staff members at the National Archives in Kew. In Italy, Fr. Stefaan Minaert at the White Fathers Generalate made my research in Rome incredibly productive, as did Fr. Juan Rios and Fr. Julien Corbier. In Belgium, Pierre Dandoy and Alain Gérard, as well as Rafaël Storme at the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et de Commerce Extérieur–Archives Africaines in Brussels were exceptionally generous with their time. My gratitude and affection to Gill and Jon Epstein and Dani Serlin, my London family, for making every landing there a smooth one.
All translations from German are my own. Katja Wezel and Gregor Thum helpfully consulted on occasion. Brandon County and Alissa Martin Webel each collaborated with me on several translations from French, with Brandon lending his particular expertise on material in White Fathers diaries and journals. I benefited greatly from the expertise of several translators of Kiswahili and Oluhaya in Tanzania and in the United States, and I acknowledge with deep appreciation Arnold Kisiraga, Irene Rwegalulira, and particularly Elpidius Rwegoshora and Nyambura Mpesha for their work in transcribing and translating both manuscript and oral historical sources. A project of such scope and duration relies on the generosity and assistance of many people; I remain fully responsible for any and all errors or omissions in this work.
This book came together over many years, in New York, Berlin, Dar es Salaam, Detroit, London, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Pike County, Illinois, with the enduring support of my family and friends. My love and gratitude to Rachel Allison, Lauren Oster, and Naila-Jean Meyers for caring about these epidemics and parasites, and giving me an escape from them, in New York and beyond. Deepest appreciation also to Heidi Reiner and Alex Yacoub, David and Jenny Yeend, Koren McCaffrey and Jacob Waldman, Stephen Yuhan, Joe Soldevere, Clara Burke, Amira Wolfson, Sara and Micah Myers, Kristin and Evan Ray, Lauren Herckis and Rory McCarthy, Katharina Bolze, Alexia Huffman D’Arco, Mike Bocchini, Helen Bömelburg, Eleanor Gregory Miles, and Valerie and Grant Shirk and Jen Gadda and Ben Wilhelm and their families. My immediate and extended family have been steadfast supports: Baird and Alissa Webel, Chris Hume, Jay and Karen Hume, and Nicole Pelly; Ann Williamson; Steve and Janet Webel; Craig Williamson and Renu Tipirneni; Marian and Larry Kobrin; and Rachel Kobrin. Max B. Webel, Alexandra Webel, Sophie Hume, Noa Kobrin-Brody, Adin Kobrin-Brody, Jake Hume, Tanner Hume, and Hudson Pelly deserve special mention for being wonderful companions over the years. I thank Asher Simon William Kobrin for his recent enthusiasm about how my book is going and his excellent high-fives.
My parents, Max and Kathy Webel, have always been with me. Each and every day, I am grateful for their abiding and tenacious love, their sharp minds and good sense, and the sanctuary they have always provided me. Finally, and with deepest affection, I hold a full heart’s worth of love and gratitude for Josh Kobrin, who has kept my chin up and my eyes clear. Josh has been the bedrock of the best years of life (yet) and ever my greatest champion. My thanks to him for all the lightning bolts, the early mornings, and the uncountable ways he has supported me.
Introduction
AROUND 1900, many people living on the northern shores of the great Nyanza (Lake Victoria) began to die after wasting into thinness and falling into a nodding, impenetrable sleep. Their strength had been diminished and their ability to care for themselves was gone. Similarly, around the vast and deep Lake Tanganyika, wasting sickness and a deadly sleepiness began to affect people on the lake’s western shore, driving their flight from villages and migration to areas not yet touched by illness. The first people afflicted were primarily those who traveled to trade and work around the region’s growing commercial hubs on the lakes, those who farmed on the fertile edges of the Lake Victoria basin and the Lake Tanganyika valley, and those whose lives took them to the shores of the lake to fish, to draw water, or to row across the vast inland seas. In these areas, they were bitten by various insects as they went about their daily routines. They were already contending with the irregular rains and droughts that in recent years had brought widespread hunger and insecurity and coping with outbreaks of illnesses that struck people down swiftly and without respite.1 They had survived the disruption and violence of European colonial incursions that had divided the region into Belgian, British, and German spheres of influence after 1880. But this wasting sleepiness that led to the deaths of increasing numbers of people on the lakes’ shores was something different.
In the first years of the twentieth century, the process of making sense of this illness had just begun for people living on the Ssese Islands of Lake Victoria, in the kingdoms of the Haya people on the lake’s western shores, and in the coastal lowlands of Lake Tanganyika. Around Lake Victoria, people named this new form of illness and death kaumpuli, botongo, isimagira, mongota, tulo, or ugonjwa wa malale; on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, people called the sickness malali, ugonjwa wa usingizi, or ugonjwa wa malale. European observers in the region identified a disease, naming it maladie du sommeil, Schlafkrankheit, or sleeping sickness. These diverse names reflect differing experiences rather than a unified and uniform understanding. As illness increased, African elites, affected individuals and their communities, colonial officials, missionaries, researchers, and a few scattered ethnographers began to document the arrival of this sleeping sickness, which seemed to be new to the area and unprecedented in its scale and severity.2
While evidence exists that sleepy, wasting illnesses were known and recognized as serious by some populations around Africa’s Great Lakes (the interlacustrine region), their greater extent in the early twentieth century was novel and alarming. Tens of thousands of people died around Lake Victoria alone in the first few years of the 1900s; other epidemics peppered the continent simultaneously. As historical phenomena, these epidemics of sleeping sickness loom large in studies of African life. Scholars have argued that the expansion of sleeping sickness and its staggering mortality rates related to colonial incursion and subsequent colonial economic imperatives.3 Equally compelling are studies that demonstrate how colonial disease prevention efforts attempted to completely reconfigure African lives and livelihoods.4 But such emphasis on the causes of these epidemics and on extensive prevention efforts that followed has effectively concentrated our attention on the actions of European colonial regimes at the expense of understanding African intellectual worlds and existing systems of managing illness and disaster. Scholars have paid scant attention to how people responded to widespread illness at the time—what intellectual resources they drew upon, how they acted in response.5 In the interlacustrine region, many populations linked new illnesses directly to past experiences of sickness and death. Their strategic responses drew on the intimate histories, experiences, and memories that loomed large as family members or neighbors began to sicken and die in new ways. Affected people also engaged with European colonial officials and European missionaries, relatively recent arrivals in the region. While German, British, and Belgian empires were expanding in the Great Lakes region, the area’s social, political, economic, and ecological dynamics also shifted. Between 1902 and 1914, the overlap between the habitat of a particular biting fly and the spaces and lands used daily by people in the region would ultimately catalyze some of the most ambitious, extensive, and disruptive colonial public health campaigns of the twentieth century.
This book is a history of public health and politics in Africa’s Great Lakes region in the early twentieth century. It focuses on epidemic sleeping sickness and colonial and African efforts to prevent it, drawing on case studies from colonial Uganda, Tanzania, and Burundi. It fits sleeping sickness into local people’s pasts and presents in order to highlight the experiences and intellectual worlds of the vast majority of the people who sickened and died at the time. It argues that African systems of managing land, labor, politics, and healing were central in shaping the trajectory, strategies, and tactics of colonial public health campaigns around Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika. African engagement with, evasion of, or negotiation within anti–sleeping sickness measures shaped the very nature of the campaigns, as people sought to make colonial interventions work within their own frameworks and colonial officials were forced to respond to (if not accommodate) this engagement in order to maintain their programs. Possibilities for negotiation opened up through the mutability and uncertainty of biomedical knowledge and practice as well as through the evolving nature of new political and economic relationships.
