Anger and Bitter Hearts: The Spread of Suicide in Northern Ugandan Families

ABSTRACT

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

Acknowledgments

The research on which this paper is based was supported by the Danish Foreign Ministry’s Consultative Research Committee 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 counsellors, 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 organisation 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.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

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.

3 Elsewhere Lotte Meinert and Susan Whyte (2017) have written about the contagion and contamination of violence in everyday life after the war. They 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.

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this paper is based was supported by the Danish Foreign Ministry’s Consultative Research Committee 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).