what spaces demanded attention, and what measures might be undertaken in place to impact the spread of disease. We gain, here, a sense of the practical distance that authorities could place between the sick and the well—a half-hour’s walk away—and of connections made between the growth of bush and scrub around homes and the health of people living within them. The regulations fit within the historic aspects of chiefship to safeguard the kingdom’s wider health, as well as within the prerogatives of the kabaka and chiefs to allocate labor and the use of land. Pertinent to the Ssese Islands, as we will see, was the injunction to move the sick to “high ground.” This, along with a prohibition against eating fish also included in the regulations, targeted chiefly attention to people living around the lakeshore or along waterways. Further, the injunction against eating fish—which would effectively have had the impact of keeping people away from riverbanks and lakeshores—would have constituted a significant burden for Ssese islanders in both food security and economic activity.
Ssese approaches to mongota changed over time, particularly in the initial years of the epidemic, and both drew upon and expanded from historic precedents for mitigating illness. Initial accounts also indicate that Ssese populations, as with elsewhere in Buganda and the lake littoral, addressed mongota within frameworks defined by experience with other serious illnesses. Strategic separation from the sick was one aspect of Ganda approaches to those stricken with the spreading, swollen lesions and open wounds of bigenge, for instance.115 During an outbreak of kiddukano (a diarrheal illness) in late 1904, affected people left their houses for the forest and markedly avoided the Bumangi mission and its sick people.116 Distancing the well from the sick echoes how people had historically left places of illness temporarily during a visitation of Kaumpuli’s power. But resituating bamongota, as occurred on the Ssese Islands, was not congruent with recorded responses to other widespread illnesses, suggesting innovation amid its widening impact. Strategies similar to those that might have arrested bigenge or kaumpuli ultimately would shift to more drastic measures as mongota continued to spread in the early twentieth century.
Let us take the Weatherheads’ descriptions of how the relations of the sick on Bugala Island ultimately settled the sick near to one another, but also nearer to the lakeshore, as a starting point. Many Ssese islanders spent time on the shore regularly and men may have had shelters to use while fishing or drying their catch there—indeed, the lakeshore’s ideal tsetse habitat of abundant moisture and thick vegetation had likely exposed many to fly bites and thus the disease’s causative parasite. But permanent homes were typically in the islands’ interior, on higher ground.117 To locate the sick in smaller homes nearer the lake was to set them apart, but not to maroon them without access to basic necessities like food and water. Indeed, the designation of an elderly relation to care for the sick boy Isaya immediately signals recognition of diminishing capacity and the need for sustained care and indicates that families or kinship groups addressed the degenerative progress of the illness as they shifted allocations of time and labor that their sick kin now needed. The grouping of several “little houses” together might have allowed kin to share time, labor, and resources as they managed the needs of the sick or enabled people in different stages of the disease to assist one another. But, importantly, these “little houses” were places apart from more permanent homes. A photograph from 1906 of a “camp of the sick near Bugala” matches missionary descriptions of the kinds of habitations that Ssese islanders built for the sick.118 Compared with contemporary photographs and descriptions of typical homes around Lake Victoria, these “little houses”—later marked as a “camp” by German scientist Robert Koch—differed markedly in their layout and emplacement from a typical family home.119 While the exact location of this small settlement is unknown, several aspects suggest its remove from social and domestic spaces in Ssese society. Firstly, the houses are clustered tightly together and some are constructed roughly, of differing sizes; materials used to build them are scattered in front of their doorways. Piles of brush and low trees or shrubs appear to circle the group of houses and a well-worn path crosses in front of it. The settlement sits at the margins of clumps of trees and grassland, with ground rising away in the background in one direction; in the other, the lakeshore is also visible. Accounts of Ssese isolation practices are not consistent with regard to the distance that people might be set apart, nor do they discuss the meanings or implications of that distance, but this camp near Bugala appears to fit the instructions of the kabaka’s regents to the topography and environment of Bugala village, and appears also to accord with past approaches to illness that affected many members of a community. Its remove from the settled geographies of village life sought to keep illness from affecting others. But its exposed location and its temporary materials also signal its unsustainability as a place of durable social life. This little camp was not a place where people could tend a vegetable garden, keep small livestock, or cultivate banana trees. Rather, it was a place to rest and to shelter as death came.
The early responses of isolation and separation that missionaries noted would have followed months of accumulated experience in Ssese communities. Here, the specificity of mongota must remain central: though drastic, it was not a fast-moving disease like, for example, lubyamira, a widespread illness that had circulated a decade prior.120 Mongota made people nod or sleep, in a gradual decline, whereas lubyamira literally laid people (and cattle) down swiftly. Progress of trypanosomal infection—how fast signs like disrupted sleep, mania, or coma might emerge—are and were variable from one person to another. Levels of stress and fatigue, how regular and nutritious one’s diet is, or whether a person experiences multiple exposures to a parasite (i.e., multiple bites from infected flies) are several factors that scientists assert can impact a person’s immune response to the parasitic infection and the efficacy of that response.121 A case like that of Isaya, a young man and a domestic laborer likely mobile and active around the mission’s vicinity and through fly vector habitats, suggests that he would have been exposed to the parasite and ailing for many weeks, if not a few months, before he fell asleep while he was supposed to be minding a boiling pot. Settling people with particular symptoms in a particular space shows that affected households and villages had generated collective responses to the illness as more severe signs appeared with greater frequency. It is very likely that this move was mediated by political and ritual authorities—chiefs, clan heads, perhaps healers or kubándwa mediums—given frameworks where elder kin and clan or village members were responsible for decisions with bearing on productivity and prosperity.122
FIGURE 1.1. Camp of the Sick near Bugala. Courtesy of the Robert Koch Institute, Berlin. This photograph from Robert Koch’s expedition photograph album shows dwellings of the sick on Bugala Island. The area’s elevation and vegetation indicate that the “camp” sat nearer to the shore of Lake Victoria and at a distance from Bugalla village, similar to the “little houses” set aside for bamongota by Ssese islanders. Source: Robert Koch Institute Archives, Fotoarchiv 6105, Fotoalbum Koch in Sese, 6105036 (1906-07).
After these early moves to gather and isolate people showing signs of mongota, approaches and capacities to deal with mongota began to shift. Fr. Reynès, journaling his July 1904 itineration around Bugala Island between Bumangi and Bugoma, walked past village upon village filled with the sick, visiting some in their homes; the disease, he found, was widespread.123 Reflecting on the fourth year of the epidemic in 1905, Reynès noted that people preferred to be at home, and could find devoted care even among distant relatives; though the mission provided patients with salt, fish, and sometimes meat, patients would forego such “little treats” to be in their home and among kin.124 For many, then, care concentrated in the home, with family and networks of kin in established domestic spaces. Caring for stricken relatives initially corresponded with gender and age. Patterns of early infection suggest that men, particularly younger and more mobile men, were first affected, followed by adult women. Thus, missionaries reported women caring for both a spouse and male relative, children caring for older siblings and fathers, and, ultimately, entire families coping with illness among adults and children.125 Mongota’s effects cascaded to touch more and more of the Ssese population, as the disease struck ever more
