and its associated court functioned as a political hub, with large royal households comprised of adult monarchs and their wives and children, as well as important senior relatives, alongside countless laborers and people who filled particular ritual roles.
Political authority rested in a ruler’s ability to ensure enduring prosperity for his followers or subjects. This involved strategic decision-making—waging war, levying tax or tribute, managing production and access to land, distributing surplus resources—within a framework of mutual obligation. Successful kings also acted to mediate the power of ancestral and other spirits upon their people through maintenance of rituals that kept society and ecology in balance; chiefship came to blend the political, ritual, and material.64 While political structures and institutions were heterogeneous and took on locally specific forms, some root consistencies were also distributed over a wide geographic area, such as the institution of sacred kingship in the form of the Rwandan and Urundian mwami, the Bugandan kabaka, and the mukama in Bunyoro and Buhaya. From palace to province to district to chiefdom to village, relations of mutual obligation knitted together administrative structures across increasingly large territories. Interlacustrine royal and chiefly power from around 1000 CE had intertwined with that of clan leaders and healers to set the rhythms of daily life and keep them in tempo with spiritual forces—to mark, for example, when to begin cultivation, how to seal a new alliance or relationship, when and how to make war, or what measures to take to avoid widespread illness.65
Clans that provided social connection and cohesion, sometimes in counterpoint to royal political ideologies, also flourished in this era. Clans bound people to one another locally and sometimes regionally.66 As a hierarchical, patrilineal kinship relation, clan affinity manifested through the common association with particular totems, most often an animal or plant that had played a historic role in a first-comer or ancestor’s life, as well as through taboos observed, such as the common avoidance of particular foods.67 Clans linked people in familial and fictive kin relations to a sense of place and space, tying people to land and giving sites meaning and significance within local cosmologies and social worlds. Relations between clans, and thus clan members, defined a person’s social world by determining patterns of marriage and access to material and spiritual resources, while also locating individuals and families within durable social groups.68 Locally, clan elders and senior family members controlled the allocation of land. Clan elders also maintained shrines for and spirit mediums of important ancestors to connect the worlds of the dead and the living, thus ensuring access to powerful healing resources fixed to specific sites around the interlacustrine region.69
Cults of healing and mediumship created ways to access social, spiritual, and material resources for many people, whether on the margins of political and social power or deeply connected to royal and clan networks in the kingdoms.70 Healing of serious ailments and resolution of persistent problems focused around skilled healers and mediums, people who used gifts of connection with diverse spirits to identify causes of misfortune or illness and set a path toward health and prosperity. Some mediums connected people to powerful figures of a society’s past—kings, gods and goddesses, or clan ancestors—or to deities in its present cosmology. Their intercessionary work often reinforced the powers of divine kingship or clan connections. Other forms of mediumship connected people to powers outside of royal and clan ideologies: to territorial “nature” spirits (misambwa) and to spirits of ancestors within a family or household (mizumu).71 As well, kubándwa spirit possession, an ancient tradition that formalized into an institution of possession, mediumship, and initiation early in the second millennium CE, became centrally important for efforts targeted toward healing and prosperity in the region. In the ensuing centuries, the cwezikubándwa healing complex had developed and covered most of the region. It combined established traditions of kubándwa spirit mediumship with the exceptional powers of abacwezi spirits, deities often associated with particular places and/or environments who were also connected by ancient lineages to the ruling dynasties of the interlacustrine kingdoms. Two such deities, Kaumpuli and Mukasa, still influenced people’s experiences of illness and health around Lake Victoria in the late nineteenth century. Cwezi-kubándwa deities and their mediums had particular territorial ranges, representing the system’s grafting onto older, place-oriented misambwa spirits, but also focused around sites of particular power where major shrines were typically located. Healing powers concentrated at major shrines, where resident mediums acted as intercessors between treatment-seekers and spirits or deities, but also could be accessed at other, minor shrines as well as through mediums who lived in a community.72
Nineteenth-Century Transitions in Interlacustrine Life and Livelihood
By the nineteenth century, durable social and political institutions with deep historical roots shaped the everyday lives and intellectual worlds of the people on the Ssese Islands, in Kiziba, and in the southern Imbo who are the central subjects of this study. But also significant was the impact of changing regional dynamics, particularly those animated by the powerful, expansionist states that had emerged in the recent past. The rise of four interlacustrine kingdoms—Buganda, Urundi, Rwanda, and Bunyoro—shaped and was shaped by wider regional changes, particularly as new connections with the Indian Ocean coast commenced in the mid-nineteenth century. Understanding the nature of those new influences and forces in the wider region requires us to pivot away from the fertile littorals, highlands, and grasslands of the lakes region and look eastward to the Indian Ocean coast as well.
Newly prominent kingdoms like Buganda, Urundi, Rwanda, and Bunyoro were aggressively expansionist in their orientation, consolidating power in a territorial core and co-opting or subduing their unruly peripheries into tributary roles.73 Two key factors enabled their territorial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.74 Political centralization, undergirded by familial and clan ties as well as generational social groups, created stronger states. Entrepreneurial economic activities underwrote and facilitated territorial expansion. Political authorities in these kingdoms also successfully utilized the political and material resources provided by historic chiefship and clanship, alongside innovations in infrastructure, military organization, food production, and trade.75 Growing cohesion and power at the centers of state—the capitals that grew up around royal palace complexes—were achieved by the accumulation of labor and of trade goods, as well as through the growth of bureaucratic institutions and infrastructure that expanded the reach of the state.76 Long-standing trade around and between the lakes had connected communities that produced valuable goods such as iron hoes or copper and the products of agricultural labor, fishing work, and local craftspeople. Increasingly robust connectivity and the demands of expansionist kingdoms moved goods overland and via canoes across and around the lakes, linking people directly to markets in the kingdoms’ distant urbanizing centers and to new hubs along paths of transit as well.77 These powerful states existed alongside many, many smaller domains and, across the nineteenth century, forced these smaller polities into subordinate, tributary relationships of alliance or defense as they expanded—this was the case with the Ssese Islands and Kiziba and Buganda, less so with people in the southern Imbo and Urundi. Wars driven by expansion generated displacement and insecurity for the populations in their path. Violence disrupted food production and raids produced captives, dependents, and slaves.78 New mobilities catalyzed by war and trade also meant that many interlacustrine populations experienced hunger, insecurity, and epidemic disease in new ways.79
In the early nineteenth century, wider regional flows and influences became more important as interactions between the interlacustrine kingdoms and peoples of the savannas and coast began to define a larger territorial—and indeed subcontinental—arena of exchange and engagement. Shifting political and economic trends in the western Indian Ocean interacted with entrepreneurial political ideologies further inland to produce new interventions into the politics and economies of eastern African populations.80 By 1800, port cities dotting the Indian Ocean coast from Mogadishu (in modern Somalia) to Sofala (in modern Mozambique) had seen Arab, Indian, and African influences blend into a distinctive Swahili coastal culture over several centuries. Europeans, too, came and went, attracted by thriving trade in everything from precious metals to exotic spices and driven by competition for geopolitical primacy. Independent Swahili