ensure health and prosperity.52 Throughout, geography, climate, and environment historically played a role in shaping agriculture, economic activity, and social organization in the region.53
Agricultural sophistication and diverse food production were central to regional populations’ prosperity.54 On the highlands and near the lakeshores of the region, early populations in the first millennium CE farmed endemic crops such as eleusine (finger millet), squash, and sorghum. The availability of different crops at different times of year within seasonal rainfall regimes provided security for populations, as staggered harvests of annuals combined with perennial crops to safeguard against famine.55 Uptake of non-endemic plants and their cultivation as food staples characterized ongoing, gradual agricultural innovation spanning several centuries before 1500 CE. Such innovation resulted from connectivity with other parts of the continent, as well as the circulation of people and goods around the western Indian Ocean. Alongside endemic sorghum, squash, and eleusine, people cultivated new arrivals from Asia, such as peas, taro, and banana, and then subsequent imports from the Americas, such as sweet potatoes, cassava, and new species of beans.56 In some areas, such as the Burundian shore of Lake Tanganyika, people also cultivated oil palms, a tree species originating in western Africa.57
Generally gendered labor regimes emerged. Clearing work (such as that needed to prepare a field for yams) was typically done by men, while the daily tending of fields and crops fell to women.58 Cattle-keeping further augmented agricultural production and food security in multiple ways, and cattle clientage bolstered political authority and stitched together individuals and households or compounds.59 Fishing also flourished along the lakes and rivers, relying on sophisticated technical and labor inputs, fitting into agricultural production, and augmenting food security.60 Specialized production of valued trade goods such as iron hoes, salt, dried fish, palm oil, and barkcloth occurred alongside the circulation of foodstuffs and livestock produced within households, driving patterns of trade that connected different ecological zones.61 Scattered deposits of iron and salt throughout the region led to hubs of smelting and salt production among interlacustrine societies and catalyzed trade in hoe blades and salt; production of pottery, as well as barkcloth from ficus trees, was also widespread.62 Diverse agricultural production, herding of cattle and small ruminants, and exploitation of heterogeneous natural resources facilitated the growth of populations from roughly 1600 CE onward. Local and regional trade connected these growing polities.
The intellectual resources available to the populations who would ultimately contend with epidemics in the late nineteenth century were rooted in pivotal political, economic, and social changes that occurred in the region between 1500 and 1900. In this era, monarchies rose and expanded, clans and healing cults evolved and spread, caravan routes stitched the lake and coastal littorals together, and people and goods circulated with unprecedented vigor and range.63 Institutions of kingship and chiefship that emerged in the region were generally patrilineal, structuring and consolidating power within royal family lines. Political power and social prestige cohered around the royal or chiefly house and its expansive network of dependents and kin. A king’s residence and its associated court functioned as a political hub, with large royal households comprised of adult monarchs and their wives and children, as well as important senior relatives, alongside countless laborers and people who filled particular ritual roles.
Political authority rested in a ruler’s ability to ensure enduring prosperity for his followers or subjects. This involved strategic decision-making—waging war, levying tax or tribute, managing production and access to land, distributing surplus resources—within a framework of mutual obligation. Successful kings also acted to mediate the power of ancestral and other spirits upon their people through maintenance of rituals that kept society and ecology in balance; chiefship came to blend the political, ritual, and material.64 While political structures and institutions were heterogeneous and took on locally specific forms, some root consistencies were also distributed over a wide geographic area, such as the institution of sacred kingship in the form of the Rwandan and Urundian mwami, the Bugandan kabaka, and the mukama in Bunyoro and Buhaya. From palace to province to district to chiefdom to village, relations of mutual obligation knitted together administrative structures across increasingly large territories. Interlacustrine royal and chiefly power from around 1000 CE had intertwined with that of clan leaders and healers to set the rhythms of daily life and keep them in tempo with spiritual forces—to mark, for example, when to begin cultivation, how to seal a new alliance or relationship, when and how to make war, or what measures to take to avoid widespread illness.65
Clans that provided social connection and cohesion, sometimes in counterpoint to royal political ideologies, also flourished in this era. Clans bound people to one another locally and sometimes regionally.66 As a hierarchical, patrilineal kinship relation, clan affinity manifested through the common association with particular totems, most often an animal or plant that had played a historic role in a first-comer or ancestor’s life, as well as through taboos observed, such as the common avoidance of particular foods.67 Clans linked people in familial and fictive kin relations to a sense of place and space, tying people to land and giving sites meaning and significance within local cosmologies and social worlds. Relations between clans, and thus clan members, defined a person’s social world by determining patterns of marriage and access to material and spiritual resources, while also locating individuals and families within durable social groups.68 Locally, clan elders and senior family members controlled the allocation of land. Clan elders also maintained shrines for and spirit mediums of important ancestors to connect the worlds of the dead and the living, thus ensuring access to powerful healing resources fixed to specific sites around the interlacustrine region.69
Cults of healing and mediumship created ways to access social, spiritual, and material resources for many people, whether on the margins of political and social power or deeply connected to royal and clan networks in the kingdoms.70 Healing of serious ailments and resolution of persistent problems focused around skilled healers and mediums, people who used gifts of connection with diverse spirits to identify causes of misfortune or illness and set a path toward health and prosperity. Some mediums connected people to powerful figures of a society’s past—kings, gods and goddesses, or clan ancestors—or to deities in its present cosmology. Their intercessionary work often reinforced the powers of divine kingship or clan connections. Other forms of mediumship connected people to powers outside of royal and clan ideologies: to territorial “nature” spirits (misambwa) and to spirits of ancestors within a family or household (mizumu).71 As well, kubándwa spirit possession, an ancient tradition that formalized into an institution of possession, mediumship, and initiation early in the second millennium CE, became centrally important for efforts targeted toward healing and prosperity in the region. In the ensuing centuries, the cwezikubándwa healing complex had developed and covered most of the region. It combined established traditions of kubándwa spirit mediumship with the exceptional powers of abacwezi spirits, deities often associated with particular places and/or environments who were also connected by ancient lineages to the ruling dynasties of the interlacustrine kingdoms. Two such deities, Kaumpuli and Mukasa, still influenced people’s experiences of illness and health around Lake Victoria in the late nineteenth century. Cwezi-kubándwa deities and their mediums had particular territorial ranges, representing the system’s grafting onto older, place-oriented misambwa spirits, but also focused around sites of particular power where major shrines were typically located. Healing powers concentrated at major shrines, where resident mediums acted as intercessors between treatment-seekers and spirits or deities, but also could be accessed at other, minor shrines as well as through mediums who lived in a community.72
Nineteenth-Century Transitions in Interlacustrine Life and Livelihood
By the nineteenth century, durable social and political institutions with deep historical roots shaped the everyday lives and intellectual worlds of the people on the Ssese Islands, in Kiziba, and in the southern Imbo who are the central subjects of this study. But also significant
