to a specific suite of symptoms or changes in a person’s body, and to a specific, individualized etiology of illness, but rather to any grave, serious illness, perhaps especially one that could spread and kill more widely. Kaumpuli was thus used to identify epidemics of cholera, bubonic plague, and sleeping sickness/human African trypanosomiasis that struck littoral populations in succession between roughly 1880 and 1905.74 But sources also indicate that Kaumpuli was well known to missionary observers as the name of the lubaale of “plague,” who brought illness into people’s lives. Its powers affected people at least three times in as many decades, covering multiple generations. And so, another reading of these texts: “kaumpuli,” a word gathered by European interlocutors and fixed to particular signs of illness, referred not just to the body’s changes, but also established etiology, naming the external, spiritual force which acted on human lives and bodies with increasing frequency in the late nineteenth century. Kaumpuli, here, would not describe the disease alone, because this isolation of physiology from cosmology was not a conceptual or practical reality for sufferers at the time.75 Rather, kaumpuli could describe certain changes to the body, but also named the unseen, but very present, forces that determined which individuals or communities suffered, when relations between deities and people fell out of balance, and whose mediums and shrines could promise intercession and resolution if honored appropriately. Kaumpuli could serve to signify Ganda taxonomic and etiological thinking that located a particular species of disaster, misunderstood by missionaries as a name for a particular illness, but still serving to signal belief in cosmological forces.
Attribution of diverse illnesses to Kaumpuli’s power signals an expansiveness in Ganda nosologies that would have facilitated the incorporation of new threats to health and prosperity into extant systems, and that also would have allowed experienced healers and/or powerful mediums to claim continued power to intercede as the world changed around Ganda populations. Consider the differing presentations but widespread devastation that unchecked diarrheal disease, suppurating buboes and overheated bodies, or weakness, wasting, and uncontrollable sleep might have on a given community: each visited disaster upon the population, but in diverse ways and timeframes. Increasing severity or difficulty could shift the nosology of an illness into the realm of kaumpuli, a disaster visited by its namesake lubaale. These differing identifications of kaumpuli were not, then, a conflation of diseases or symptoms, but rather evidence of the work kaumpuli could do as a capacious categorization of an illness and attribution of its causes. As a context for later epidemics, Kaumpuli’s malign powers would confound European efforts to seek equivalencies in Ganda and European names and definitions of disease, as they attempted to pin in place a set of signs and problems that were more complex, variable, and contingent.
An outbreak of illness linked with kaumpuli in the 1880s offers insight into the intellectual precedents and strategies in circulation on the Buganda shores of the lake. Catholic missionary diaries reported that an illness causing diarrhea, vomiting, and frequently a quick death—in between one and four days—gripped the city of Kampala by mid-April 1881. People around the city called the illness kaumpuli, missionaries reported; the kabaka Mutesa referred to it as lumbe, glossed in the 1890s as sickness, disease, or death.76 The epidemic generated panic and disruption as people attempted to evade the illness, safeguard their families, and stem the tide of wider misfortune around them. It also generated engagement with kubándwa mediums—as well as Catholic missionaries—as people sought tools and strategies to do so.77
Intertwined with the use of kubándwa mediums or missionary doctors for healing were other responsive, preventive practices. Identifying an illness as of Kaumpuli facilitated collective responses that temporarily redefined everyday life in different ways. Reactions to kaumpuli indicate that people changed the rhythms of daily life and oriented differently to the environment and people around them in response to widespread illness: by isolating the sick, by moving away from homes and villages, or by suspending typical social obligations. Sources indicate that, for instance, the Ganda responded to kaumpuli in early 1881 by isolating those with signs of the illness in separate rooms or dwellings.78 Kagwa and Roscoe noted respectively at the turn of the century that arrival of this illness sometimes necessitated that Ganda people abandon their homes, without differentiating between the sick and the well.79 Kaumpuli’s mediums here played an important role in structuring such movement. Mediums might establish that death associated with the lubaale was attached to a person or household, triggering movement away. Kaumpuli’s medium also ritu-ally welcomed people to return to their homes and farms following an outbreak of illness (glossed by Kagwa and Roscoe as plague), and received goods and gifts in return.80 The lubaale’s intervention was spatial as well as spiritual, with implications for the long and short terms. People might temporarily leave their homes and farms to flee places of illness or cease the collective labor of planting or harvest.81 When they returned, along with the lubaale’s blessing, beer was brewed and offered, restoring social bonds. Departures from homes and farms were sometimes precipitated by animals, particularly rats, sickening or dying, both Roscoe and Kagwa assert, a pattern corroborated elsewhere in the region at the same time period.82 Kagwa’s ethnographic notes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century recalled that “if a person had swollen glands it was said that this god had done it,” and noted that the “plague” that Kaumpuli’s name connoted still struck fear into populations because of the many deaths it could cause.83 Several years later, in 1908, the principal medical officer of Uganda would note a case “of a disease called by the Baganda Kaumpuli, which is associated with the occurrence of bubo.”84 Médard asserts that Kaumpuli and his mediums mediated the return of survivors; the possessions of the sick belonged to the lubaale upon their illness, and the lubaale and medium facilitated their return (and thus the return to normal activity) when widespread illness had abated.85 As ever, widespread disease also had implications for the stability of the state, safeguarded by political authorities, clan elders, and healers. Practices that worked to ensure population health also worked in the interest of political leaders and the ritual leaders and kubándwa mediums with whom they engaged.86
Experiences of kaumpuli also offer insight into different collective strategies for addressing widespread illness that would prove relevant as epidemic sleeping sickness came to the region. But unlike the serious, periodic illnesses that people survived alongside everyday injuries and ailments, the next widespread disease that communities around the lake encountered would significantly and permanently alter social and political relations. Efforts to prevent it would change the geography of daily life. As bamongota, “those who are drowsy,” appeared more and more frequently on the Sseses and word spread of increasing mortality, Ssese people marshalled social resources and directed diverse strategies to cope with new manifestations of illness and misfortune. Their efforts would ultimately become entangled with those of colonial authorities and itinerant researchers, as illness brought new outsiders into the orbit of Ssese islanders and others living near Lake Victoria.
MONGOTA: THE SSESE ISLANDS IN A GATHERING STORM
European reports of a new and strange disease first emerged from Buganda in 1901 via doctors Albert Cook and J. Howard Cook, brothers and CMS missionary physicians at work in the hospital at Mengo.87 By late 1901, White Fathers missionaries on the Sseses noted that their parishioners suffered from “the sleeping sickness” as well. In his annual report for 1901–2, Fr. Ramond at Our Lady of Good Comfort at Bumangi reported that, spiritually, the mission’s fortunes were fine, but the mission found itself in grave circumstances otherwise: illness took its toll on the islanders to whom the Fathers tried to minister, creating a population weakened by disease and death. Kaumpuli—here understood as bubonic plague—he reported as a familiar threat. Newer and less predictable was the illness “called sleeping sickness,” which was “very terrible and very murderous for all.”88 Of a population on Bugala estimated at twenty-six thousand, Fr. Ramond reported that the mission had treated six thousand people in 1902.89 Elsewhere on the same island, Anglican missionary H. T. C. (Henry) Weatherhead noted that “nearly everywhere [he] met with murmurings with regard to the sleeping-sickness” on his itinerations around the archipelago and that “the death-rate on Sese [Bugala Island], hitherto not very high is, we now fear, increasing.”90
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