Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic

On March 18th, 1962 a boarding school in the north west of what is now known to the world as Tanzania was forced to shut, after its pupils were gripped by fits of uncontrollable hysterics for a period of more than 6 weeks...

The laughter had begun with a group of three girls sharing a private joke, but spread quickly around the school, despite the best efforts of their teachers to stop it. In this particular case the giggles were so infectious that the laughter simply would not stop – although it is physically impossible to laugh continually for an extended period of time, the schoolchildren were continually setting each other off again after a short break, and the fact that all 160 of them were around each other continually, 24 hours a day meant that there was simply no let up. Not even the night-time would stop the uncontrollable mirth; throughout the night, only little isolated pockets of laughter would spring up, but it didn’t matter because the next day the situation seemed just as funny, and that would set everybody off again.

In actual fact it is not strictly true to say “everybody”. Only around a hundred of the students were affected, and not one adult seemed in on the joke, which was how it remained until the decision was taken to close the school down, and the students were sent back to their homes, in communities dotted around the local area. But as soon as this happened, the laughter spread like the proverbial wildfire, and nobody seemed safe from its grip.

Soon the predominant sound as you travelled around this part of the country, on the western edge of Lake Victoria, was related to laughter; you might hear a single guffaw emanating from behind a mud-hut, or a cacophony of cackling as you passed a field. More worrying, however, were the other symptoms which started to develop in some individuals. People would literally be laughing until they started crying, even until they started screaming in some cases. People would be racked with such a litany of giggling that they would be finding it difficult to breathe. Others still developed odd rashes as the mass hysteria continued, and weeks turned into months. At the same time, however, nobody was actually recorded as having suffered any permanent damage.

At least three other schools in the area were forced to shut down, as well as the original school which was forced to shut a second time in June of 1962 after it had reopened in May. Finally, at least 16 months after the first manifestations of this mass hysteria occurred, the laughter finally came to an end, and life was able to get back to normal once again.

But what caused this risible onslaught? Well nobody is quite sure. The historical details are quite sketchy, with nobody having recorded the original joke that set the students off, and no mention being made of whether people were laughing as a result of having heard the joke or simply because other people were laughing. Certainly there has been a great deal of work done into laughter and it has been found that it really IS infectious ; in 2006 researchers at University College London discovered that it triggered very powerful activity in the Pre-motor Cortex, which stimulates subsequent motor activity.

But quite what caused the laughter to spread so far and for so long remains merely a matter of speculation. Could it have been linked to some sort of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) leak? This seems very unlikely – unless there was some sort of bizarre and highly complex dentist or farmer-led conspiracy being hatched, particularly given the fact that the laughter seemed to follow the movement of laughing people, rather than spreading out, like a gas would.

Others have suggested it may have been a result of the period of history that the Tanganyikan people found themselves in – they had only recently won their independence from British rule, so expectations about the future had risen dramatically. However, at this point the nation had yet to be properly defined and established as a formal republic, so the future was, at the same time, uncertain. Perhaps these factors combined could lead to the kind of situation where mass hysteria could manifest? It seems unlikely, but what other explanation is there? And could this type of thing ever happen again?