Anger and bitter hearts: the spread of suicide in northern Ugandan families

Henry ObokeDepartment of Mental Health

Gulu UniversityP.O. Box 166, Gulu,Uganda

E-mail; henry.oboke@gmail.com Tel: +256 782 786 616

Susan Reynolds Whyte*Department of Anthropology

University of CopenhagenOester Farimagsgade 5

DK-1353 Copenhagen, Denmark E-mail: susan.reynolds.whyte@anthro.ku.dk

Tel:+45 35323477

*Corresponding author

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Anger and bitter hearts: the spread of suicide in northern Ugandan families

In many societies, the phenomenon of suicide provides a particularly powerful example of how something sinister might ‘run in the family’. In the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda, concerns about its capacity to spread increased during and after the Lord’s Resistance Army war. Based on interviews with bereaved families in 2016 and historical material on suicide, we offer an analysis of suicide as an approach to the contagious connections of kin. Successful and attempted suicides were often preceded by affective contamination of family relations through feelings of neglect, humiliation, abuse, indignation and resentment that made hearts bitter. Anger finally moved people to take their lives, often leaving behind questions of liability. Suicide requires that we consider these questions together with notions of personhood and mutuality of being. The concept of affective contamination contributes to the understanding of both suicide and contagious kinship connections.

Keywords: Acholi, suicide, kinship, contagion, affect

At first Josefu seemed suspicious of our interest in the death of his son, but then the story simply poured forth in an unbroken stream, as if he had it ready to tell. It was on Christmas Eve that the 17- year-old boy hung himself. He had been dead just three weeks at the time we sat with his father on a verandah in the small trading center. Donald was the eldest of his six children, a hardworking boy who had managed to build his own house and buy two goats. Josefu recounted:

I had been away and when I returned on December 23rd, the other children reported that Donald had taken some kilos of my unmilled rice to sell. I talked to him—his mother was sitting nearby peeling Irish potatoes—I told him that he should ask me if he needed something…It was a normal family discussion but my wife got annoyed at the way I spoke to our son about the rice and she decided to leave and go to her family home. I don’t know why—I did not want her to go. The boy climbed a mango tree with a rope. Another child saw him and called for someone to come see what he was doing, but no one heard. He jumped and died. After the police came and determined he was not murdered, we covered the body under the tree and buried him next day. Members of his mother’s family came and demanded that I pay them 600,000 shillings [ca. 200 USD] before they would allow the burial to proceed. No one should touch the soil of his grave. The tree was cut in pieces and the roots dug out. They killed a sheep and threw the chyme (wee) on the tree and then burned everything.

Pushed about his relation to his son, Josefu said there had been some disagreement over the allocation of tasks when ploughing together, after which the boy did not like to work the plough with him. He once overheard Donald talking about exchanging one of his father’s chickens for a mobile phone, but he never said anything. He cared about his children and had never beaten his wife of 19 years. ‘When I drink I come home and sleep without bothering her,’ he asserted, denying a common pattern of domestic violence. Josefu told us that the matter would be discussed at a clan meeting in 6 months time. For now they did not want to talk about it and sow hatred among themselves. They were just listening to what people were saying. Did the boy meet cen [shades of the resentful dead]? Other spirits? Josefu concluded: ‘This world has become complicated.’ Josefu gave his account in a matter-of-fact tone. It was only when speaking of his brother’s wife that tears formed in his eyes: ‘She thinks I’m proud with many sons who will take the family land.’ He believed that she had set up the murder of their father.

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After the talk with Josefu, the two of us speculated that there was more to the story. He seemed to be hiding something. Had Donald sold some of his father’s rice to buy nice food for Christmas because his father had not provided anything? If it was just a normal family discussion, why did Donald’s mother suddenly decide to go back to her own home in another district? By chance, a few days later, we ran into someone who knew about the case. She said that Josefu had threated his son with a knife and sent his wife packing. He was arrested and kept in jail for two days.

Nine months after our first meeting, we heard a fuller alternative to Josefu’s version from Oloya, a neighbor and relative, who had attended the clan meeting to discuss the suicide.

Josefu is violent; he always beats his wife and children, and quarrels with his brothers every day. He was not abducted [those forced to fight for the Lord’s Resistance Army are often thought to have been brutalized]; it’s his character. He drinks a lot. He’s a rice trader, an agent for his relatives in town who have a rice mill. He grows tomatoes and cabbage and uses the money for drinking. He had been drinking trans-night on the 23rd and went home very drunk in the morning. He carried a big knife and told his son he was going to kill his wife, the boy’s mother. After nearby relatives intervened she left, and Donald went to his grandmother’s home nearby, removed ropes from the goats tied there, and hung himself.

At the clan meeting, Josefu’s wife’s family said he should properly marry the mother of all these children. But he has still not paid bridewealth, only the 600,000 for claiming the children, and she has not returned to him. Some of his family members say he should pay kwoor [liability for death] to her family. He is of a clan that has had many suicides—some say there is cen in his lineage. If you think of suicide it will push you to do it. The elders should try to stop the cen...or else clan members should get saved [join a Pentecostal church].The several accounts of Donald’s death raise questions about how contagion

might work within kinship connections. Two patterns are evident. The treatment of the tree and corpse and the speculation about cen spirits within a kin group suggest that something dangerous might be transmitted and replicated through touch or social connection. We shall refer to this form of spread as ‘contagion by transmission’. The discussion of Josefu’s interactions with his family alludes to another dynamic, which we call ‘affective contamination’. The emotions at play within intimate relations, intensified by alcohol in this and many cases, may corrupt them to the extent that terrible consequences ensue, requiring reflection about culpability. We propose that this pattern of affective contamination is key to understanding contagious kinship connections.

In his essay on what kinship is, Marshall Sahlins (2013) argues that it constitutes a ‘mutuality of being’ in which people ‘live each others’s lives’. As he himself points out, his principle of mutuality fits well with a long tradition of anthropological work on the ‘dividual person’ constituted of relationships. Most of his selections from the ethnographic literature illustrate positive aspects of existential sharing, many of them symbolic affirmations of solidarity and unity. He admits that often the closest kin have the worst quarrels, but sees such breaches as failures that include their own ideal (2013: 24). and does not develop the negative potential of mutuality. In this article, we explore that other side of mutuality, showing how sinister forces may also run in families. In contrast to Sahlins, we move from cultural analysis of symbols to the specificity of practice. Where he writes of kinship in a fairly generic

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way, we follow our interlocutors’ concern with particular relations such as Josefu’s interactions with his son Donald, with his wife and her family.

Ethnographic research in many parts of the world, especially the Global South, describes suicide as deeply embedded in kinship tensions and the everyday conflicts and perceived injustices of domestic life. Situating suicide as an anthropological problem, Staples and Widger write that ‘..both the causes and consequences of suicidal behavior are relational. ..one of the most important lessons that the anthropology of suicidal behavior has to offer is that the act occurs within a nexus of bodies and relationships, in which “self” and “other” provide some form for meaning but always collapse back into each other…’ (2012:194). Those bodies and relationships are almost always ‘family’ in the broad sense of intimates by blood, affinity and everyday familiarity. As Münster and Broz (2015:17) state: ‘Anthropological theorizing on suicide…seems to agree that most suicides entail elements of accusation and revenge or of an indictment against wrongdoers in kinship affairs..’. Thus suicide is understood (and contested) within broader negotiations about the morality of kinship (Widger 2012). Where the psy-sciences have a strong presence, suicide may be seen as an outcome of individual mental illness; this is not the case for most of the non-Western societies where anthropologists have worked. Instead, suicide may be considered a matter of ‘taking relationality to extremes’ (Strathern 2014). As deeply relational, persons destroy not only their own lives, but also something of the lives they share.

LOOKING FORWARD AND BACKWARDThe material on which this paper is based comes largely from a series of interviews that we did together in Gulu District in 2016. Henry Oboke’s PhD project on suicide prevention looks to a future when suicide in Acholi will decline. He has trained 63 lay counsellors to document attempted and executed suicides in their parishes, and to provide sensitisation and counselling that might help avert suicide. We interviewed six of these lay counselors about cases of suicide they knew. They also introduced us to homes where we were able to have long conversations about seven suicides that had occurred in the past three years. In addition, we talked at length with four people who had attempted to kill themselves. In five of these 11 cases, we spoke to more than one family member. In Koro, where so many deaths had happened, we discussed suicide with the traditional clan chief (rwot Koro) and on another occasion, with his council of elders. In all of these discussions, Henry was at pains to offer help to families and individuals and to explain about the lay counsellors who were available to assist towards a better future.

Looking back was made possible because of material assembled by Paula Hirsch Foster, an anthropologist who worked in Acholiland between 1955 and 1959. From inquest and court records, she derived information on 122 suicides and 10 attempts that occurred between 1925 and 1954. Intending to write a chapter for Paul Bohannon’s edited volume, African Homicide and Suicide (1967 [orig. pub. 1960]), she also left notes from some long interviews on the topic. Foster never published her suicide material; working through it, we like to think that we are continuing the task she undertook with such effort and care.

THE DISORDERS OF WARIn 2012 and 2013 a series of articles in Ugandan national newspapers and in the local Acholi Times described and decried the rising number of suicide cases in the Acholi sub-region of northern Uganda. The journalists mentioned several factors assumed to

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be responsible: alcohol, poverty, domestic violence, land disputes, trauma and depression. But the principle underlying cause named in all of the articles was the twenty-year war between the government and the Lord’s Resistance Army with its concomitant confinement of the population in camps for Internally Displaced People. As the chairperson of Koro, one of the sub-counties worst affected by suicide, stated to a reporter: ‘the social disorder left by the war makes some people prefer to end their lives with the hope of escaping from misery’ (The Monitor November 4, 2012). We can recognize here something of the ‘moral panic’ about suicide in Africa that Meghan Vaughan (2012) has described.

Researchers too have traced a relationship between Acholi suicide and the 1986-2006 war. Psychiatrists and public health professionals carried out studies in the camps, while the war was still on-going, and later. They found remarkably high rates of PTSD, depression and suicide ideation among interned civilians (Ovuga et al. 2005, Roberts et al. 2008, Pfeiffer & Elbert 2011, Dokkedal et al. 2015). In his empirically rich study undertaken during the war, Dolan (2009) found suicide in the IDP camps to be one consequence of the ‘social torture’ of internment. In 2007-8, shortly after the war ended, a qualitative study by a team of health professionals used psychological autopsy to examine 20 suicides—17 by men and 3 by women. In contrast to the earlier studies, their findings did not show that mental illness such as PTSD and depression were the main causes of suicide. From the accounts offered by their bereaved informants, their analysis found ‘psychosocial factors’ to be likely reasons for suicide; these included loss of hope, desperation, loss of dignity and self-worth, shame, and loss of control over social situations. The authors attributed these feelings to failure to adjust to the challenges of the war, which had such disorganizing effects on Acholi families (Kizza et al. 2012a, 2012b).

The material we have assembled on suicide in Acholiland supports Kizza and colleagues in locating its immediate cause within disturbed familial relations. They call these ‘external stressors’. However, these relations can hardly be termed ‘external’ if we follow Sahlins in thinking of kinship as ‘mutuality of being’. The notion of contagious connections assumes commonality rather than individually internal and socially external ‘stressors’. We follow the emphasis our interlocutors placed on affect within intimate relations: quarrels and humiliation, anger and shame. At some remove, commentators and researchers associate suicide with the war, but those close to a suicidal event experience it in terms of emotional disturbance within family relations.

In this, there are parallels to other studies. From Sri Lanka, Widger (2014) considers the distinction between suicide there and suicide here. At a distance, suicide is explained in terms of developments in political economy, the poverty of farmers, youth frustration, or problems of Buddhism. Suicide here is experience-near and deeply embedded in family problems and conflicts. It poses questions not about why someone took his or her life, but about who in the family or household drove the person to do it. Before we turn to these questions, however, we must attend to Acholi ideas about what might convey suicide to other people.

CONTAGION AS TRANSMISSIONIn the narratives of Josefu and his neighbor Oloya, we can discern the notion that suicide is transmissable through contact or connection. The hanging tree and its roots had to be cut up and burned so that the pollution of suicide could not spread to others; members of the household are in particular danger since most people kill themselves at home. Beyond physical contact, kinship connection is invoked as a mode of

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transmission. People say that the spirit of suicide runs in ‘families’ in the broad sense of kin groups; Oloya noted that there were many suicides in Donald’s clan and that there might be a cen spirit in his lineage. He and other interlocutors mentioned cen spontaneously; we did not ask about it specifically. As Victor and Porter (2017) show, the notion of cen belongs within a broader Acholi conception of ajwani, ‘dirty things’ that pollute and spoil. Cen has received special attention in efforts to deal with the social and psychological consequences of war and may now have greater weight than it might earlier have had. In relation to suicide, however, it seems to have enduring pertinence; it was described to Paula Hirsch Foster long before humanitarian interventions in recent times.

If contagion is about the spread of something through touch or connection, then one type of contagion consists of the repetition and multiplication of a phenomenon through transmission. Here, like produces like. HIV begets HIV; suicide causes more suicide. Acholi people say that the material that touched a suicide might make others kill themselves, or might be used in malicious sorcery to move someone to end his or her life. Thus did Josefu note that Donald’s body was not taken inside the house to await burial next day, as is the case in a normal death. It was left to lie covered outside under the fateful tree. The hanging tree and its roots were cleansed with the chyme of a sacrificial sheep, chopped and dug up and burned; no one was allowed to touch the grave soil. The normal ritual of throwing a handful of soil into the open grave was prohibited.

The perception that the morbidity of suicide can spread by way of contact has been widely reported in East Africa. There, as in many parts of the world, suicide is considered a ‘bad death’ that poses a danger to survivors. Bohannon’s pioneering edited volume contains many examples. LaFontaine (1969:110-11) wrote that suicide among the Gisu was treated as contagious, especially to relatives and close patrilineal kinsmen of the deceased. The hut of the dead person and the tree from which he hanged himself had to be destroyed; the spirit of the suicide was pacified by killing a sheep in order to prevent ‘the contagious evil’ from spreading to other members of the family who might also kill themselves. Similar practices obtained among the Luyia people of Westen Kenya, where it was also reported that ‘intimates of the deceased’ were at greatest danger from such contagion (Bohannon 1969:177). Concerning the Luo of Kenya, linguistically related to the Acholi, Wilson (1967:193) wrote that suicide brought the condition called chira (a kind of pollution consequent upon transgression) to members of the clan. The immediate family was most affected and had to perform cleansing rituals before they could again interact freely with others. The general pattern in these reports is that suicide could spread through touch or physical proximity as well as social proximity in the form of kinship closeness. These notions of contagion correspond to the concepts of pollution analysed by Mary Douglas (1966) in a book that appeared six years after the original publication of Bohannon’s volume.1

Foster’s material assembled 60 years ago and our own current investigations reveal similar themes of contagion, with a particular Acholi turn. In a case similar to that of Donald, where another 17-year old boy hanged himself after a quarrel with his father, a sheep was sacrificed both to cleanse the site where the tree was cut down and burned, and also to cleanse the person who first found the boy hanging. The physical site of suicide is treated as potentially contagious: if a person hangs himself in a house, the offending roof beam, or even the entire house, is destroyed. While the principle holds, it was not always possible to realise it in practice. The Acholi word for suicide, deene, means to hang oneself, and it is applied even to the increasing use

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of self-poisoning with pesticides/herbicides or pharmaceutical drugs. But in these latter cases, people sometimes die in hospital so the destruction of the morbid material and cleansing of the site are not so easily done. We did not hear of any efforts to purify hospital wards; in fact suicides, whether attempts or successful, are quickly removed from hospitals to avoid police involvement, since suicide is a criminal offence.

Even more pertinent to our interest in kinship is the Acholi concept of cen, the resentful spirit of a person who died by violence, by the agency of someone else, in anger or who was not buried respectfully. These cen spirits are thought to afflict those who perpetrated or witnessed violent death, and there has been much concern with them in the aftermath of war (Meinert and Whyte, forthcoming; Behrend 1999). A suicide can become cen, especially if he or she died in anger after a quarrel, humiliation, or false accusation. One of the reasons for killing a sheep or a goat when dealing with the corpse of a suicide is to appease that vengeful spirit, which might cause others likewise to kill themselves. People say that some clans or lineages have cen that brings many suicides among their members. According to this line of thinking, an ‘original suicide’ whose spirit was never appeased, repeats itself among current and future descendants. There are hints of this idea in the old inquest records examined by Foster: ‘It is a custom in their clan that when angry they kill themselves’ (of a suicide on December 17th, 1945); ‘there is a history of suicide in the family’ (May 27, 1948); ‘they say he killed himself after getting family ghost’ (28 August 1949).

In our own interviews, we heard this idea of transmissable suicide fairly often. After a suicide, people speculated about whether there had been cen in the lineage. The widow of a man who had talked about suicide remembered that he had told her: ‘If in our lineage there was someone who drank poison, then I would also do it.’ He implied that there was no cen in his ancestry, but in the end he did kill himself. And this brings us to the relation between cultural discourses of contagion, and the actual practices of suicide that we encountered. We never heard of anyone whose suicide was explained by having come into contact with the morbid material of another suicide.2 Nor was cen alone considered the primary cause of a suicide. As Chief Jeremiah Ajwayo Odongo explained to Paula Foster so long ago, what is key is quarrels (daa) and anger (kiniga): ‘If you have a cen …in the clan, then even if there is a little anger in your heart, the cen will add to it, take away your whole heart, and you go and commit suicide.’ Cen enhances the anger, which has another source, an intersubjective one that is specific and highly personal. One of the lay counselors trained by Henry even used the notion prophylactically when he urged a man whose wife attempted suicide to end the affair that was making her angry and unhappy: ‘If she kills herself because you brought other women, she could become a cen and cause all your future wives to commit suicide.’

In contrast to this unusual didactic deployment of the concept, cen often seems to be a rather impersonal force. A suicide would not necessarily know the name or

1 It is noteworthy, however, that Bohannon and his contributors, were very attentive to kinship structure and strains, and specific social relationships, beyond the cultural analysis of pollution that was Douglas’ main interest.

2 In the same way, many people in East Africa warn that the froth of someone having an epileptic fit should never be touched because it is contagious. But one never hears or reads of an actual case of epilepsy attributed to this cause.

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circumstances of an earlier suicide that had become cen. Despite its implications of social proximity, cen remains a rather abstract conceptualization of how kinship unites people and their fates. Like morbid material that had been in contact with a suicide, the shade of a suicide mediated suicide. Contagion by transmission was at one remove, so to speak, and efforts to deal with the property and spirit of a suicide required distancing, as has also been described in a study from southern Uganda (Mugisha et al. 2011). This type of contagion was not about the first order experience, the immediate sociality, the quarrels, the value judgements and intense affect that were so prominent in most discussions.

Much more important than connections to morbid material and vengeful spirits were intimate relations among the living. Even Chief Jeremiah, who was at pains to instruct Foster about the principles of cen and suicide in the 1950s, said that cen alone did not make people take their lives. He ended the interview by telling her: ‘If you want to write, you should write there are three reasons for suicide: anger (kiniga), shame (lewic) and people failing to control the world (piny oloyo dano- literally, the world defeats people).’ The following example is a striking instance of these three reasons closely interwoven.

‘SHALL SEE’: ANGER AND INDIGNATIONOlaa’s mother died when he was very young and he grew up with a stepmother Matilda and her son Ochieng. As adults, the two men lived and worked in homes close to their parents, Olaa with his seven children and Ochieng with his three. Olaa drove the family ox plough, and suffered injuries from that task. Once the animals broke his hand and he often developed painful wounds that healed very slowly and left his fingers deformed. He let it be known that he suspected his stepmother of using witchcraft to cause these afflictions. She was offended at this and reported her grievance to her own family and her sisters-in-law.

To relieve his pain, Olaa used to drink together with his stepbrother Ochieng. Ochieng was expert at mixing sackets of commercial spirits with local brew to make it stronger. Sometimes he had to be carried home and once he was hospitalised after a binge and resuscitated. In November 2012, Ochieng died after being drunk for three days. As is the custom, a second funeral rite and family meeting were held a few months later to settle matters relating to the death. It was events at this meeting that pushed Olaa to take his life.

Matilda used the occasion of the family meeting to complain about the accusation of witchcraft. Olaa was instructed to stop such talk and pay a fine to his stepmother. Then one of Matilda’s sisters-in-law spoke up. She was angry about the accusation against Matilda, asserting that there was no witchcraft in the family, and ending her tirade with the threat that whoever called Matilda a witch ‘shall see’. Those words are taken as a threat of death.

According to his father, who told this story to Henry, Olaa was angered at the words of his aunt. He moved aimlessly about the homestead, crying. He went to his own house, came back to the crowd of kinsfolk, and seemed restless. An hour later, he fell dead. His father remembered that he had given Olaa acaricide to spray the oxen against ticks and he believed that Olaa had drunk it when he went back to his house. They buried Olaa and called another family meeting, where the sister-in-law was found guilty of provoking Olaa to death. She was instructed to pay kwoor, acknowledging her liability, because her words had made Olaa so distraught that he took his life.

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When a quarrel or humiliation flared into anger and suicide, there was often a family meeting afterward with the implicit or explicit attempt to apportion blame for the suicide. In a sense, suicides can be treated as homicides with the same obligation to pay compensation (kwoor) to the ‘owners’ of the dead person. (Kwoor does not necessarily imply intention to kill, but it apportions responsibility and attempts to re-establish cosmological and social balance disrupted by death.) At the least, people insist that outstanding payments for children and wives who committed suicide should be made good before their burial, as we saw in the opening case of Josefu and his son Donald. This ideal of restitution and reconciliation, of putting relationships in order, reflects the value of harmony and the recognition that a preferred configuration of relations was disturbed (see Porter 2012).

Ochieng may have killed himself by alcohol, but his death was not seen as suicide nor was there any intimation of contagion by transmission. It seems that Olaa had been suffering from his painful injuries for some time, but his father’s account did not attribute his suicide to that distress. Rather it pointed to the quarrel, the humiliation before the whole family, and Olaa’s anger, which brought things to such a dramatic head. This focus on a critical event—a quarrel where affect reaches a crisis point—was typical of many of the suicide stories we heard.

In an analysis of suicide of among Toraja people in Indonesia, Hollan suggests the term ‘indignant suicide’ to denote the common situation where a person kills himself (victims are usually male) because he feels he has been wronged or offended, usually by a close family member: ‘…the suicide is an indirect expression of the victim’s sense of hurt, disappointment, shame and rage for having been maltreated’ (Hollan 1990:365). He argues that such suicides are predicated on a commitment to traditional norms and expectations about how kinfolk should treat one another; as Sahlins wrote, failures encompass their own ideal. People feel injustice if they are deprived by kin of what they clearly deserve or strongly desire. Much of the pattern Hollan traces is congruent with the affective contamination we see in Acholi suicide. Feelings of indignation, related to maltreatment, humiliation, and anger arise within family and domestic relations, and they are, as Hollan suggests, often based on disappointed expectations of support, respect and sympathy. Donald was abused by his father, Olaa by his father’s sister, and, as we shall see below, Moses felt that his parents favoured his sisters’ needs over his own.

CONTAGION AS AFFECTIVE CONTAMINATIONThe pattern of spread we call ‘affective contamination’ was by far the most commonly described by our interlocutors.3 They asserted that anger and bitter hearts lead to suicide—feelings that arise from quarrels, humiliations, and betrayals within families. Time and again, we heard that people kill themselves because of some immediate or long-standing conflict in intimate kinship relations. Rarely did anyone suggest that suicide was the culmination of depression or some other mental illness. If they used terms that professional psychologists recognize as emotional disturbances, they spoke of ‘leaking’ or ‘bitter’ hearts (cweer or kec cwiny) caused by problems in social relations, and of the anger (kiniga) that arose when conflicts flared up—anger that might drive the resolve to end ones life.

We see affect not as an element within an individual psyche, but as a force of encounter that arises and shifts within relationships. ‘Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon…Affect..is the name we give to those forces….that can serve to drive us toward movement. … Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the

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world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations. ….At once intimate and impersonal, affect accumulates across both relatedness and interruptions in relatedness…’ (Siegworth & Gregg 2010: 1-2). Affect is thus an essential aspect of ‘mutuality of being’. Yet it takes the notion of mutuality beyond Sahlins’ rather static formulation into the realm of action and interaction, of affecting and being affected.In a somewhat similar way, recent work on domestic moods draws on Heidigger’s principle that being is always ‘being-with’ and entails attunement to others with whom one lives in close proximity. Domestic moods are defined as ‘..the assemblages of intersubjective affective states that coalesce in a given household’ (Gammeltoft 2018:584).

3 Elsewhere Lotte Meinert and I have written about the contagion and contamination of violence in everyday life after the war. There we suggested that violence was experienced as something alien that requires a response. In contrast, the argument here is that contamination happens within—as part of—sociality.

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Bohannon, Paul. 1967. Homicide and Suicide among the Bantu Kavirondo. In African Homicide and Suicide, edited by Paul Bohannon. New York: Atheneum.

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Dolan, Chris. 2009. Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda, 1986-2006. New York: Berghahn Books.

Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Finnegan, Amy C. 2010. Forging Forgiveness: Collective Efforts Amidst War in Northern Uganda. Sociological Inquiry 80(3): 424–447.

Foster, Paula Hirsch. 1955-1959. Field notes. Deposited in Foster Archive, African Studies Library, Boston University.

Gammeltoft, Tine M. 2018. Domestic Moods: Maternal Mental Health in Northern Vietnam. Medical Anthropology 37(7):582-596.

Harlacher, Thomas, Francis Xavier Okot, Caroline Aloyo Obonyo, Mychelle Balthazard, and Ronald Atkinson. 2006. Traditional Ways of Coping in Acholi: Cultural Provisions for Reconciliation and Healing from War. Gulu: Caritas Gulu Archdiocese.

Hollan, Douglas.1990. Indignant Suicide in the Pacific: An Example from the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 14: 365-379.

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Unlike contagion by transmission, the dynamic of affective contamination is not one of replication. The danger of suicide does not come from other suicides so much as from intersubjective affective responses. In her study of the spouses of alcoholics in France, Fainzang (1996) argued that alcoholism was contagious but not transmitted. Spouses were intensely affected, even sickened, by the heavy drinking of their mates. But they did not become alcoholic. She describes a kind of bodily participation through the smell of alcohol on the other’s breath, the feelings of fear at the possible arrival of the drinker in bad company, dreams that he or she was drinking again. Fainzang suggested that alcohol is polluting; it spoils and destroys, not by spreading alcoholism, but by the feelings and symptoms it inspires in the spouse. It is this sense of contamination within intimate relations that best captures the most

Imberton, Gracia. 2012. Chol Understandings of Suicide and Human Agency. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 36(2):245-263.

Kizza, Dorothy, Birthe Loa Knizek, Eugene Kinyanda, and Heidi Hjelmeland. 2012a. Men in Despair: A Qualitative Psychological Autopsy Study of Suicide in Northern Uganda. Transcultural Psychiatry 49(5):696 - 717.

____.2012b An Escape from Agony: A Qualitative Psychological Autopsy Study of Women’s Suicide in a Post-conflict Northern Uganda. International Journal of Qualitative Studies of Health and Well-Being 7:18463

____.2012c Alcohol and Suicide in Postconflict Northern Uganda: A Qualitative Psychological Autopsy Study. Crisis 33:95-105.

LaFontaine, Jean. 1967. Homicide and Suicide among the Gisu. In African Homicide and Suicide, edited by Paul Bohannon. Pp. 94-129. New York: Atheneum.

Meinert, Lotte and SR Whyte. 2017. “These things continue”: Violence as contamination in everyday life after war in Northern Uganda. Ethos 45(2): 271-286.

_______. Forthcoming. Legacies of Violence: The Communicability of Spirits and Trauma in Northern Uganda.

Mugisha, James, Heidi Hjelmeland, Eugene Kinyanda, and Birthe Loa Knizek. 2011. Distancing: A Traditional Mechanism of Dealing with Suicide among the Baganda, Uganda. Transcultural Psychiatry 48 (5):624-642.

Münster, Daniel and Ludek Broz. 2015. The Anthropology of Suicide: Ethnography and the Tension of Agency. In Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Destruction, Personhood, and Power. L. Broz and D. Münster, eds. Pp. 3-23. Farnham: Ashgate.

Ovuga, Emilio, Jed Boardman, and Danuta Wassermann. 2005. Prevalence of Suicide Ideation in Two Districts of Uganda. Archives of Suicide Research 9(4):321-332.

Pfeiffer, Anett, and Thomas Elbert. 2011. PTSD, Depression and Anxiety among Former Abductees in Northern Uganda. Conflict and Health 5(14).

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common contagion of suicide in Acholiland. Like a spouse’s alcoholism in France, suicide in Acholiland is contagious but not transmitted. However, affective contamination leading to suicide is somewhat different than the sickening contagion of alcohol adduced by Fainzang. In the accounts we heard, it was not the alcohol itself that was contagious or polluting. Rather, relationships were contaminated by hurtful interactions, causing a person’s heart to become bitter, until some event triggered anger that drove him to suicide.

In the cases of Josefu and Olaa, alcohol seems to have tainted familial relations and it was indeed an element in many of the stories we heard, as other researchers have also discussed in connection with suicide in northern Uganda (Kizza et al. 2012). In fact, alcohol is mentioned as a suicide factor in studies from several

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Sahlins, Marshall. 2013. What Kinship Is—and Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Siegworth, Greogry J and Melissa Gregg. 2010. An Inventory of Shimmers. In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Siegworth, Pp. 1-25. Durham: Duke University Press.

Staples, James and Tom Widger. 2012. Situating Suicide as an Anthropological Problem: Ethnographic Approaches to Understanding Self-Harm and Self-Inflicted Death. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 36(2):183-203.

Strathern, Marilyn. 2015. Afterword: Taking Relationality to Extremes. In Suicide and Agency: Anthropological Perspectives on Self-Destruction, Personhood, and Power. L. Broz and D. Münster, eds. Farnham: Ashgate.

Vaughan, Meghan. 2012. The Discovery of Suicide in Eastern and Southern Africa. African Studies 71(2): 234-250.

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Widger, Tom. 2012 Suicide and the Morality of Kinship in Sri Lanka. Contributions to Indian Sociology 46(1&2 ):83–116.

Widger, Tom. 2014. Suicide in Sri Lanka: The Anthropology of an Epidemic. London: Routledge.

Wilson, Godfrey. 1967. Homicide and Suicide among the Kenyan Luo. In African Homicide and Suicide, edited by Paul Bohannon. New York: Atheneum.

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parts of the world (Widger 2014, Imberton 2012). We suggest that what alcohol did was to intensify or allow freer expression of tensions and conflicts that already existed in relationships. Oloya, Josefu’s relative, noted that Josefu’s harshness toward his eldest son began when the boy was still young. Violence was in his character and infused his interaction with his brothers, wife, and children. Whereas Fainzang’s informants saw alcohol itself as a contaminant, our interlocutors spoke of the actions of the drinkers, what they did when drunk, the feelings they expressed and the affects evoked in others. Many recognized the role of alcohol in affect. It is not only, as one woman said, that you have to be drunk to kill yourself, but that drinking intensified quarrels, abuse, and bitterness.

Explanations in terms of contaminating affect are not new. Of the 116 records of suicides and attempts we were able to retrieve from Foster’s transcriptions, reasons were alleged in 80 cases. The majority of these suicides (53) were attributed to domestic quarrels and shame, that is, they were recognized as involving anger and humiliation arising in relations to intimate others. Twenty cases were ascribed to escape from unbearable physical illness, and six to grief at the death of a loved one. One person was said to have killed himself because he felt useless to anyone, another because of impotence, and another because of neglect. It was striking that mental illness was named in only four cases. Then, as now, articulated explanations focused on quarrels, not on ‘mental health’. In Foster’s inquest records, four cases from 1947 and 1948 noted that the suicide was an ex-soldier. On January 22, 1948, Odur was found hanging in his hut after a violent quarrel with his wife and daughter. The coroner wrote: ‘Had been moody and uncertain temper since returning from the army.’ But it was the quarrel (daa) that was recorded as the immediate reason for suicide. Family dissension was by far the most common reason given, and that discord was instantiated in some specific event or agent—the immediate trouble that caused people to take their life. Sometimes the cause was dramatic and momentous: on June 14, 1949, 30-year-old Bajilio Otoo hanged himself after spearing his wife

and two year old son to death Alberto Oke killed himself on September 3, 1946, because his brother called the

council of elders to hear the allegation that Alberto had twice impregnated his brother’s wife while the brother was away in the army. Alberto’s widow stated that, ‘his shame caused his death.’

In other instances, the alleged reason for suicide in the records seemed insufficient. Did people actually kill themselves because of one quarrel or insult or instance of neglect? As Foster wrote of the inquest records, they reveal the trigger or immediate cause, but not the underlying ones. There are entries like the following: ‘Two days ago he asked me to pick cotton for him. I refused. He said I must hate

him’. (statement by the mother of a 25 year old man who died on February 2, 1938)

‘She killed herself after getting annoyed for being falsely accused that she suggested to her daughter-in-law to leave her son’. (9 September 1949)

Often the brief reports mention a quarrel as the immediate cause, but leave open the possibility of a longer-running tension between relatives: ‘Her co-wife says she killed herself after a domestic quarrel due to jealousy’.

(August 10, 1949) ‘He was very angry that his mother abused his wife that she was a prostitute and

called him a drunkard’ (a middle-aged man who hanged himself August 21, 1933)

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‘A man quarreled with his second wife, accusing her of telling people that he was impotent and weak. He got angry and hanged himself.’ (December 17, 1945)

The event of the quarrel (daa) and the anger (kiniga) that flared up and urged one to suicide could have been flashpoints in a persistent stream of bitterness.

Our own interviews with bereaved family members and people who had attempted suicide were of a completely different order than the terse entries in the inquest records that Foster assembled. Still, the pattern of pointing to a contaminating event as the immediate cause of suicide was evident. Because we had long discussions, we heard more background: heavy drinking, running arguments, disrespect, jealousy, impotence, insults. But almost everyone we spoke with started their account by describing an incident that indexed or instantiated simmering tensions and seemed to bring them to a head. In ten of the eleven cases we investigated in depth, people emphasized a family conflict and the anger it evoked.

Of these cases, only one involved a former soldier, an abductee who became an LRA fighter. Recalling his suicide attempt, he told us a long story about his bitterness toward his father’s brother, and the quarrel with his first wife that caused anger to overtake him, so that he tried to swallow 100 tablets of amoxicillin. It was only when Henry questioned him about his mental state after years in the bush that Okumu spoke of the consequences of having killed so many people (‘I cannot even remember how many,’ he said). He explained that he has a recurring dream that his heart is being removed. He wakes breathless and sweating. ‘One big dream comes and tries to take my life.’ But in his account, it was the nagging and false accusations of his wife that evoked the anger that drove him to suicide, not the trauma of years with the LRA.

Over and over, we heard accounts of eruptions within domestic relations. As one person put it: ‘we don’t have problems with people from afar, but within our own circle.’ Those problems could simmer for long, making hearts bitter. As the elders of Koro explained: ‘Cweer cwiny [bitter hearts] within homes is difficult to take to court. Solutions must be found in the family, but if not a person might find their own solution like suicide.’ Bitter hearts and anger were related, they explained; the difference, it seems, was that bitterness might smolder for months or years, while anger could explode abruptly into the resolution to die.

‘I WILL LEAVE IT FOR YOU’ Flora told how she was harvesting crops at her mother’s home one day when her husband Moses came with their three children and his bankbook. He told her that he was going to work in a far place and would put money in the bank for her to use. ‘That day I felt numb after he left, as if my body knew something was wrong. If I had reacted, I might have saved him.’ Very soon she found out what had happened. Moses had quarreled bitterly with his parents, and even beat them, uttering the words, ‘This wealth that you are talking about, I will leave it for you’. After bringing the children to where his wife was working temporarily, he went back to their house near his parent’s home. His mother, perhaps thinking to smoothe over the row, sent her daughter’s daughter to bring him some tea. The door was closed and she pushed it open to find his body dangling from the roofbeam. The girl ran to her grandmother crying ‘I found my uncle on the rope.’ They called the police, who did not beat the body as they sometimes do, since suicide is a crime in Uganda. The family destroyed and burned the house, but they did not sacrifice an animal since they are ‘born again’ Christians who do not perform such rituals.

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This critical event culminated several years of disagreements between Moses and his parents. Two of his sisters, like many women in the Acholi sub-region, had left their husbands and returned to their father’s home with their (in all six) children. Fortunately, their father was able to support them; when he received his gratuity upon retirement as a health worker, he had put up a building with rooms he could rent out. But this arrangement annoyed Moses, who thought he should get the income from one of the rentals while his sisters could share that from the other. His father argued that Moses was a builder and had an income, so he did not need the help. Flora recounted:

Moses used to drink and there were always quarrels (daa). He used to tell his mother, ‘even this land here at home, I will leave it for you’. At the time, she thought it was a joke, now she sees it was serious…Between us there was no bitterness, but with his parents. His mother disturbed his head. He used to say he had pain in the heart. His father was proud with his wealth—paying fees for the children of his daughters but not those of his son.

There were always quarrels, according to this widow of a suicide, and where there are quarrels, blame and bitterness are present. ‘I wanted to leave this world for her’ and ‘I will leave the happiness of the world for you’ were phrases we heard in other accounts. They seem to imply personal resentment against someone who has offended or hurt you: not just ‘I want to die’ or ‘I want to leave this world’, but something more in the nature of ‘I hope you’re satisfied, it’s all yours’. Whether narratives merely outlined the nature of conflicts, as did this one, or included actual accusations and attempts to apportion blame, they flagged the fissures in mutuality.

RESPONSIBILITY AND MUTUALITYWhat can the study of suicide contribute to anthropological understanding of contagious kinship connections? The ethnography from northern Uganda shows first of all that contagion takes two forms: a symbolic one of transmission through touch and social connection; and a more immediate concern with affective contamination. It is this latter pattern of affective contamination that we have emphasized and that ties into several of the themes in the anthropology of suicide.

A distinction is commonly drawn between psy- discourses on suicide, which consider it in terms of dynamics internal to an individual, and social discourses, which formulate it in terms of relations to others, even to spiritual entities. This distinction leads anthropologists to reflect on assumptions about personhood in various societies, not least the West and the Rest. Recent overviews tend to reject the dichotomy between a Western egocentric and a non-Western sociocentric personhood, and between explanations of suicide that focus exclusively on self or on other (Staples and Widger 2012:194). Assumptions about the relational nature of persons do not necessarily exclude the recognition of the boundedness of individuals (Münster and Broz 2015:16). In many, if not most societies, persons are recognized as both individuals and dividuals.

This is not a new discussion in anthropology, but it has a special relevance for the study of suicide. Münster and Broz (2015) argue that there is a ‘tension of agency’ in both biomedical and vernacular considerations of suicide. Taking one’s life assumes intention; the very definition of suicide rests on determination to kill oneself. But to what extent is this a matter of individual will or of forces that move the agent to take such drastic action? This question and the concomitant ‘tension of agency’ are perhaps less urgent if we truly relinquish the opposition between an individual and dividual notion of personhood. Or, as Strathern (2015:208) clarifies in an Afterword to their collection: ‘…relational persons have their own kind or relations, and pari

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passu their own kind [of] individuality’. Nevertheless, the question of responsibility remains, both for scholars of suicide and for the people trying to deal with it. It is here that ethnographic studies of suicide make a special contribution to studies of contagious kiniship connections.

The affective contamination that spoils kin relations, makes hearts bitter and explodes in anger can be attributed to ‘distant’ structural violence, wars and shifts in political economy. But as we and others have argued, it is experienced as embedded in quotidian domestic relations and in conflicts with specific others with whom ones life is inevitably entangled. Therefore, taking ones life is often seen as a matter for which those intimate others might be blamed. Apportioning responsibility can be a way of recognizing the contamination that has infected the mutuality of kinship and of trying to deal with it. This seems clear in the narratives we heard about suicide in northern Uganda.

The real challenge is to sort out the immediate disturbed relationships that were often seen as instrumental in moving someone to suicide. Ideally there should be a family meeting, with participation from both the mother’s and father’s side. While such meetings are usual after a death to work out plans for the bereaved, they are weighty in cases of suicide to determine whether anyone is liable and to decide if payments are to be made (as we saw in the case of Olaa). Compensation (kwoor) required for a homicide may also be demanded for a suicide if there is agreement that someone drove the person to take his life by abusing or mistreating him. Whether the compensation is actually paid is another matter, but the very suggestion confirms that quarrels and mistreatment are not only potentially mortal, but that responsibility must be apportioned in order to set things right.

The pattern of deciding guilt was evident in a counter-instruction left in a short letter by a man who killed himself after a history of heavy drinking and intermittent impotence (though he fathered five children). He wrote: ‘The matters that the Paramo clan should know: if I am not there, no one should blame the body of anyone. Thanks.’ The suicide thus anticipated the clan meeting that would follow his death and denied that any other person was responsible.

Trying to put things right after a suicide is an aspect of a more general value in Acholi ethos: social harmony. Especially in the light of the war, researchers and Acholi activists have emphasized the significance of forgiveness, cleansing and compensation as ways of asserting the ideal of harmony in Acholi culture (Harlacher et al. 2006, Finnegan 2010, Porter 2012, 2016). The idealization of harmony stands in stark contrast to the bitter hearts and anger that can simmer and explode in familial relationships.

Surely many things run in families, including dark moods, styles of interacting and patterns of eating. But when affective contamination is thought to cause a death, mutuality is brought into dramatic relief. The response to suicide, even if it is only talk rather than compensation payments, reveals assumptions about morality and personhood and mutuality. To share kinship relations, to be a person constituted in many ways by those relations, means acknowledging the responsibilities that family members have for one another, for better or for worse.

In a larger sense, the ‘moral panic’ about suicide in the Acholi sub-region after the war, which led to Henry Oboke’s project to train lay counselors, appeals to another kind of community. The efforts to intervene, by lay counselors, religious leaders, elders, and other non-kin, acknowledge tensions within families and try to defuse them before they develop into bitter hearts and anger.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe research on which this paper is based was supported by the Danish Foreign Ministry’s Consultative Research Committee for Development Research under the project ‘Post-conflict Primary Health Care’ led by Professors Emilio Ovuga and Morten Sodemann (ethical clearance SS3678 from the Uganda National Council of Science & Technology). We are most grateful to the people who shared with us their accounts and their views. This includes those who had attempted suicide, the families of those who died, the village counselors, and the Rwot Moo and council of Koro. We would like to thank Beth Restrick of the African Studies Library at Boston University, where the Foster archive is located. She was wonderfully helpful in scanning and sending the unwieldy material. We are also grateful to Martha Lagace; without her organization of the archive and explanations to us in Gulu, we would never have found these historical records. Many thanks as well to Lone Grøn and Lotte Meinert for their comments on earlier versions of this paper and to two anonymous reviewers whose critical suggestions helped sharpen our argument.

DECLARATION OF INTERESTWe have no conflict of interest in relation to this study.

NOTES

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