is an irregularly shaped island that curves southwest away from the Buddu shore before angling sharply to the south; a wider northern section joins a wider southern section at the narrow neck at Bumangi. Directly east of the southern half of Bugala is Bubembe Island, and beyond it, the second-largest island of Bukasa. The islands cluster close to one another and many lay less than a day’s row apart, such that travel between the islands was frequent in the nineteenth century.20 The miles-wide expanse of the lake defined the islands’ orientation to Buganda and Busoga on the mainland to the east and north, but the mainland lay closer on the west, with the islands separated from Buddu by only a narrow channel. Within the archipelago, canoe travel was by no means easy or reliable, however. Changeable weather and squalls—as well as occasional encounters with hippopotamuses—made the journey uncertain and dangerous for rowers on both large and small vessels.21 By the late nineteenth century, islanders could connect to mainland markets and communities and Europeans wishing to travel could generally find rowers to make the journey.22
Ssese integration into the Ganda state required grafting centralized, elite royal politics onto the necessarily dispersed governance of the islands. Within the Ganda bureaucracy, province-level authorities held sway over rulers of districts of the larger islands or of individual, smaller islands; nnamasole, the Ganda queen mother, traditionally held influence over land and politics in the Sseses, constituting another connection between the palace and islands.23 Political authority on the Sseses focused at the village level, within district and island hierarchies, such that powerful chiefs ruled the larger inhabited islands. Particular to the individual islands were hereditary chiefs, powerful political figures whose titles and political-ritual roles were linked to control of particular areas.24 These men were the primary interlocutors of missionaries and colonial authorities, and, alongside other key chiefs, would have appointed village-level leaders.25 Clan affinities also structured relations between islands and mainland. The historic leader of the powerful lungfish clan, titled gabunga, held symbolic and practical power on the islands as a consequence of his central position between Ganda political power and Ssese-based ritual power.26 Gabunga held the role of “admiral” or “head of canoes” of the Ganda fleets, reinforcing links between Ssese rowing and the Ganda state (a related role, titled kweba, served as provincial chief). Lungfish clan members also mediated worship at the lake deity Mukasa’s principal shrine on Bubembe Island, stitching together clan, palace, and the islands. Other clans with connections to rowing and boatcraft also shaped political life on the islands.27
Dramatic changes in the 1880s and 1890s redounded to alter life on the Sseses. The arrival of Arab-Swahili traders at Lake Victoria and in Buganda in the mid-nineteenth century, followed by the arrival of increasing numbers of Christian missionaries in subsequent decades, made for vigorous economic and cultural exchange around the lake.28 At the same time, rivalry within the Ganda palace made for increasing volatility toward the end of Mutesa’s reign in the 1880s, turmoil that only increased as his son Mwanga took power in 1884. Muslim, Protestant, and Catholic factions had developed in the palace, particularly among young elites, early in Mwanga’s reign; the kabaka’s sense of threat from external forces, particularly Christian converts and missionaries, led to escalating violence.29 Roughly simultaneously, outbreaks of both bovine pleuropneumonia and rinderpest (diseases affecting cattle and other ruminants) flowed through the region in the 1880s and 1890s, with serious, although not necessarily uniform, mortality among cattle-keeping societies’ herds.30 Epidemics of serious human illness overlapped with cattle diseases and, along with crop failure and famine, devastated individuals and households. Importantly, this convergence of misfortunes “undermin[ed] one of the key functions of the kingship as a key point of patronage and distribution”—spelling political trouble for the new kabaka.31 Amid these wider disturbances, ongoing violence toward different religious communities, and Mwanga’s increasingly onerous demands for taxes and labor, the kabaka was overthrown in a palace coup in 1888. British imperial interests, drawn in in the 1880s amid an outcry over religious persecution of Anglicans and attracted by the region’s economic potential, became involved in palace affairs first under the auspices of a chartered company. Uganda then fell into the British sphere of influence in East Africa mandated by the Anglo-German treaty of 1890. A formal protectorate followed in 1894. Under the new regime, the child Daudi Chwa was installed as kabaka and the power of the Ganda ruling council (the lukiiko) was preserved. Land that had previously been the kabaka’s prerogative to disperse to clients and allies was dramatically reduced, and all other “unclaimed” land was now owned by the British Crown.32 Buganda would remain centrally important to British rule of the larger, multiethnic Uganda Protectorate, but the Sseses receded to the periphery of Ganda, and therefore also colonial, politics.
The 1880s and 1890s were decades of significant change around the Lake Victoria littoral and, indeed, in central and eastern Africa more generally. While we cannot presume a wholesale disarray in Ganda or Ssese society amid the overlapping crises of war, cattle disease, human illness, and famine, it is also clear that death, illness, and insecurity changed daily life—sometimes in temporary responses, sometimes in permanent reorientations. In wider perspective, the potential causes of trouble and insecurity in the 1890s for Ssese islanders and those on the lakeshore were legion. The religious wars that tore Buganda apart in the late 1880s and early 1890s had material consequences, destroying some Ssese households, villages, and boats and leaving some homes looted of livestock and household goods.33 These wars removed able-bodied Ssese men from other work on the island, as they served as rowers on the Ganda fleet.34 The diminishment of agricultural and economic manpower and resources to such a wide and lengthy extent would have made many households more vulnerable to the ravages of infectious diseases. In some cases, new local mobility resulted as people sought temporary assistance from nearby missions or, perhaps, migrated to areas of greater relative security where family or clan connections might offer support. Throughout, people assertively sought healing and amelioration of misfortune within the range of historic strategies and in an increasingly diverse therapeutic marketplace.
| 1 | Finding Sleeping Sickness on the Ssese Islands |
GEOGRAPHY AND environment—the lake and the islands—oriented political and ritual power, while also shaping the types of labor and production that the Sseses provided within the growing Ganda empire. This chapter examines the island contexts within which the illness called mongota appeared and on which colonial energies would ultimately focus in order to illuminate the social, political, and environmental dynamics of widespread illness. A singular aspect of the Sseses that shaped political, economic, and treatment-seeking activity around Lake Victoria was the presence of the lubaale Mukasa’s principal shrine, situated among other sites of healing or cosmological power. I open this chapter with a discussion of the political and ritual dynamics around Mukasa’s shrine and the powers that mediated contact between the Sseses and Buganda before turning to an exploration of the historic sources of illness and misfortune that struck island and littoral communities. I then examine the illness kaumpuli to consider how Ganda ideas about illness as well as practices of managing widespread illness accommodated the rapid change and emerging therapeutic diversity of the late nineteenth century.
Both the nature of misfortune and the possibilities for healing and relief were changing near the turn of the century, with the emergence of a new illness, mongota, that caused people to nod or sleep markedly, as a pivotal moment. This chapter closes with an exploration of changing Ssese responses to mongota. I argue that the advent of mongota catalyzed the deployment of diverse strategies to cope with the illness and death it caused, as well as shifting engagement with European missionaries on the islands. Focusing on how such strategies changed over time, I look particularly at historic precedents of place-centered responses to widespread illness, such as new mobilities or reorientations to domestic spaces and surrounding environments. Ssese islanders made important moves to mitigate the impact of illness and death, and their actions demonstrate historical continuities in responses to widespread illness during an exceptionally disruptive and tumultuous era in littoral life.
The matter of human African trypanosomiasis—of sleeping