that people in nearby communities were contemporarily categorizing a set of changes to the body and temperament—here, a nodding sleepiness—as a single illness and differentiating this from others.96 Informants in the 1910s underlined the initial novelty of mongota on the islands, for example, though other illnesses causing fever and sleepiness had been known.97 CMS missionary George Pilkington’s Luganda-English dictionary (one of the earliest made) glossed bongota and simagira as “to nod” or “to be drowsy” in the 1890s, with distinct words—tulo and ebaka—glossing “to sleep.” But the connotations of the words mongota or isimagira seem to have changed over time amid the early epidemic, shifting from an association with nodding or drowsiness in the 1890s and early 1900s to a firmer connotation of sleep in subsequent years. As nodding gave way to sleeping or unconsciousness in “those who were drowsy,” mongota became an illness of sleeping. The meanings of bongota, correspondingly, seem to have cohered around sleeping rather than sleepiness or nodding amid and after the burgeoning epidemic.98 By 1902, Ssese islanders also called the illness tulo, a word that glossed sleep, but not nodding, even as missionaries referred to it as mongota.99 As well, at some point before 1904 people around Lake Victoria came to associate peculiar swelling on the body—it is unclear whether exclusively on the back of the neck, or more widespread on the body—with illness that ended in sleeping and death.100 Some also attributed the illness to the lubaale Kaumpuli, generating the talk that led European observers to report connections between sleeping sickness and that extant nosology of serious and widespread illness.101
As they discussed and defined mongota, Luganda-speaking Ssese islanders fit it within their experience of concurrent political change, making sense of illness and death in relation to the potential consequences of dwindling communities. H. T. C. Weatherhead recounted how, by 1904, missionaries “hear[d] it said that the English have brought this sickness by the ‘magic,’that they may ‘eat’ the land. ‘Has not the Government made a law that all uninhabited land shall belong to the English?’Therefore, they want to kill the people off the coast lands and islands that they may claim them.”102 Land tenure at the time oriented around paternal and agnatic relationships and social reproduction depended on access to land. Islanders knew that deaths among them and on the mainland on the scale that mongota caused could disrupt land tenure and fundamentally change such durable arrangements. With “the English” as the new players in the region claiming “uninhabited land,” Weatherhead’s Ssese informants reasoned that depopulation could only redound to the benefit of the British colonial regime.103 That Weatherhead’s informants also explained mongota as a sickness brought by “magic” by the “English” indicates that people fitted colonizers into cosmological and nosological systems where human malevolence wreaked widely felt havoc. The association between English presence and widespread mortality also underscores that people categorized mongota as something new—or, at least, significantly different in its scope and impact—and intimately linked with experiences of recent British arrival in the region.104
Within households and villages, people reconfigured life around mongota in several ways.105 Illness and death triggered changes in mobility that we might compare to earlier responses to kaumpuli on the mainland, encouraging circulation away from areas where people were sick and perhaps also movement to consult lubaale shrines and powerful kubándwa mediums. On the Sseses, mongota began to erode remaining islanders’ prosperity and livelihoods as it sickened fishermen and farmers, men and women, across the archipelago. Locally, people deployed strategies to mitigate mongota, setting the sick apart from the well, but also settling sick people together. Some might have acted similarly to nearby Ganda communities that in 1902 isolated the sick, avoiding smoking from the same pipe or eating together.106 Missionary sources recount early recognition of the illness on the Ssese Islands in 1902–3 and particular steps taken to isolate, but also care for, the sick, such as settling a group of sick people together or lodging a sick person away from other homes and providing a caretaker. In November 1902, for example, CMS missionary Aileen Weatherhead wrote in her journal of a house that had recently been built around twenty minutes’ walk away from the Bugala mission. This house was a space for the sick, not a preexisting home for particular people, and was notable enough that the Weatherheads took British researcher Cuthbert Christy there directly when he journeyed through the area in search of cases of sleeping sickness.107
The case of a young man named Isaya, employed as a servant in the Weatherhead household, further illustrates how these processes of isolation and care might unfold. News of Isaya’s illness came to the Weatherheads from other mission youth, who raised the alarm with a story of Isaya putting a pot on to boil and inexplicably falling asleep. Recognizing the signs of sleeping sickness, the Weatherheads sent Isaya away to his relatives. Soon, both Henry and Aileen Weatherhead reported, Isaya’s relations on Bugala Island had “built a little house on an open space near the shore where others who have the disease live,” and had designated an elder female relation to care for him.108 This arrangement lasted for some time. Aileen Weatherhead journaled to her relations in England that they had sent Isaya a book to write in and some fishing line, that he might stay occupied; Henry Weatherhead later noted, “it took him six months to die.”109
Ssese communities moved sick people out of households, Isaya’s case suggests, relying on familial responsibility for each individual. Parallel sources on Bugala also indicate that efforts to avoid the spread of the illness coordinated at the village level as well. Fr. Ramond of the White Fathers Bumangi mission noted in May 1903 that “each of the major villages has an average of ten patients set apart to prevent contagion. Each patient has his separate hut where he was treated and fed by his relatives during the long months that the disease lasts until inevitable death comes to end his miseries…. During the last months of his painful existence the patient seems to lose the use of his faculties—he vegetates rather than thinks.”110 Ramond’s account corroborates other contemporary accounts of the epidemic’s initial demographic impact on younger members of the population, whose parents or relatives might yet have survived to help care for them. The villages that he and the Weatherheads described had apparently become a commonplace around Bugala Island at the time. At Buninga on the island’s northern peninsula in the summer of 1903, the White Fathers’ Bumangi diarist recounted that there were a number of such villages where “the bamongota were placed a little apart; everywhere they [the Bassese] built huts outside the villages.”111 Coordinated efforts to isolate the sick at the village level were likely the consequence of regulations issued by the kabaka’s powerful regents in May 1902, who ordered chiefs to
gather together all sick people…. Take them away to a place half an hour away from their house and build a shed on high ground to put the sick men in and set fire to the scrub near the house where the sickness was, one hundred yards on each side…. Food and water is to be taken to the sick people…. You, the chiefs must build the houses for the sick people to go in. Every chief is to see that someone gets to look after the sick…. Don’t eat fish.112
This regulation from Kampala preceded British scientists’ confirmation of the causative parasite and fly vector of sleeping sickness to colonial officials in April 1903, as well as concurrent suggestions to gather the katikiro (Luganda, chief minister) and principal chiefs to disseminate information to affected populations.113 It significantly predated British colonial efforts to institute widespread bush clearance measures, depopulate fly areas, or control travel on the lake.114 It provides, then, a sense of how Ganda authorities located the spreading epidemic within the existing political and public health landscape, with overlapping colonial, missionary, and Ganda responses to matters of health. The 1902 regulations asserted particular chiefly powers and obligations to maintain and care for the sick, balancing the management of those ill with the protection of those still well. Placing responsibility for providing food and water to the sick onto political authorities suggests that the regents recognized that chiefs might need to step in to ensure resources for sick people whose families could no longer provide for them, or whose social world had been changed by their illness. Regulations also speak to a sense of the spatial dimensions
