determined the temper of the lake and therefore the fate of people traveling on it—whether weather would be calm or the waters rough, how rowers would fare in their collective work, whether canoes would be threatened by hippos or meet with unseen rocks.10 Veneration and propitiation of Mukasa was a key aspect of the labor and experience of traveling the lake for Ssese rowers especially. Rowers or fishermen might make an offering for safety at a local, minor shrine or as they worked on the lake.11 A loose network of mediums around the littoral maintained those minor shrines that were scattered around the lakeshore.12 In the early 1880s, Fr. Léveseque, transiting the lake from Buganda to a mission on the southern edge of the lake by canoe convoy, recounted Mukasa serving as a touchstone for rowers in the daily experience of rowing—explaining a hippo’s growl or a slow journey—as well as a means of seeking intercession in difficult circumstances. Ssese rowers offered the lubaale ripe bananas before setting out across the open lake, to “feed” Mukasa, employing rituals that maintained connections between their terrestrial farms and home life and their work on the water.13
Mukasa’s power was formidable and his reach was wide, extending deep into Buganda and far beyond the Sseses.14 The legitimacy of interlacustrine chiefly authority depended on the health and prosperity of a ruler’s population and good relations with the lubaale Mukasa were important to Ganda royal power. Veneration of the powerful god by the Ganda kabaka maintained a connection between the islands and the Ganda royal court.15 The kabaka’s veneration of Mukasa, through offerings of people, fowl, livestock, barkcloth, and cowries at his shrine, and reciprocal gifts of fish from Mukasa’s priests to the kabaka, directed the exchange of symbolic goods between the Ganda court and the Ssese shrine within regular, ritualized festivals.16 Mukasa’s shrines and mediums also offered resources to Ganda and other leaders in dire circumstances. According to early twentieth century ethnographies of the Ganda, just as an individual might seek the cause and remediation of a challenging or serious illness from one of Mukasa’s shrines, so, too, might the kabaka seek counsel with Mukasa’s Ssese medium “if any plague began to rage in the country.”17 In times of difficulty, such as a famine that struck the region in late 1880, the kabaka might send frequent gifts to the central shrine’s medium on the Sseses. In the same era, missionaries reported, kabaka Mutesa relied on consultation with the medium to determine when to make war or travel on the lake.18 Mukasa’s medium also famously brought life in the capital, Kampala, to a halt during efforts to define and address the kabaka Mutesa’s illness in 1879: no one could trade.19 Intimately linked, Ganda rulers and lubaale “were involved in a continuously negotiated relationship” mediated through such exchanges of symbolic goods, maintaining independent “realms of action” as well as reciprocal, mutual obligation.20 On the Sseses and in mainland Buganda, these connections between broader chiefly authority and Mukasa’s power were reinforced historically through connection to specific sites from which the most significant healing power emanated. The person titled Sewoya was, as chief of a major area on the Sseses, historically involved in the ceremonies that annually reconstituted Mukasa’s shrine as a sacred and powerful space, along with the men bearing the names Semagala, Kaganda, and Gugu.21 Thus, many positions of authority on the Sseses related to chiefly mediation of the powers of particular lubaale or of activities around Mukasa’s principal shrines.22 Mukasa’s importance for safe and secure life around the lake—as protector of fishermen and rowers and controller of weather and good catches—meant that the lubaale’s influence also extended beyond Buganda. Royal responsibility for maintaining health and prosperity by mediating cosmological forces also connected other regional kings to Mukasa and to his Ssese priests. In one example, ceremonial “fire” from the Sseses was required for the installation of the bakama of Kiziba, to the southwest of the islands, where it was ceremonially used to cook the king’s food and heat his person; it was kept burning in the palace hearth until a mukama died.23
Historic ritual and political connections between Ssese shrines and the Ganda court provided one logic for interaction between the islands and the mainland, structuring the engagement of political elites and ritual experts around the mediation of cosmological power centered on the islands. The relations that connected aquatic and terrestrial worlds were experienced differently by the people who worked the lake, however, for whom engagement with Mukasa affected life, health, and prosperity in everyday ways. Rowers’ ready invocations of Mukasa as they labored, moving people and goods across and around the lake, point to the lubaale’s role in shaping mobility and security for littoral populations. The lakeshore and the forested fringes of the Ssese Islands were spaces that islanders had to traverse as they went about their days—to fish, to collect water, to travel, to work, or to bring livestock to drink. Gendered but comprehensive use of the lake meant widespread activity at the islands’ edges; the lakeshore was rich with vegetation and fish, a place of fecundity and potential. But nearness to the lakeshore had implications for health and security.24 On the Sseses as elsewhere in the era of Ganda military campaigns and raiding for captives, it was also a space of vulnerability to violence and force for people living on the islands: living permanently near the lake occurred only in extraordinary circumstances, as we will see. The lubaale’s powers mediated those mobilities and potentials for island and littoral communities, linking terrestrial and aquatic worlds through places where the lubaale Mukasa’s powers could be accessed in widespread small, local shrines. These social and environmental aspects of Ssese life and livelihood would influence how islanders and littoral communities engaged with new kinds of illness in the coming decades.
MALADIES, MISFORTUNE, AND HEALING ON THE SSESE ISLANDS AND NORTHERN VICTORIA NYANZA, C. 1890
The circumstances of cosmological power and its mediation would shape how Ssese islanders dealt with widespread illness in the early twentieth century, and, ultimately, the emplacement of colonial public health. Previous experience and extant practice are also central to understanding dynamics of treatment and mitigation of sickness and misfortune that would later emerge around new outbreaks of widespread illness. I here examine therapeutic practices and the intellectual worlds within which littoral communities in Buganda understood illness. By the late 1800s, Ssese islanders and others living along the lakeshore had diverse resources to manage the precarity and prosperity of life and cope with illness and misfortune. Generally, they availed themselves of an expanding, pluralistic set of therapeutic and medical resources that included family members, healers, local shrines, and missions. Within Ganda therapeutic and etiological frameworks, healing an individual’s illness depended on the mediation of spiritual forces and also addressed a wider set of relations: between a person and ancestral spirits; between a person and his or her family, kin, or clan relations; between a person and deities in Ganda cosmologies. Mission healing, too, drew upon a framework that integrated spiritual and material causes of and treatments for illness.
Consulting knowledgeable family members likely provided a first possibility for the sick. Elder members of one’s kin or clan networks might direct a person to locally available botanical remedies, perhaps with the assistance of herbalist healers with specialized knowledge of healing plants.25 More persistent or worrisome ailments drove the sick and their relations to seek further specialized assistance. A healing expert—who might act as a diviner, herbalist, kubándwa medium, or utilize these skills in combination—determined the cause of the illness and set a course for its remedy.26 Treatment-seeking was a social endeavor and healing accounted for a person’s relationships; the involvement of household and kin and attention to social relationships corresponds with the public nature of healing and its overarching emphasis on ensuring collective health and prosperity.27 Healers attended to specific physical or temperamental signs but connected changes to the body and temperament to a wider social and spiritual world. A person’s actions or behaviors, when they contradicted taboos or proscriptions, might cause illness or pain; likewise, behavior or activity that disrupted good relations with ancestors could also cause harm.
Healers might also act on the sufferer’s body, addressing physical manifestations of illness. Detailed descriptions of Ganda healing in practice are rare; historical and ethnographic narratives offer only
