider food poisoning or the presence in the atmosphere of nitrous oxide, a laughing gas. Others posit a side effect of malaria, with the disease in some cases causing brain damage. But the tests carried out contradict these hypotheses. Blood samples are sent to Europe, still nothing. No viral or bacterial infections to report. Once the biological causes and the rumors of witchcraft – which at the time were rife – were ruled out, it was psycho-sociological track which, so far, seems the most plausible.
Collective hysteria or mass psychogenic disease
As early as 1962, Rugeiyamu Kroeber, a Tanzanian psychiatrist, put forward the hypothesis of an episode ofcollective hysteria. This phenomenon, now known as mass psychogenic illness (MPI), is quite common. It is most often manifested by physical ailments in cascades within communities, schools or businesses. More rarely, individuals are seized with uncontrollable madness.
The crazy dance epidemic of Strasbourg
The most spectacular example is thedance epidemic which seized Strasbourg in July 1518. For a month, several hundred inhabitants began to dance frantically in the streets. What to make smile… if it’s only the dancers would die of exhaustion one following another. The common trigger for all these episodes: stress. In 1518, Strasbourg emerged from a series of epidemics and famines. In 1962, Tanganyika gained its independence and the expectations towards the youth may have been the source of a feeling of suffocation. From laughter to tears, there is only one step.
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