sleeping sickness camp at Kigarama. Focusing on the local economies of land and labor that shaped the location and trajectory of the camp, it examines the engagement of the Ziba kingdom’s young monarch, Mutahangarwa, with German colonial officials. This chapter illuminates the factors that shaped how and why people sought or rejected the treatments offered at Kigarama, pointing to the importance of clan-based land distribution, seasonal labor, and shifting royal power. I argue that Haya practices of land allocation overlapped with place-centered traditions of royal authority to make Kigarama a space imbued with Ziba political power as well as a site for the acquisition of material resources and access to colonial therapies. This chapter also follows the fortunes of a cohort of new colonial auxiliaries, Drüsenfühlern (gland-feelers), whose work to search for hidden cases of sleeping sickness reveals the complex interplay between royal prerogatives, colonial desires, and individual interest in the thick of the public health campaign. Here, I offer new readings of the spaces and tactics of colonial public health in order to interrogate local meanings alongside colonial intentions and understand the Kigarama camp within Ziba geographies and economies.
Though the Lake Victoria epidemic commanded colonial attention firmly and quickly in the first decade of the twentieth century, German energies in eastern-central Africa soon turned to Lake Tanganyika, where sleeping sickness appeared to spread unchecked. Part III shifts to focus on the littoral of Lake Tanganyika, where German sleeping sickness interventions had begun in parallel to those at Lake Victoria. Part II begins, like parts I and II, with a brief orientation to important social, political, and environmental aspects of life on the coastal lowlands of Lake Tanganyika known as Imbo and areas on the western shore with connections to those lowlands. I focus particularly on contexts useful for understanding the particular dynamics of mobility and illness that shaped anti–sleeping sickness work in the region. Chapter 5, “Mobility, Illness, and Colonial Public Health on the Tanganyika Littoral,” examines mobility between the opposite shores of Lake Tanganyika—the lowlands of the southern Imbo region in German Urundi and the Ubwari peninsula of the Congo Free State/Belgian Congo, areas connected by vigorous trade and migration. I show how lacustrine mobilities and their routes and hubs contributed to the spread of sleeping sickness and came to define the emplacement and scope of subsequent colonial prevention efforts. I piece together the importance of historic mobilities across the lake for life, livelihood, and experiences of illness for linked Rundi and Bwari (and other Congolese) populations. I argue that the parameters and constraints of colonial interventions, particularly bush-clearing work aimed at destroying tsetse habitats, resulted from the vigorous mobilities, distinctive environmental conditions, and heterogeneous populations in the southern Imbo. The book concludes with a discussion of how histories of sleeping sickness and its control help us understand current global health challenges.
A NOTE ON LANGUAGES AND CONVENTIONS
This book relies upon source materials created by speakers of English, French, German, Oluhaya, Kiswahili, Kirundi, and Luganda, some of whom also used distinctive dialects within those major languages. I have maintained German special characters or spelling in use in the early twentieth century, but have standardized German translations of African place-names and terms to reflect modern standardized spelling in the relevant African languages; for example, the word Schauri (German) is written as shauri (Kiswahili); the place Kiguena (German) is written as Kigwena (Kirundi). I follow orthography of the historical languages of the Great Lakes region from David Lee Schoenbrun’s The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Bantu Cultural Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 1997) and modern conventions of the International African Institute for all African languages.
The Ssese Islands, c. 1890–1907
The Ssese Islands, c. 1890
An Overview
LOCAL DYNAMICS on the Ssese Islands in the late nineteenth century played a central role in shaping the epidemiology of sleeping sickness in the early twentieth century and also influenced the nature and trajectory of early research and control efforts based there. Alongside the overview of regional and interlacustrine history provided in the Introduction, I here offer an orientation specific to the Ssese Islands in order to highlight distinctive aspects of Ssese politics, society, environments, and economies that impacted experiences of illness and misfortune as well as efforts to heal and prosper.
A hilly and dispersed archipelago of eighty-four islands in the northwestern corner of Lake Victoria, the Ssese Islands were a distinctive feature of the northern part of the lake.1 The islands’ location and topography shaped islanders’ social and political worlds and livelihoods in the late nineteenth century. Islanders lived within diverse ecosystems: dense forest, mixed grassland with scattered trees, reed-choked swamps, and wide, open beaches. The centers of the islands were drier than the margins nearer to the lake, and covered by grasslands and small clumps of trees as well as and denser forest. Those dense forests and open, grassy areas sloped down toward a shoreline irregularly cut by deep coves and bays. While Ssese populations utilized forest crops and resources, forests were also spaces apart from homes, fields, and grazing lands—sites of burial and therefore places of ancestral spirits, for instance. On some of the islands’ bays and coves, a sandy beach offered a good access to the lake, while in others the shoreline was a thick mass of reeds or stretched into a swamp. The hilly, grassy central areas of the islands provided grazing lands and were often bounded toward the lakeshore by a belt of trees.2 The islands had their highest elevation at their most central points, with elevations sloping down toward the lakeshore. The lake, then, lay below homes and villages, separated from them first by grasslands and then by forest or swamp.
MAP 1.1. Northern Littoral of Lake Victoria. Map by Brian Edward Balsley, GISP.
Ssese villages and their social geography were tailored to the islands’ environment. Villages fit into the mixed forest-grassland ecosystems of the islands’ interiors and homes appear often to have been located advantageously where forest and grassland met. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, Ssese homes were loosely grouped into non-nucleated villages connected by well-worn, meandering paths.3 Typical homes of non-elites were circular, domed constructions with exterior walls of reeds covered in grass thatch, divided internally by barkcloth curtains or reed walls, and with a hearth for cooking inside. Chief’s homes, by contrast, were larger, with multiple poles supporting a broader roof, exterior walls supporting the roof, and a larger interior space divided into separate rooms.4 The typical home, regardless of status, was situated on flattened, cleared ground and set among numerous banana trees, with groves also kept clear of undergrowth to allow growing other crops.5 Crops that later observers considered typical for the Sseses—plantain bananas, yams, and coffee—optimized the heavier rainfall regimes on the lake’s shores and were cultivated alongside vegetable crops.6 Rainfall on the islands was bimodal, with rainy seasons lasting for two months, typically beginning in March–April and September–October, and among the heaviest on the Buganda littoral.7 Within the rainy and dry seasons, cultivation of annual crops and management of perennial tree crops shaped labor demands and dictated bursts of activity. Missionary diaries from the late 1890s indicate that November and December were busy months for planting, as well as a season of relative dearth as final stores were used up and new plants had not yet matured.8 Alongside farming, islanders also
