Bumangi, where five “improvised nurses” cared for patients in the hospital, reflected, “The disease still raging with the same intensity, we look with dread to the moment coming, sooner or later, where the survivors who are still healthy will not be able to feed and care for the sick, at least if God does not end this scourge soon.”127 Missionaries on the Sseses noted that the islands’ population had gradually diminished, either because of mortality from the disease or people fleeing from it to the mainland. Fields around Bugala Island lay fallow by late 1905, though not wholly abandoned; months-long devotion to caring for increasing numbers of sick drew labor away from preparing fields and cultivating crops, necessary work to sustain households into the future. The islands, one priest observed, “resembled a great battlefield after a long struggle.”128
Place-centered ideas about illness and health shaped new relocations and local mobilities on the islands. On an itineration around Bugala, Fr. Reynès found a man affected with sleeping sickness caring for his elderly mother, aunt, and wife (who was apparently also affected by smallpox), also sick, sheltered under a large tree.129 Reynès assailed the local village chief’s “inhumane” expulsion of a sick family out of their village, but I read here a shift in tactics and evidence of a sharp narrowing of the possibilities for coping with the sick within existing social relationships. For this family, separation from their village meant not a “little house” attended by an elderly relative among others similarly affected, but removal from hearth and home. To be sent away from home and village and into the forest in such a manner may have reflected a chief’s efforts or a medium’s advice to safeguard remaining villagers by encouraging abandonment of a home to which death had come—consistent with responses to visitations of kaumpuli in past generations. Removal also suggests a heightened gravity of the disease; the priest’s presumption about the drastic measures of the village chief begs the question of whether anyone remained to care for the ailing family. Within lived experience of other grave diseases in the area, particularly those attributed to Kaumpuli and for which abandoning home was a practiced strategy, the possibility also remains that the family, too, played a role in leaving their home in an attempt, however desperate and futile, to evade illness and death that was understood to attach to domestic spaces.130 Indeed, as illness became widespread, more radical moves occurred. A Bumangi priest noted that “those who it has spared have fled toward the beaches, thinking, as they do, them to be less murderous.”131 The Ssese abandoned homes and farms temporarily and perhaps permanently as the crisis widened.
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