By Ireneaus Chia Chongwain
The wave of collective hysteria that swept across different schools in Cameroon during the 2007/2008 Academic Year did not only reflect the gangrene that has blighted the country's educational system recently, but also indicated the paranoia mass fainting has generated within the learning environment. Rather than downplay the gravity of the situation, as most administrative officials in Cameroon are wont to doing, a dissuasive, or better still, prevention approach through the subject's frank discussion with all stakeholders would be beneficial.
Girls are, so far, collective hysteria's main victims but no region, denomination, social class and provenance has been exempted from the phenomenon. There are no guarantees that schools which have not yet been affected will not be eventually, since the phenomenon remains highly elusive to scientific explanation and rational thinking. Yet it rages on and those, whose duty would have been to rein it in, were it subject to rational analysis, stare helplessly.
From Collège Francois Xavier Vogt and Libermann, through CETIC Akwa, Government High School Mbanga, Maroua, Cité des Palmiers and Joss, to Collège de la Maturité and Collège Herbert of Souza, the gory details are the same- an epileptic seizure that usually starts with one female student and rapidly propagates affecting other female students, mostly within the same class.
The symptoms are also identical-seizures, loss of consciousness, breathing difficulties, screaming and complaints of pains around the chest. The symptoms may be consistent, but not the diagnoses and conclusions.
News quickly goes round and panic and confusion follows as parents and guardians rush to the school affected to either assist their loved ones or relations, or cart those not affected off to safety. While some victims are taken to hospitals, others are taken to priests and pastors, and in many cases, to traditional healers. The places victims are taken to reflect public perception of mass hysteria.
In a superstitious-prone country like Cameroon, mass hysteria has been largely attributed to demonic practices. To put an end to it, some students and people have either destroyed or looted property in the schools affected, molested or attempted to lynch the proprietors of these schools. Only the timely intervention of the forces of law and order has rescued many of them. It is therefore clear that mass hysteria can have enormous effects.
Confusion generated by mass hysteria is not limited to Cameroon. In 1983 when several Palestinian high-school girls fainted in their class, the media attributed it to Israel poisoning young girls to reduce the Arab population. The Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta later attributed it to mass hysteria and exonerated Israel from the grip of an unfortunate situation that had quickly been transformed into a propaganda war.
From past experiences it is clear that few schools are prepared to handle crises of this nature, were they to happen again, yet the more mass hysteria is understood, quickly diagnosed and clearly labelled, the better the learning environment in most schools will become. Part of a comprehensive solution to the problem would mean understanding why only girls are affected. Authorities in different schools have equally pointed out that some of the students affected were sick. This could have been the case, but is hard to explain why all these students took ill at the same time.
From the recrudescence of mass hysteria in the school milieu in Cameroon, the Secretary of State for Secondary Education, Catherine Abena, last April 16, while on a working visit to Maroua, pinpointed the need to put back in place health structures in different schools to effectively address the problem. Easier said than done as so far no such structure has been put in place.
One of the reasons parents send their children to Catholic schools is discipline and security. Some of the schools that have been hit by the mass hysteria phenomenon are Catholic schools, thus seriously compromising some of the reasons behind parents' choice of Catholic schools. While it would be euphoric to attempt exempting Catholic schools from a phenomenon that is still posing a serous challenge to health and religious officials, no problem is above God.
Human limitation in diagnosing and pre-empting mass hysteria should rather reinforce dependence on a spiritual way out of the problem. Students in Catholic schools should be made to understand that they are not simply "Catholic-students" by designation, but moreso because Catholic spiritual principles should help them in addressing their challenges.
It is said a problem well defined, is one half solved. Rather than function as if they are out of the brink of the mass fainting syndrome, or as if the problem has gone away for good, Catholic schools could adopt a more realistic and preventive approach by discussing the subject with their students and teachers and helping them understand what they should do if the problem eventually affects their school.
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