cattle diseases, war, and human illness had widespread and profound impacts on people on the lakes’ shores and hinterlands, sickening and killing many, driving new local mobilities, and creating new tensions around political legitimacy. Epidemic sleeping sickness followed these other forms of illness and misfortune. Amid rapid change and diverse challenges, the possible resources and strategies available to secure health and prosperity for interlacustrine societies also shifted, as political regimes changed and therapeutic diversity increased. And yet, as the history of controlling illness and securing health amid new epidemics in the region demonstrates, certain political, economic, and therapeutic relationships and institutions continued to be resonant for interlacustrine populations. Their meaning and importance in daily life throughout the era of increasing colonial intervention demonstrates their resilience, even as the grave consequences of late nineteenth-century disruptions make clear the complexity and vulnerability of the political, social, and ecological balances in place.
OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
This book traces the experiences of health and illness in communities that were affected by sleeping sickness and were central to the development of colonial disease-prevention strategies. Three case studies ground the three parts of the book: Part I examines the Ssese Islands of colonial Uganda between 1890 and 1907, Part II examines the kingdom of Kiziba in colonial Tanzania between 1890 and 1914, and Part III examines the Imbo lowlands of colonial Burundi between 1890 and 1914. Each part follows accumulated knowledge, ideas, and practices that changed as the German colonial anti–sleeping sickness campaign unfolded from research on the Ssese Islands to the first sleeping sickness camp in Kiziba to the implementation of a scaled-up campaign in the southern Imbo. Part I focuses on the Ssese Islands as the site of research and treatment development efforts spearheaded by eminent German scientist Robert Koch; these efforts culminated in the development of the Schlafkrankheitslager (sleeping sickness camp) as a model for German colonial strategies. Part II examines how the camp model fit into both precedents of managing widespread illness and changing political dynamics in the kingdom of Kiziba. In Parts I and II, I explore continuities across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an effort to understand the points of reference and intergenerational touchstones that allowed people to make sense of sleeping sickness upon its arrival. Part III pivots to follow how ideas of sleeping sickness prevention that developed out of these experiences at Lake Victoria, which explicitly focused on location and mobility, played out in the particular context of northern Lake Tanganyika. Each part, then, also traces German colonial efforts as connected to those of British and Belgian regimes nearby.
Part I begins with a brief orientation to the history of the Ssese Islands and Buganda in the late nineteenth century. The Ssese Islands, an archipelago in northwestern Lake Victoria and part of the Buganda kingdom, were widely understood to be a hotspot of sleeping sickness in the early twentieth century. This orientation introduces the reader to specific social, political, and environmental aspects of life on the Ssese Islands and the northern rim of Lake Victoria, setting the scene for chapters focused on healing, mobility, and the interaction between established and new ways of addressing illness. Chapter 1, “Finding Sleeping Sickness on the Ssese Islands,” argues that important continuities existed between historic responses to widespread illness and those to seemingly new forms of misfortune at the turn of the twentieth century. It first establishes the general contours of islanders’ lives and livelihoods in the late nineteenth century, focusing on the islands’ political and ritual importance within Buganda and also situating Ssese mobility and livelihood within the islands’ distinctive environments. These elements of life would be fundamental to Ssese experiences of serious illness to come. This chapter then examines the range of responses that islanders and lakeshore populations historically employed in times of illness and misfortune, looking at kaumpuli to highlight responses that involved new mobilities or reorientations to domestic spaces and surrounding environments. With the serious illness kaumpuli as a key point of reference, chapter 1 closes with an exploration of changing responses to an increasingly common form of wasting death, mongota, which European researchers would come to translate as sleeping sickness. It demonstrates that Ssese islanders made important moves to mitigate this new form of illness and death, drawing upon both established strategies for healing and avoiding illness as well as the resources of increasing therapeutic diversity on the islands.
Chapter 2, “Healing Mongota, Treating Trypanosomiasis: Research on the Ssese Islands,” continues to follow the history of mongota on the archipelago, anchored by a research expedition on the Ssese Islands led by German scientist Robert Koch in 1906–7. This chapter argues that Ssese islanders’ experiences of previous misfortune and illness and the diverse therapeutic landscape they inhabited shaped their engagement with entrepreneurial German scientists. Ssese islanders’ engagement with the German expedition’s diagnostic techniques and therapeutic regimens influenced both practical research techniques and theories of disease control that would be exported throughout German East Africa and define the German anti–sleeping sickness campaign. In particular, the historic importance of the Ssese Islands and recent uses of specific sites on Bugala Island, where the German research site was located, significantly impacted Ssese engagement. I examine the advent of the Schlafkrankheitslager, or sleeping sickness camp, and Koch’s attempts to suppress sleeping sickness through the use of months-long regimens of atoxyl, an arsenic-derived drug.
Research on the Ssese Islands led colonial scientists to historic relationships—epidemiological, economic, and social—that connected the islanders to the Haya kingdoms of the western lakeshore, specifically to the kingdom of Kiziba. Kiziba would ultimately become the key site in the region for German anti–sleeping sickness measures. Part II begins with a brief orientation to important social, political, and environmental aspects of life in Kiziba, one of the eight kingdoms of Buhaya in modern northwestern Tanzania, in the late nineteenth century. It offers deeper historical detail on the local factors that shaped royal power and the political economy of land and labor, elements that would shape Ziba and colonial efforts to mitigate the impact of illness. Chapter 3, “The Prince and the Plague: Politics, Public Health, and Rubunga in Kiziba,” argues that the political and social dynamics of sleeping sickness must be understood in the context of another illness, rubunga. This chapter explores the social, political, and environmental factors that shaped Ziba society and wider Haya approaches to illness, healing, and misfortune, including approaches to both rubunga and sleeping sickness. I analyze outbreaks of rubunga (usually translated as bubonic plague) in the 1880s and 1890s to uncover intersections of tactics to prevent disease and mitigate misfortune by Ziba royal authorities and the newly arrived German colonial regime. I argue that rubunga served as a foundational experience for the implementation of both Ziba and German understandings of disease prevention in the early colonial era, during a time of significant change in many aspects of Ziba life. Rubunga provided a practical model of how health and politics could intertwine in the early colonial era, one that shaped subsequent responses to widespread death and disease.
Directly on the heels of rubunga came another widespread illness and, with it, further colonial public health interventions. Chapter 4, “Gland-Feelers, Elusive Patients, and the Kigarama Camp,” explores the creation of the flagship
