The Politics of Disease Control. Mari K. Webel
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strategic position—good harbors, gateways to rich hinterland regions—to great advantage, while astutely engaging with new powers in the Indian Ocean world to try to preserve their autonomy.81 Centrally important in the increasing connectivity between the coast and the Great Lakes region, and to new possibilities for insecurity and prosperity for interlacustrine populations, were two parallel developments in the 1820s and 1830s: Omani migrants established a sultanate in Zanzibar and claimed suzerainty in Swahili coastal ports; and large, organized caravans began to travel between the coast and lakes. The presence of coastal newcomers—read as “Arab” or Swahili by local populations—would only increase in the hinterlands by midcentury, as would African involvement in moving goods and people to the coast.82 After 1840, Zanzibar became the hub of a transcontinental, Afro-Arabian state; Omani plantation agriculture, especially clove production, soon exhausted supplies of free labor and generated demand for unfree labor in the form of slaves from the mainland.83 Concurrently, historic demand from the Indian subcontinent for East African ivory was joined with growing desire for ivory luxury and status items in Europe and the United States. The recently established caravan routes connecting various coastal cities to the Great Lakes became conduits for the movement of slaves and ivory out of the African hinterland, and of printed cloth, weapons, beads, and other manufactured goods into internal markets.84 The caravan trade brought cultural change to the Great Lakes region as well, as coastal goods (such as printed cloth) came to connote prestige and worldliness and Islamicized, Arab-Swahili identities also traveled.85
This new slave-ivory nexus catalyzed significant, if uneven, changes in the politics and economies of the interlacustrine kingdoms between the 1840s and 1880s. Expansionist states, through wars and raiding, had long generated captives; such captives had historically been integrated into internal production as slaves, but now also became valuable commodities for labor markets further afield.86 Arab and Swahili traders concentrated in entrepôts on and near the lakes and in proximity to caravan routes: Mwanza and Kampala at Lake Victoria, Ujiji and Uvira at Lake Tanganyika, Tabora on the central plains, and Kasongo in the Congo River basin.87 The most vigorous, direct engagement between traders and the major interlacustrine states happened in Buganda, where an entrepreneurial, aggressive regional imperialism made it an active partner in generating and moving slaves and ivory within the wider region.88 The many smaller kingdoms and polities connected with the caravan trade were affected by the movement of slaves, ivory, and other commodities in the region, some as targets of raids for slaves, some through pressure to generate ivory for chiefs to trade, and some as sources of caravan porters. By contrast, the highland kingdoms of Urundi and Rwanda saw less direct engagement until the later nineteenth century, by virtue of their relative isolation from major caravan routes.89
Coastal populations in East Africa had had contact with European traders, particularly the Portuguese, in prior centuries. But with the expansion of northern European empires and increasing agitation against the slave trade in the nineteenth century, European interest in influencing both coastal and hinterland African lives grew more assertive. European travelers followed caravan routes to explore the geography of the interior, “discovering” the sources of the Nile and the chain of vast inland lakes in the 1850s and 1860s on expeditions facilitated by Arab and African translators and guides.90 Christian missionaries were often at the leading edge of European engagement with African populations and both Catholic and Protestant missionaries moved inland to the lakes from coastal footholds after mid-century. Continental partition by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884 established the Belgian sphere of influence in the Congo Free State as extending to the western shores of Lakes Tanganyika and Kivu. Jockeying for control of the interlacustrine region, conceived as a “second shore” for German power in eastern Africa, fit into wider imperial calculations regarding the balance of power in Europe. Border negotiations ultimately established the British to the north of Lake Victoria along 1 degree southern latitude, and the Germans to its south.91 But while Buganda, the Victoria hinterlands, and the central caravan route via Tabora to Ujiji had become the focus of European energies, it was not until the 1890s that the hinterlands of Lake Tanganyika were traversed and surveyed by colonial officials.92 Thereafter, first through exploratory expeditions aimed at mapping the region and then through military campaigns aimed at securing German colonial power, Urundi and also Rwanda were integrated into the German colonial state; similarly, the eastern regions of the Congo Free State at Lake Tanganyika were drawn more tightly into the Belgian colonial regime.93 Ultimately, the British claimed modern Uganda, Kenya, and Zanzibar, the Germans claimed modern mainland Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi, and King Leopold II of Belgium, the modern Democratic Republic of Congo.
As European colonial incursion both accelerated and broadened, the 1890s were a time of increasing stresses on health, peace, and prosperity, generating significant upheaval in nearly all aspects of African life. Waves of disruption and disaster in the form of drought and famine, cattle diseases, war, and human illness had widespread and profound impacts on people on the lakes’ shores and hinterlands, sickening and killing many, driving new local mobilities, and creating new tensions around political legitimacy. Epidemic sleeping sickness followed these other forms of illness and misfortune. Amid rapid change and diverse challenges, the possible resources and strategies available to secure health and prosperity for interlacustrine societies also shifted, as political regimes changed and therapeutic diversity increased. And yet, as the history of controlling illness and securing health amid new epidemics in the region demonstrates, certain political, economic, and therapeutic relationships and institutions continued to be resonant for interlacustrine populations. Their meaning and importance in daily life throughout the era of increasing colonial intervention demonstrates their resilience, even as the grave consequences of late nineteenth-century disruptions make clear the complexity and vulnerability of the political, social, and ecological balances in place.
OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
This book traces the experiences of health and illness in communities that were affected by sleeping sickness and were central to the development of colonial disease-prevention strategies. Three case studies ground the three parts of the book: Part I examines the Ssese Islands of colonial Uganda between 1890 and 1907, Part II examines the kingdom of Kiziba in colonial Tanzania between 1890 and 1914, and Part III examines the Imbo lowlands of colonial Burundi between 1890 and 1914. Each part follows accumulated knowledge, ideas, and practices that changed as the German colonial anti–sleeping sickness campaign unfolded from research on the Ssese Islands to the first sleeping sickness camp in Kiziba to the implementation of a scaled-up campaign in the southern Imbo. Part I focuses on the Ssese Islands as the site of research and treatment development efforts spearheaded by eminent German scientist Robert Koch; these efforts culminated in the development of the Schlafkrankheitslager (sleeping sickness camp) as a model for German colonial strategies. Part II examines how the camp model fit into both precedents of managing widespread illness and changing political dynamics in the kingdom of Kiziba. In Parts I and II, I explore continuities across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an effort to understand the points of reference and intergenerational touchstones that allowed people to make sense of sleeping sickness upon its arrival. Part III pivots to follow how ideas of sleeping sickness prevention that developed out of these experiences at Lake Victoria, which explicitly focused on location and mobility, played out in the particular context of northern Lake Tanganyika. Each part, then, also traces German colonial efforts as connected to those of British and Belgian regimes nearby.
Part I begins with a brief orientation to the history of the Ssese Islands and Buganda in the late nineteenth century. The Ssese Islands, an archipelago in northwestern Lake Victoria and part of the