the turn of the century.28 Nevertheless, sources discuss that a healer’s interaction with a sick person might involve applying botanical materials on the skin, preparing medicines to ingest, letting blood, or directing smoke or steam onto or into the body, for instance. Ganda healers attended to specific foci of pain, swelling, or irregularity as well as more generalized weakness or malaise, even as they engaged with spiritual or socially grounded woes.29 Healers employed horn cups to draw blood from incisions on affected parts of the body, for example—on either side of the head, in case of headache. A healer might apply also a heated iron implement to cause blisters in order to draw out sources of pain from a particular place deep in the body, or use a blistering agent on sites of swelling.30 A healer might also recommend a regimen of repeated washing of the sufferer’s body with mixtures of particular plants and the drinking of plant, animal, and other tinctures.31 Therapies were also applied to ill bodies: Roscoe approvingly recounted fevered patients sitting under barkcloth steam tents, applying an immersive, surrounding remedy for a particular symptom. Healers might require a sick person or family member to procure powerful substances—bones, saliva, urine—which were used to make medicines or amulets, as well as animals used for augury.32 The occupation, social status, and clan of a sufferer were important to healing, as they positioned a person with regard to taboos, protective deities, or possible transgressions. Ganda etiologies, fitting within a wider moral economy, further accounted for the gender and age of the sick.33 The sick person and his or her family also likely pursued overlapping therapies, shifting strategies if an illness persisted, in pursuit of effective cure.34 These interventions, particularly if the healer was not a medium, occurred in tandem with propitiation of spiritual forces—efforts to properly maintain ancestral graves or shrines, offering gifts of food, livestock, or goods to a medium—as well as complying with a healer’s instructions to restore balance and health to relationships. Alongside efforts to address an individual’s manifestation of illness, healers and mediums also worked to resolve misfortunes on a different scale when illness became more widespread or frequent in Ganda society. Serious or widespread illnesses—those that redounded to impact a household, family, or larger population—might be attributed to correspondingly serious disruptions in relations between people and a lubaale or, conversely, to the behavior of the kabaka, who himself held secure the health of the kingdom’s population.35
Some maladies might resolve with the use of medicines a healer made; others might have historically required consultation with a lubaale or ancestral spirit for resolution. In such cases, islanders would have sought solutions for illness and misfortune from kubándwa mediums, including those of the lubaale Mukasa. Appeals for healing to deities other than Mukasa are less well documented, but Cohen notes that the Ssese Islands were “a veritable hive of deities,” with sixty deities associated with the islands in diverse interlacustrine traditions.36 Several of the powerful balubaale with connections to the Sseses also had lineage links to Mukasa. Musisi, lubaale of earthquakes and progenitor of Mukasa, had one of his two principal temples on Fumve Island, where offerings might be made to keep the earth calm. The lubaale’s powers also extended to affect fecundity and pregnancy, in both invocations of his potential to impact pregnant women and in amulets bearing the same name that were associated with fecundity and childbearing.37 Wanema, father of Mukasa and another powerful deity, historically had his temple on nearby Bukasa Island, which was also renowned as Mukasa’s birthplace.38 Buswa forest on Bugala was sacred to Mukasa’s son Mirimu, a lubaale with implications for victory in battle.39 Kagwa’s research tallied another six minor deities located on Bugala Island, another specifically on Bugala’s Buninga peninsula, and seven more on Bukasa Island.40 These other deities, alongside appeals to other prominent balubaale such as Kaumpuli, who had a mainland shrine, could have offered islanders connections to other kubándwa mediums in addition to those oriented to Mukasa when seeking relief or healing.41 Deep associations with potent, generative forces were woven into island names: Bugala Island’s name resonated with the root -gàlá, which glossed “physical force of life” and also connoted fertility on one’s maternal side.42 All told, particularly for adults during mongota whose grandparents would have had direct experience engaging with Mukasa and other balubaale as part of life on the Sseses or elsewhere around the lake earlier in the nineteenth century, this constellation of historically important and potent forces made island sites places that people had gone to and could still go to for relief or aid.43 Such processes of treatment-seeking occurred in a dense social field. Given the prominence of Mukasa’s shrine on the islands and the prominent role of Ssese clans and political authorities in shrine activities, people affiliated with Mukasa’s shrine might have also been family or clan members of the supplicant. Further, seeking healing required utilizing social connections to marshal necessary resources. Appeals to balubaale required material goods—contribution of foodstuffs or of livestock, for instance—that signaled veneration and acknowledged a medium’s inter-cessionary powers, and thus also potentially required tapping into wider networks of family or affinity for resources.
By the late nineteenth century, Ssese therapeutic resources were diverse. Mediums or healers, on the one side, and missionaries, on the other, both sought to provide healing within systems that linked material and spiritual etiologies and treatments. 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 cultural exchange around the lake that introduced Islamic and European diagnostic systems and therapeutic practices and added to the healing resources available to Ganda and Ssese populations at the time. By the 1890s, mission medicine had become available to many Ssese islanders, as well as to populations elsewhere around the northern shores of the lake.44
The acceleration of both Protestant and Catholic missionizing in the late 1880s meant that many on the Lake Victoria littoral lived within a day’s journey of a Christian mission or community of converts. Two groups—the Catholic Society of the Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) and the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS)—were of particular relevance to the Sseses. Amid the religious and civil wars of the late 1880s and early 1890s, the White Fathers founded missions first at Bugoma, on the westernmost point of Bugala Island near the Buddu shore, and then at Bumangi in the island’s center.45 The Sseses, like most of Buganda, were a contested field of evangelization, and after years of religious unrest and occasional confrontation, British authorities intervened to “divide” the islands into Protestant and Catholic spheres in 1891, much to the chagrin of the White Fathers.46 By 1898, Anglican missionaries had built a station on Bukasa, a southeastern island facing out into the lake, ruled at the time by a Protestant chief, Danieli Kaganda. From Bukasa, missionaries supervised a few dozen small congregations; they began building a church on Bugala in 1902, providing them a base on the eastern end of the island. But the CMS generally encouraged the growth of small churches in the villages under Ssese readers (as they called converts) rather than worship at a central station.47 Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries relied on established missions on the Buganda mainland as springboards for their Ssese outposts. By all accounts, mission staff traveled frequently between islands and mainland, and the Ssese missions also served as way stations for confreres dependent on canoe transport and lakeside routes in traveling elsewhere around the lake.48
Healing was ideologically central to both Catholic and Protestant missions’ ministries, although missionaries’ capabilities and expertise sometimes differed as much as their approaches to converting and saving souls.49 Missionaries often went into the field with some basic medical training, allowing them both to manage ailments that might affect Europeans with no alternative for treatment and to offer treatment and care to those they wished to convert.50 For Ssese islanders, the White Fathers missions at Bugoma and Bumangi on Bugala Island and the CMS missions on Bukasa and Bugala Islands presented an additional source of healing and means to ameliorate misfortune—whether or not it involved the kinds of “genuine” conversions that missionaries sought. Locally on the Ssese Islands, CMS missions made medical care and treatment less of a priority than their mainland Buganda counterparts, while the White Fathers gradually sought to formalize and expand their capacity
