typical social obligations. Sources indicate that, for instance, the Ganda responded to kaumpuli in early 1881 by isolating those with signs of the illness in separate rooms or dwellings.78 Kagwa and Roscoe noted respectively at the turn of the century that arrival of this illness sometimes necessitated that Ganda people abandon their homes, without differentiating between the sick and the well.79 Kaumpuli’s mediums here played an important role in structuring such movement. Mediums might establish that death associated with the lubaale was attached to a person or household, triggering movement away. Kaumpuli’s medium also ritu-ally welcomed people to return to their homes and farms following an outbreak of illness (glossed by Kagwa and Roscoe as plague), and received goods and gifts in return.80 The lubaale’s intervention was spatial as well as spiritual, with implications for the long and short terms. People might temporarily leave their homes and farms to flee places of illness or cease the collective labor of planting or harvest.81 When they returned, along with the lubaale’s blessing, beer was brewed and offered, restoring social bonds. Departures from homes and farms were sometimes precipitated by animals, particularly rats, sickening or dying, both Roscoe and Kagwa assert, a pattern corroborated elsewhere in the region at the same time period.82 Kagwa’s ethnographic notes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century recalled that “if a person had swollen glands it was said that this god had done it,” and noted that the “plague” that Kaumpuli’s name connoted still struck fear into populations because of the many deaths it could cause.83 Several years later, in 1908, the principal medical officer of Uganda would note a case “of a disease called by the Baganda Kaumpuli, which is associated with the occurrence of bubo.”84 Médard asserts that Kaumpuli and his mediums mediated the return of survivors; the possessions of the sick belonged to the lubaale upon their illness, and the lubaale and medium facilitated their return (and thus the return to normal activity) when widespread illness had abated.85 As ever, widespread disease also had implications for the stability of the state, safeguarded by political authorities, clan elders, and healers. Practices that worked to ensure population health also worked in the interest of political leaders and the ritual leaders and kubándwa mediums with whom they engaged.86
Experiences of kaumpuli also offer insight into different collective strategies for addressing widespread illness that would prove relevant as epidemic sleeping sickness came to the region. But unlike the serious, periodic illnesses that people survived alongside everyday injuries and ailments, the next widespread disease that communities around the lake encountered would significantly and permanently alter social and political relations. Efforts to prevent it would change the geography of daily life. As bamongota, “those who are drowsy,” appeared more and more frequently on the Sseses and word spread of increasing mortality, Ssese people marshalled social resources and directed diverse strategies to cope with new manifestations of illness and misfortune. Their efforts would ultimately become entangled with those of colonial authorities and itinerant researchers, as illness brought new outsiders into the orbit of Ssese islanders and others living near Lake Victoria.
MONGOTA: THE SSESE ISLANDS IN A GATHERING STORM
European reports of a new and strange disease first emerged from Buganda in 1901 via doctors Albert Cook and J. Howard Cook, brothers and CMS missionary physicians at work in the hospital at Mengo.87 By late 1901, White Fathers missionaries on the Sseses noted that their parishioners suffered from “the sleeping sickness” as well. In his annual report for 1901–2, Fr. Ramond at Our Lady of Good Comfort at Bumangi reported that, spiritually, the mission’s fortunes were fine, but the mission found itself in grave circumstances otherwise: illness took its toll on the islanders to whom the Fathers tried to minister, creating a population weakened by disease and death. Kaumpuli—here understood as bubonic plague—he reported as a familiar threat. Newer and less predictable was the illness “called sleeping sickness,” which was “very terrible and very murderous for all.”88 Of a population on Bugala estimated at twenty-six thousand, Fr. Ramond reported that the mission had treated six thousand people in 1902.89 Elsewhere on the same island, Anglican missionary H. T. C. (Henry) Weatherhead noted that “nearly everywhere [he] met with murmurings with regard to the sleeping-sickness” on his itinerations around the archipelago and that “the death-rate on Sese [Bugala Island], hitherto not very high is, we now fear, increasing.”90
Soon known to Europeans throughout the Uganda Protectorate and eastern Africa colloquially as sleeping sickness, the illness was also called mongota in Luganda, translating as “one who sleeps” and deriving from the verb glossed contemporarily as “to nod” or “to be drowsy.”91 Centered on unpredictable sleepiness or disrupted sleep to define the malady, news of mongota peppered the diaries and notes of European observers around Lake Victoria in the few dozen months between the epidemic’s outbreak and the identification of the causative pathogen and vector in 1902. After that point, Europeans generally referred to a specific biomedical entity, sleeping sickness/maladie du sommeil, or sometimes trypanosomiasis after the parasite believed to cause the disease.92 Despite the dangers of illnesses brought about by Kaumpuli, pox-causing diseases, respiratory infections, and the ever-present potential precariousness of rural agricultural life, mongota appeared to be different in how people deteriorated and died, causing severe degenerative changes in a person’s body as well as their temperament. Grave illness was far from unknown, and misfortune in its many forms struck islanders, but this illness slowly and inexorably brought weakness, thinness, unpredictable behavior, and impenetrable sleep: death in a new form.
Missionaries’ reports of early sleeping sickness patients and subsequent government reports of the wider epidemic focus on the abject misery and illness of the afflicted, but also, markedly, on a fatalism in their Ganda and Soga interlocutors.93 Colonial-era sources frequently characterized African responses to epidemic sleeping sickness around Lake Victoria as a combination of fatalistic, brutal, and primitive: the sick were cast out completely by their families, chiefs sent away the sick to suffer “in the bush,” people killed and consumed all of their household’s livestock at once, the dying were discovered in squalor and alone. These early accounts, while likely capturing the physical and psychological toll of illness and death, have also had the consequence of creating a durable narrative where shock and inaction characterize the African response. Particularly in descriptions of the “pagan” or “heathen” practice of casting out the sick rather than abiding with them, tropes of Christian charity were at the forefront of missionaries’ writings about the disease, serving strategically to emphasize the ongoing need for evangelization and resources to their readers (and funders) back home and to underscore the missionaries’ commitment to particular communities or individuals amid the epidemic. Though Kuhanen and others have noted that Ganda authorities attempted to respond proactively to control the spread of disease, Ssese sources flesh out how these elite mainland moves were paralleled by energetic activity in affected households and villages on the islands.94 Further, this close reading, alongside a rough sketch of the known historical epidemiology of the disease, offers a sense of the practical strategies that Ssese populations used and underscores that their approaches shifted as the epidemic unfolded. Examining these shifts not only illuminates the changing nature of the epidemic and its widening impact, but also helps us understand why islanders engaged as they did with different therapeutic possibilities, first with missionaries who remained as the islands’ population declined, and subsequently with the German sleeping sickness research expedition that arrived in 1906. Ssese islanders fit their experiences with mongota into wider political changes commensurate with their position amid Ganda and British imperial spheres as well as within existing intellectual and therapeutic frameworks and experiences of illness in previous generations. Mongota generated diverse responses on the islands, particularly given its overlap with British colonial encroachment and the widening availability of mission-centered medicine for people living on the lake’s shores and islands.
An initial response to mongota was elemental: islanders spoke of it, named it, and discussed it with travelers or those in wider clan or kinship circles. Generally, across the Great Lakes region, distinctive, locally specific names for an illness associated with nodding were in use at the time:
