The Humor Code (16 page)

Discussing our options with Rutta, we decide our best bet is to try to track down this woman Amelia. So we pile into the van, which we've renamed the “Hotbox” because of its lack of air-conditioning, and head off into the bush. Deeper and deeper we drive into the backcountry,
past verdant stands of banana trees and through rocky, remote valleys. The rain clouds have passed, and the hot African sun beats down on the van. “Welcome to Tanzania,” Rutta cracks as we inch down a treacherous series of switchbacks, the rock-strewn dirt road nearly tearing out our transmission. Every now and then, we come across somebody ambling down the road, and Rutta pauses to ask directions. More often than not, these passersby climb into the vehicle to show us the way. Soon we have the equivalent of a small village crammed into the van, all of whom profess to know where Amelia lives.

The dirt roads soon regress to little more than rugged trails, spindly tree branches scraping against the sides of the van. “This is the end of the road,” announces Rutta, parking at the end of a dusty footpath flanked by rugged fences of tied-together sticks. At the end of the path, we find an elderly woman in a faded shirt and skirt working in a meager field. She regards us, frowning, and shuffles on bare feet over to a small, mud-walled shack. We follow her inside and sit on the ground in the murky, fragrant interior. Yes, she says, her name is Amelia. Yes, she's from Nshamba. Her dark eyes fix on Rutta alone, hardly acknowledging Pete's and my presence at all. Her white hair frames a rigid grimace.

Then Rutta mentions
omuneepo
. Amelia flinches, startled. “
Omuneepo
?” she asks, leaning forward. But the moment passes. Her poker face returns. “I don't know anything about that,” she tells Rutta in Swahili. Rutta doesn't buy it, pushing her to say more. Fine, she relents. Maybe she had the disease once, as a young woman. “But that was 60 years ago,” she grumbles. She doesn't remember anything about it.

But what about what happened after? prompts Rutta. Didn't she treat people with
omuneepo
? Yes, she admits, she treated sick people. But she can't recall what she treated them for. We sit there, dumbfounded, as flies buzz about our heads. Beams of sunlight slice through the dusty gloom, radiating from holes in the walls.

She's afraid, Rutta tells us when we step outside for a moment. “In Tanzania, some people are killed if they are practicing witchcraft.”

Undaunted, we press on. “I was eight years old when there was war between Uganda and Tanzania, and I still remember it,” protests
Rutta. We explain to her that Pete's a university professor, that we've heard the rumors about
omuneepo
and we're eager to hear the truth.

But Amelia just shakes her head, making it clear it's time for us to go. Whatever she knows about
omuneepo
, she's taking it with her to the grave.

Jason Kamala, the
principal of the vocational school in Kashasha, recommended we talk to Kroeber Rugeiyamu, Tanzania's first indigenous psychiatrist. He's retired now, Kamala told us, and lives not far from the school. So one warm afternoon, we pull up in front of Rugeiyamu's home, which looks like no other home we've seen in Tanzania—or any other house we've seen anywhere.

A tall, sloping cone of rock, concrete, and corrugated metal rises from the earth, like an industrial-strength igloo. The house is a modernized version of the region's traditional woven-grass huts known as
mushonge
, we learn from Rugeiyamu, a slight, gray-haired man with a wise smile and bright eyes. “My father was content with his
mushonge
, but I am a medical man,” says Rugeiyamu, guiding us around his property in a remarkably spry manner, considering he was born in 1928. So, for his
mushonge
, Rugeiyamu mixed the best of both worlds—the traditions of his homeland and the ideas he adopted while studying medicine in Great Britain. The outhouses out back feature subsoil fertilization systems to feed his banana trees and vanilla vines. In the depths of the hut, past the grain storage area and wood-fired ovens, a dusky library overflows with books—the plays of Shakespeare, a biography of Nelson Mandela, a copy of
The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. When the tour is over, Rugeiyamu deposits us in the main room of his
mushonge
, where, surrounded by soaring concrete pillars and a cathedral-like ceiling, we sit on the straw-covered ground and pass around a gourd filled with pungent fermented wine made by locals crushing bananas with their bare feet.

From his distinctive perspective, from his fusion of the old and the new, Rugeiyamu offers us his take on
omuneepo
. “It's hysteria, isn't it?” he says with a knowing smile, as though this was obvious all along. More specifically, mass hysteria, the spontaneous communal
eruption of hysterical symptoms, often a response to stress. According to Rugeiyamu, the Kashasha pupils and other schoolchildren who came down with the laughing disease had lots to be stressed about. “Life was different for the students before they went to school; They had freedom,” he says. “At school, there were strict limits to freedom. And this was a form of expression: the children started laughing. Rather than protesting, they were laughing.”

This makes sense from what we've learned. While the Kashasha school sounds far from ghastly, it was clearly not an easy place to go to school, with its windowless dorms and uncomfortable chairs. And since it was one of the first boarding schools of its kind in the region, the schoolgirls were likely unprepared for the religious-based limits on their largely liberated childhoods. As Rugeiyamu suggests, they had reason to protest.

While Rugeiyamu didn't live in this part of the country and didn't witness the
omuneepo
outbreak himself, in later years while working for the ministry of health, he was dispatched to other schools where similar symptoms erupted. And always, he says, he found evidence that something was wrong. Serious overcrowding. Poor food quality. A headmistress who had gone AWOL, leaving the school rudderless. “It's a form of complaint,” he concludes. “They have no alternative form of expression.”

A few years ago, Christian Hempelmann, a Texas A&M professor of computational linguistics and an avid humor researcher, decided he wasn't sure about the claim in Provine's book
Laughter: A Scientific Investigation
that what happened in Tanganyika in 1962 was an example of the contagiousness of laughter. It just didn't seem to fit into what we knew about laughter, he told me before our trip. So he scoured the psychological literature available and, in a 2007 article published in
HUMOR: The International Journal of Humor Research
, he came up with the same conclusion as Rugeiyamu.
²²

The evidence to support this theory is compelling. Historical surveys of 140-plus outbreaks of mass hysteria between 1872 and 1993 found that half of all cases occurred in schools just like Kashasha, and the majority of the victims were women—young women, in particular.
²³

And laughter, it turns out, has occurred in other cases of mass
hysteria, at least the more physical kind known as motor mass hysteria. I learned this when I called Robert Bartholomew, an Australian sociology professor who's an expert on UFO scares, witchcraft terrors, dance manias, headhunting panics, imaginary air raids, and other bizarre human behavior.
²⁴
“With mass motor hysteria, there have long been reports of laughing that go on for long periods of time intermittently,” Bartholomew told me. From his extensive computer databases, he called up a variety of those reports: The Klikushestvo shouting manias of the beleaguered later years of imperial Russia. Outbreaks in strict primary schools in turn-of-the-century Europe. Occurrences amid substandard factory conditions in twentieth-century Singapore. Bouts in a down-and-out Canadian sardine packing plant in 1992. Incidents among Nepalese schoolgirls in 2003. In all these cases, said Bartholomew, “the common denominator was they were under, without a doubt, extreme stress.”

The fantastical symptoms of
omuneepo
and other communal manias might seem like something from an exotic time and place. And, sure enough, mass motor hysteria is less common in more modern parts of the world. But that doesn't mean what happened in Tanganyika can't still happen right in our own backyard.

“Have you heard about this thing going on right now in Le Roy?” Latif Nasser, a Harvard grad student researching
omuneepo
, asked me when I gave him a call. He's referring to the news that in the New York factory town of Le Roy, high school students were coming down left and right with uncontrollable tics, wild gestures, and crazed outbursts. As in Tanzania, the ailment was primarily striking young women, spreading outward from the most popular in school like some shared secret passing from one girl to the next. Some experts were suggesting mass motor hysteria, possibly due to the stress of growing up in a dead-end town. But many parents rejected the diagnosis, looking for some other cause. Erin Brockovich, the famous environmental legal crusader, even investigated whether the shuttered factories had left behind something horrible in the streams and fields.
²⁵
She didn't find anything.

It's the same way as how people here in Tanzania have shirked our questions, or blamed the strange laughter on witchcraft or dead
relatives or the unknowable hand of God. It's sometimes easier to ignore these episodes, or look for a culprit, than to accept them for what they are: a collective cry for help.

On our last
day in Tanzania, Rutta remembers something. He's heard rumors that at a nearby school, kids had been acting strangely. He suggests we check it out, hopping in the van with more haste and eagerness than we've seen all trip. Maybe our obsessive-compulsive tendencies are rubbing off.

The school's principal, a matronly woman in a pink pantsuit named Margaret Shilimpaka, greets us when we arrive. She tells us the co-ed school recently updated its curriculum from home economics to more contemporary, practical skills like hospitality training and food services. Looking around the scattering of modern buildings on a grassy knoll, it's hard to conceive anything majorly wrong here. But yes, Shilimpaka tells us, her students have been losing control. “There are many,” she declares, eyes widening for emphasis. “They start laughing, crying, ‘I like this, I don't like this.' ” She shakes her head. The last two years, she says, have been “very, very bad.”

We ask to see some of the victims, and she has a teacher fetch the most serious cases. They return with four girls and one boy, all with short-cropped hair and matching gray-and-white school uniforms. They sit quietly, eyeing us curiously, looking like typical high school students. But they're not, they tell us; something's been happening to them: shouting and laughing and convulsing in their sleep. Dreaming that somebody is out to get them. Drinking gallons of water at a time, as if they're dying of thirst. Becoming dizzy and passing out in the middle of the day. Waking up in the night to find they've torn off all their clothes. Screaming and clutching at their throats, as if someone were strangling them. Lashing out at those around them, and causing others to turn violent, too.

In the midst of the students' accounts, I ask each of them how long they'd been at the school when these incidents first occurred. One by one, they respond. One month. Two months. A few weeks. Pete and I exchange glances. A pattern like that is hard to ignore.

Now the students have questions of their own. “Why are you here?” they say, their eyes anxious and pleading. Do we have medicine for them? Can we tell them what, exactly, is wrong with them?

Pete pauses for a moment, collecting his thoughts. “This has been happening for many years in Tanzania. Mostly to girls your age,” he says as Rutta translates. “And we think it's because of nervousness. Anxiety. Stress. You have worries and you have symptoms in your bodies. It's normal for being away from home for the first time.” This happens all over the world, he tells them—to overworked office workers and nervous mothers and stressed-out cheerleaders. Above all, he says, it's not dangerous. The tense energy in the room dissipates, understanding and relief passing over the students' faces.

Yes, maybe the laughter of
omuneepo
and the laughter of everyday life are inherently different. But it's also true that these expressions share the same fundamental DNA. They're both basic, primal signals, designed to alert, to communicate, to connect, and to disseminate. They tap into the core of what we are as social creatures, verbalizing from one person to another what often cannot be said in any other way: either that everything is in good fun or, in the case of hysteria, that something is wrong. And maybe sometimes we're so busy trying to find reasonable explanations for it all that we miss this underlying message altogether.

No, Pete says to the students, they don't need medicine to get better. They just need time and support. If they're feeling anxious or upset or homesick, I add, they should find someone to talk to—a teacher, a friend, anyone at all who's willing to listen.

Or maybe they just need a good laugh. As we've learned from our time here, laughter is a far more powerful social force than most people realize. It can turn strangers into compatriots, crowds into communities, friends into lovers. And most of all, it signals that everything is going to be all right. If these students can joke and laugh with their colleagues, maybe they won't feel so beleaguered. Maybe they won't feel so alone.

“It will all be okay,” Pete continues. “There is nothing at all to worry about.”

Or as Rutta would say, “Hakuna matata.”