land was now owned by the British Crown.32 Buganda would remain centrally important to British rule of the larger, multiethnic Uganda Protectorate, but the Sseses receded to the periphery of Ganda, and therefore also colonial, politics.
The 1880s and 1890s were decades of significant change around the Lake Victoria littoral and, indeed, in central and eastern Africa more generally. While we cannot presume a wholesale disarray in Ganda or Ssese society amid the overlapping crises of war, cattle disease, human illness, and famine, it is also clear that death, illness, and insecurity changed daily life—sometimes in temporary responses, sometimes in permanent reorientations. In wider perspective, the potential causes of trouble and insecurity in the 1890s for Ssese islanders and those on the lakeshore were legion. The religious wars that tore Buganda apart in the late 1880s and early 1890s had material consequences, destroying some Ssese households, villages, and boats and leaving some homes looted of livestock and household goods.33 These wars removed able-bodied Ssese men from other work on the island, as they served as rowers on the Ganda fleet.34 The diminishment of agricultural and economic manpower and resources to such a wide and lengthy extent would have made many households more vulnerable to the ravages of infectious diseases. In some cases, new local mobility resulted as people sought temporary assistance from nearby missions or, perhaps, migrated to areas of greater relative security where family or clan connections might offer support. Throughout, people assertively sought healing and amelioration of misfortune within the range of historic strategies and in an increasingly diverse therapeutic marketplace.
| 1 | Finding Sleeping Sickness on the Ssese Islands |
GEOGRAPHY AND environment—the lake and the islands—oriented political and ritual power, while also shaping the types of labor and production that the Sseses provided within the growing Ganda empire. This chapter examines the island contexts within which the illness called mongota appeared and on which colonial energies would ultimately focus in order to illuminate the social, political, and environmental dynamics of widespread illness. A singular aspect of the Sseses that shaped political, economic, and treatment-seeking activity around Lake Victoria was the presence of the lubaale Mukasa’s principal shrine, situated among other sites of healing or cosmological power. I open this chapter with a discussion of the political and ritual dynamics around Mukasa’s shrine and the powers that mediated contact between the Sseses and Buganda before turning to an exploration of the historic sources of illness and misfortune that struck island and littoral communities. I then examine the illness kaumpuli to consider how Ganda ideas about illness as well as practices of managing widespread illness accommodated the rapid change and emerging therapeutic diversity of the late nineteenth century.
Both the nature of misfortune and the possibilities for healing and relief were changing near the turn of the century, with the emergence of a new illness, mongota, that caused people to nod or sleep markedly, as a pivotal moment. This chapter closes with an exploration of changing Ssese responses to mongota. I argue that the advent of mongota catalyzed the deployment of diverse strategies to cope with the illness and death it caused, as well as shifting engagement with European missionaries on the islands. Focusing on how such strategies changed over time, I look particularly at historic precedents of place-centered responses to widespread illness, such as new mobilities or reorientations to domestic spaces and surrounding environments. Ssese islanders made important moves to mitigate the impact of illness and death, and their actions demonstrate historical continuities in responses to widespread illness during an exceptionally disruptive and tumultuous era in littoral life.
The matter of human African trypanosomiasis—of sleeping sickness—will emerge as centrally important to Ssese lives in chapter 2. Colonial and tropical medicine attentions fell on the islands with increasing scrutiny after 1905. Ssese and Ganda ideas and practices around illness, which I examine in depth in this chapter, shaped the field upon which those later sleeping sickness research and treatment efforts would occur. The Sseses proved a particularly influential and productive zone for the articulation of the intellectual and strategic foundations of the German sleeping sickness campaign, ranging from particular ideas about African mobility to specific dosage regimens with atoxyl. The sleeping sickness camp that German researchers ultimately founded on the Sseses provided a springboard for the wider campaign in affected areas of German East Africa, shaping colonial public health strategies elsewhere on Lake Victoria and further afield at Lake Tanganyika. However, in this chapter, I explicitly do not work with sleeping sickness in a European biomedical framework of disease classification or causation, hewing instead to Ganda and Ssese categorizations of illness.
THE SSESE ISLANDS: POLITICS, PROSPERITY, AND DANGER WITHIN THE GANDA EMPIRE
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Ssese Islands were remarkable for their position at the nexus of ritual, military, and therapeutic power within Buganda and the lake’s northern shores. Important for elites and ordinary people alike were Ssese shrines to the powerful lake deity Mukasa, whose presence made the islands a space of power, healing, and potential danger amid the vast lake.1 The intertwining of royal, clan, and ritual power in previous centuries had made Ssese ritualists central to the kabaka’s maintenance of legitimate rule within Ganda royal cosmologies, as well as in other kingdoms around the lake. While the majority of the population occupied a subordinated position within the centralized Ganda state, powers located on the Sseses remained indispensable for efforts to secure prosperity and restore health and made the islands a singular site within littoral political, ritual, and therapeutic dynamics. These social and political worlds of Ssese islanders—created by both long-standing political and ritual relationships as well as recent adaptations to new conditions of life—shaped how people responded to colonial impositions, including those around illness and health.
Within regional cosmologies, the lake and the Ssese Islands were places of significant power.2 Powerful forces of fertility, prosperity, and nature circulated around Mukasa, the lubaale or “national spirit” of the lake, who was associated with fish, rain, winds, children, and especially twin children.3 Mukasa’s main kubándwa shrine sat on the island of Bubembe, nestled in the center of the archipelago; tradition held that the lubaale had been born on the nearby island of Bukasa.4 Ganda and Ssese people seeking healing had diverse sources to consult, but Mukasa’s significant power offered the lubaale’s mediums and shrines a corresponding potency to resolve challenging matters and ensure prosperity. Roscoe and Kagwa’s extensive explanations of Mukasa and his powers attributed “benign” force to the lubaale, characterizing him as a “god of plenty” who “gave the people an increase of food, cattle, and children” and “sought to heal the bodies and minds of men.”5 In addition to desire for successful voyages or productive fishing by people frequenting the lake, others also sought amelioration of illness and misfortune from mediums who, through the lubaale, could identify the cause of trouble and offer direction to address it. Mukasa and balubaale were “indispensable to the common people” as “providers of health and fertility.”6 Childless women sought fertility from Mukasa and his companion Nalwanga; his local mediums would have offered solutions for maladies alongside a family elder or nearby herbalist or healer, perhaps when persistence or complexity suggested additional resources were needed.7 Importantly, Schoenbrun argues, Mukasa and the Ssese Islands provided sources of “information, creativity, and fertility” to ordinary people through practices of gathering and supplication at the deity’s shrine there; they offered resources for realizing self-sufficiency, prosperity, and “respectable adult belonging” to people living on the littoral from the eighteenth century onward.8 People historically accessed these resources at shrines scattered around the lakeshore and at the main Bubembe shrine, assembling in gatherings both large and small. Large gatherings to consult Mukasa at a shrine might occur regularly and rhythmically, focused on the lunar cycle and the timing of the new moon and spaced every three months, or, less predictably, in response to other triggers: a “public calamity” such as widespread illness or famine,
