such as the construction of nets and traps were also a central component of Ssese livelihood in the late nineteenth century, as islanders actively exploited the lake’s fisheries, both for their own consumption and to market dried fish elsewhere around the lake. Fishing was “critical to regional diet and the local economy” along the lakeshore.10 Ssese fishing at the turn of the century was sophisticated and complex, involving spearfishing, setting woven traps, and hook-and-line fishing, with gendered and generational specialization.11
Canoe-building and producing the tools of fishing knitted together forest, household, and lake among Ssese communities, as trees became planks for canoes and rowers’ oars, raffia and other fibers caulked the canoes’ gaps and was fashioned into nets and basket traps, and fish provided sustenance and income. These activities involved men and women, young and old, and tied islanders intimately to the lake and lakeshore environments. Large, sewn canoes made from planks of specially selected wood defined long-distance travel on Lake Victoria in the nineteenth century and Ssese expertise was key to their widespread use.12 Contemporary Ganda and European narratives provide a sense of the impressive vessels afloat: they were regularly upwards of forty feet long and four feet wide and manned by dozens of rowers; the prow of some canoes extended with a battering ram or had animal horns fixed to it.13 By the late 1880s, Ssese expertise in boatcraft and rowing was well known to outsiders, as islanders created and manned many of the vessels circulating on the lake—their expertise was, by all accounts, unmatched. Canoes connected the Ssese with their Ganda and Soga neighbors, but also with populations further afield. Sophisticated, impressive Ssese vessels were also imbued with ritual and spiritual significance that connected rowers to the wider powers of the great lake and its deity, Mukasa.14
Ssese islanders had close political, economic, ritual, and military ties with the powerful kingdom of Buganda on the mainland some twenty miles immediately to the north.15 The islands’ intimate links with the Ganda state grew out of political and economic changes in the nineteenth century and made a deep impression on political and economic life on the islands. Over the course of the early and mid-nineteenth century during the reigns of kabaka Suna II (reign c. 1830–57) and kabaka Mutesa (reign c. 1857–84), the Ganda kingdom emerged as a local power and regional empire, incorporating the Sseses and other areas into its sphere of influence.16 Essential to the state’s emergence as a regional power was the development of a navy that could engage local rivals, raid for valuable captives, and incorporate smaller kingdoms around Lake Victoria as tributaries, as well as fleets that captured trade with coastal caravans they met on the lake’s southern shore.17 Plying the lake required diverse and complex knowledge that Ssese islanders, as well as other lakeshore populations, had developed and retained over generations, but Ssese expertise in rowing, navigation, and boatcraft now became instrumental in the growth of the Ganda fleet of war canoes in the mid- to late nineteenth century.18 Canoes and Ssese boatcraft had long linked the islands to communities around the lake, but now served to connect nodes within a wider, regional Ganda sphere of political and commercial influence. Ssese oarsmen played a crucial role in long-distance lake trade and Ganda warfare at the expense of economic stability for island communities.19 Dense populations in Buganda were sustained by production in outlying estates, with the Sseses among them. Thus, by the late nineteenth century, the Ssese Islands were a “province” of Buganda, with Bugala Island (the archipelago’s largest) serving as the anchor of Ganda governance.
Politics oriented around the largest and most populous island, Bugala, as well as the large, easternmost island of Bukasa, while ritual power centered on the powerful lubaale Mukasa’s principal shrine on nearby Bubembe Island. Bugala, also referred to simply as “Sese” by Europeans, is an irregularly shaped island that curves southwest away from the Buddu shore before angling sharply to the south; a wider northern section joins a wider southern section at the narrow neck at Bumangi. Directly east of the southern half of Bugala is Bubembe Island, and beyond it, the second-largest island of Bukasa. The islands cluster close to one another and many lay less than a day’s row apart, such that travel between the islands was frequent in the nineteenth century.20 The miles-wide expanse of the lake defined the islands’ orientation to Buganda and Busoga on the mainland to the east and north, but the mainland lay closer on the west, with the islands separated from Buddu by only a narrow channel. Within the archipelago, canoe travel was by no means easy or reliable, however. Changeable weather and squalls—as well as occasional encounters with hippopotamuses—made the journey uncertain and dangerous for rowers on both large and small vessels.21 By the late nineteenth century, islanders could connect to mainland markets and communities and Europeans wishing to travel could generally find rowers to make the journey.22
Ssese integration into the Ganda state required grafting centralized, elite royal politics onto the necessarily dispersed governance of the islands. Within the Ganda bureaucracy, province-level authorities held sway over rulers of districts of the larger islands or of individual, smaller islands; nnamasole, the Ganda queen mother, traditionally held influence over land and politics in the Sseses, constituting another connection between the palace and islands.23 Political authority on the Sseses focused at the village level, within district and island hierarchies, such that powerful chiefs ruled the larger inhabited islands. Particular to the individual islands were hereditary chiefs, powerful political figures whose titles and political-ritual roles were linked to control of particular areas.24 These men were the primary interlocutors of missionaries and colonial authorities, and, alongside other key chiefs, would have appointed village-level leaders.25 Clan affinities also structured relations between islands and mainland. The historic leader of the powerful lungfish clan, titled gabunga, held symbolic and practical power on the islands as a consequence of his central position between Ganda political power and Ssese-based ritual power.26 Gabunga held the role of “admiral” or “head of canoes” of the Ganda fleets, reinforcing links between Ssese rowing and the Ganda state (a related role, titled kweba, served as provincial chief). Lungfish clan members also mediated worship at the lake deity Mukasa’s principal shrine on Bubembe Island, stitching together clan, palace, and the islands. Other clans with connections to rowing and boatcraft also shaped political life on the islands.27
Dramatic changes in the 1880s and 1890s redounded to alter life on the Sseses. The arrival of Arab-Swahili traders at Lake Victoria and in Buganda in the mid-nineteenth century, followed by the arrival of increasing numbers of Christian missionaries in subsequent decades, made for vigorous economic and cultural exchange around the lake.28 At the same time, rivalry within the Ganda palace made for increasing volatility toward the end of Mutesa’s reign in the 1880s, turmoil that only increased as his son Mwanga took power in 1884. Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic factions had developed in the palace, particularly among young elites, early in Mwanga’s reign; the kabaka’s sense of threat from external forces, particularly Christian converts and missionaries, led to escalating violence.29 Roughly simultaneously, outbreaks of both bovine pleuropneumonia and rinderpest (diseases affecting cattle and other ruminants) flowed through the region in the 1880s and 1890s, with serious, although not necessarily uniform, mortality among cattle-keeping societies’ herds.30 Epidemics of serious human illness overlapped with cattle diseases and, along with crop failure and famine, devastated individuals and households. Importantly, this convergence of misfortunes “undermin[ed] one of the key functions of the kingship as a key point of patronage and distribution”—spelling political trouble for the new kabaka.31 Amid these wider disturbances, ongoing violence toward different religious communities, and Mwanga’s increasingly onerous demands for taxes and labor, the kabaka was overthrown in a palace coup in 1888. British imperial interests, drawn in in the 1880s amid an outcry over religious persecution of Anglicans and attracted by the region’s economic potential, became involved in palace affairs first under the auspices of a chartered company. Uganda then fell into the British sphere of influence in East Africa mandated by the Anglo-German treaty of 1890. A formal protectorate followed in 1894. Under the new regime, the child Daudi Chwa was installed as kabaka and the power of the Ganda ruling council (the lukiiko) was preserved. Land that had previously been the kabaka’s prerogative to disperse
