The Politics of Disease Control. Mari K. Webel
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2. Colonial and tropical medicine attentions fell on the islands with increasing scrutiny after 1905. Ssese and Ganda ideas and practices around illness, which I examine in depth in this chapter, shaped the field upon which those later sleeping sickness research and treatment efforts would occur. The Sseses proved a particularly influential and productive zone for the articulation of the intellectual and strategic foundations of the German sleeping sickness campaign, ranging from particular ideas about African mobility to specific dosage regimens with atoxyl. The sleeping sickness camp that German researchers ultimately founded on the Sseses provided a springboard for the wider campaign in affected areas of German East Africa, shaping colonial public health strategies elsewhere on Lake Victoria and further afield at Lake Tanganyika. However, in this chapter, I explicitly do not work with sleeping sickness in a European biomedical framework of disease classification or causation, hewing instead to Ganda and Ssese categorizations of illness.
THE SSESE ISLANDS: POLITICS, PROSPERITY, AND DANGER WITHIN THE GANDA EMPIRE
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Ssese Islands were remarkable for their position at the nexus of ritual, military, and therapeutic power within Buganda and the lake’s northern shores. Important for elites and ordinary people alike were Ssese shrines to the powerful lake deity Mukasa, whose presence made the islands a space of power, healing, and potential danger amid the vast lake.1 The intertwining of royal, clan, and ritual power in previous centuries had made Ssese ritualists central to the kabaka’s maintenance of legitimate rule within Ganda royal cosmologies, as well as in other kingdoms around the lake. While the majority of the population occupied a subordinated position within the centralized Ganda state, powers located on the Sseses remained indispensable for efforts to secure prosperity and restore health and made the islands a singular site within littoral political, ritual, and therapeutic dynamics. These social and political worlds of Ssese islanders—created by both long-standing political and ritual relationships as well as recent adaptations to new conditions of life—shaped how people responded to colonial impositions, including those around illness and health.
Within regional cosmologies, the lake and the Ssese Islands were places of significant power.2 Powerful forces of fertility, prosperity, and nature circulated around Mukasa, the lubaale or “national spirit” of the lake, who was associated with fish, rain, winds, children, and especially twin children.3 Mukasa’s main kubándwa shrine sat on the island of Bubembe, nestled in the center of the archipelago; tradition held that the lubaale had been born on the nearby island of Bukasa.4 Ganda and Ssese people seeking healing had diverse sources to consult, but Mukasa’s significant power offered the lubaale’s mediums and shrines a corresponding potency to resolve challenging matters and ensure prosperity. Roscoe and Kagwa’s extensive explanations of Mukasa and his powers attributed “benign” force to the lubaale, characterizing him as a “god of plenty” who “gave the people an increase of food, cattle, and children” and “sought to heal the bodies and minds of men.”5 In addition to desire for successful voyages or productive fishing by people frequenting the lake, others also sought amelioration of illness and misfortune from mediums who, through the lubaale, could identify the cause of trouble and offer direction to address it. Mukasa and balubaale were “indispensable to the common people” as “providers of health and fertility.”6 Childless women sought fertility from Mukasa and his companion Nalwanga; his local mediums would have offered solutions for maladies alongside a family elder or nearby herbalist or healer, perhaps when persistence or complexity suggested additional resources were needed.7 Importantly, Schoenbrun argues, Mukasa and the Ssese Islands provided sources of “information, creativity, and fertility” to ordinary people through practices of gathering and supplication at the deity’s shrine there; they offered resources for realizing self-sufficiency, prosperity, and “respectable adult belonging” to people living on the littoral from the eighteenth century onward.8 People historically accessed these resources at shrines scattered around the lakeshore and at the main Bubembe shrine, assembling in gatherings both large and small. Large gatherings to consult Mukasa at a shrine might occur regularly and rhythmically, focused on the lunar cycle and the timing of the new moon and spaced every three months, or, less predictably, in response to other triggers: a “public calamity” such as widespread illness or famine, or instances of royal consultation.9
Mukasa determined the temper of the lake and therefore the fate of people traveling on it—whether weather would be calm or the waters rough, how rowers would fare in their collective work, whether canoes would be threatened by hippos or meet with unseen rocks.10 Veneration and propitiation of Mukasa was a key aspect of the labor and experience of traveling the lake for Ssese rowers especially. Rowers or fishermen might make an offering for safety at a local, minor shrine or as they worked on the lake.11 A loose network of mediums around the littoral maintained those minor shrines that were scattered around the lakeshore.12 In the early 1880s, Fr. Léveseque, transiting the lake from Buganda to a mission on the southern edge of the lake by canoe convoy, recounted Mukasa serving as a touchstone for rowers in the daily experience of rowing—explaining a hippo’s growl or a slow journey—as well as a means of seeking intercession in difficult circumstances. Ssese rowers offered the lubaale ripe bananas before setting out across the open lake, to “feed” Mukasa, employing rituals that maintained connections between their terrestrial farms and home life and their work on the water.13
Mukasa’s power was formidable and his reach was wide, extending deep into Buganda and far beyond the Sseses.14 The legitimacy of interlacustrine chiefly authority depended on the health and prosperity of a ruler’s population and good relations with the lubaale Mukasa were important to Ganda royal power. Veneration of the powerful god by the Ganda kabaka maintained a connection between the islands and the Ganda royal court.15 The kabaka’s veneration of Mukasa, through offerings of people, fowl, livestock, barkcloth, and cowries at his shrine, and reciprocal gifts of fish from Mukasa’s priests to the kabaka, directed the exchange of symbolic goods between the Ganda court and the Ssese shrine within regular, ritualized festivals.16 Mukasa’s shrines and mediums also offered resources to Ganda and other leaders in dire circumstances. According to early twentieth century ethnographies of the Ganda, just as an individual might seek the cause and remediation of a challenging or serious illness from one of Mukasa’s shrines, so, too, might the kabaka seek counsel with Mukasa’s Ssese medium “if any plague began to rage in the country.”17 In times of difficulty, such as a famine that struck the region in late 1880, the kabaka might send frequent gifts to the central shrine’s medium on the Sseses. In the same era, missionaries reported, kabaka Mutesa relied on consultation with the medium to determine when to make war or travel on the lake.18 Mukasa’s medium also famously brought life in the capital, Kampala, to a halt during efforts to define and address the kabaka Mutesa’s illness in 1879: no one could trade.19 Intimately linked, Ganda rulers and lubaale “were involved in a continuously negotiated relationship” mediated through such exchanges of symbolic goods, maintaining independent “realms of action” as well as reciprocal, mutual obligation.20 On the Sseses and in mainland Buganda, these connections between broader chiefly authority and Mukasa’s power were reinforced historically through connection to specific sites from which the most significant healing power emanated. The person titled Sewoya was, as chief of a major area on the Sseses, historically involved in the ceremonies that annually reconstituted Mukasa’s shrine as a sacred and powerful space, along with the men bearing the names Semagala, Kaganda, and Gugu.21 Thus, many positions of authority on the Sseses related to chiefly mediation of the powers of particular lubaale or of activities around Mukasa’s principal shrines.22 Mukasa’s importance for safe and secure life around the lake—as protector of fishermen and rowers and controller of weather and good catches—meant that the lubaale’s influence also extended beyond Buganda. Royal responsibility for maintaining health and prosperity by mediating cosmological forces also connected other regional kings to Mukasa and to his Ssese priests. In one example, ceremonial “fire” from the Sseses was required for the installation of the bakama of Kiziba, to the southwest of the islands, where it was ceremonially used to cook the king’s food and heat his person; it was kept burning in the palace hearth until a mukama died.23