The Politics of Disease Control. Mari K. Webel
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and political connections between Ssese shrines and the Ganda court provided one logic for interaction between the islands and the mainland, structuring the engagement of political elites and ritual experts around the mediation of cosmological power centered on the islands. The relations that connected aquatic and terrestrial worlds were experienced differently by the people who worked the lake, however, for whom engagement with Mukasa affected life, health, and prosperity in everyday ways. Rowers’ ready invocations of Mukasa as they labored, moving people and goods across and around the lake, point to the lubaale’s role in shaping mobility and security for littoral populations. The lakeshore and the forested fringes of the Ssese Islands were spaces that islanders had to traverse as they went about their days—to fish, to collect water, to travel, to work, or to bring livestock to drink. Gendered but comprehensive use of the lake meant widespread activity at the islands’ edges; the lakeshore was rich with vegetation and fish, a place of fecundity and potential. But nearness to the lakeshore had implications for health and security.24 On the Sseses as elsewhere in the era of Ganda military campaigns and raiding for captives, it was also a space of vulnerability to violence and force for people living on the islands: living permanently near the lake occurred only in extraordinary circumstances, as we will see. The lubaale’s powers mediated those mobilities and potentials for island and littoral communities, linking terrestrial and aquatic worlds through places where the lubaale Mukasa’s powers could be accessed in widespread small, local shrines. These social and environmental aspects of Ssese life and livelihood would influence how islanders and littoral communities engaged with new kinds of illness in the coming decades.
MALADIES, MISFORTUNE, AND HEALING ON THE SSESE ISLANDS AND NORTHERN VICTORIA NYANZA, C. 1890
The circumstances of cosmological power and its mediation would shape how Ssese islanders dealt with widespread illness in the early twentieth century, and, ultimately, the emplacement of colonial public health. Previous experience and extant practice are also central to understanding dynamics of treatment and mitigation of sickness and misfortune that would later emerge around new outbreaks of widespread illness. I here examine therapeutic practices and the intellectual worlds within which littoral communities in Buganda understood illness. By the late 1800s, Ssese islanders and others living along the lakeshore had diverse resources to manage the precarity and prosperity of life and cope with illness and misfortune. Generally, they availed themselves of an expanding, pluralistic set of therapeutic and medical resources that included family members, healers, local shrines, and missions. Within Ganda therapeutic and etiological frameworks, healing an individual’s illness depended on the mediation of spiritual forces and also addressed a wider set of relations: between a person and ancestral spirits; between a person and his or her family, kin, or clan relations; between a person and deities in Ganda cosmologies. Mission healing, too, drew upon a framework that integrated spiritual and material causes of and treatments for illness.
Consulting knowledgeable family members likely provided a first possibility for the sick. Elder members of one’s kin or clan networks might direct a person to locally available botanical remedies, perhaps with the assistance of herbalist healers with specialized knowledge of healing plants.25 More persistent or worrisome ailments drove the sick and their relations to seek further specialized assistance. A healing expert—who might act as a diviner, herbalist, kubándwa medium, or utilize these skills in combination—determined the cause of the illness and set a course for its remedy.26 Treatment-seeking was a social endeavor and healing accounted for a person’s relationships; the involvement of household and kin and attention to social relationships corresponds with the public nature of healing and its overarching emphasis on ensuring collective health and prosperity.27 Healers attended to specific physical or temperamental signs but connected changes to the body and temperament to a wider social and spiritual world. A person’s actions or behaviors, when they contradicted taboos or proscriptions, might cause illness or pain; likewise, behavior or activity that disrupted good relations with ancestors could also cause harm.
Healers might also act on the sufferer’s body, addressing physical manifestations of illness. Detailed descriptions of Ganda healing in practice are rare; historical and ethnographic narratives offer only a selective view of the therapies, techniques, and medicines used by healers around the turn of the century.28 Nevertheless, sources discuss that a healer’s interaction with a sick person might involve applying botanical materials on the skin, preparing medicines to ingest, letting blood, or directing smoke or steam onto or into the body, for instance. Ganda healers attended to specific foci of pain, swelling, or irregularity as well as more generalized weakness or malaise, even as they engaged with spiritual or socially grounded woes.29 Healers employed horn cups to draw blood from incisions on affected parts of the body, for example—on either side of the head, in case of headache. A healer might apply also a heated iron implement to cause blisters in order to draw out sources of pain from a particular place deep in the body, or use a blistering agent on sites of swelling.30 A healer might also recommend a regimen of repeated washing of the sufferer’s body with mixtures of particular plants and the drinking of plant, animal, and other tinctures.31 Therapies were also applied to ill bodies: Roscoe approvingly recounted fevered patients sitting under barkcloth steam tents, applying an immersive, surrounding remedy for a particular symptom. Healers might require a sick person or family member to procure powerful substances—bones, saliva, urine—which were used to make medicines or amulets, as well as animals used for augury.32 The occupation, social status, and clan of a sufferer were important to healing, as they positioned a person with regard to taboos, protective deities, or possible transgressions. Ganda etiologies, fitting within a wider moral economy, further accounted for the gender and age of the sick.33 The sick person and his or her family also likely pursued overlapping therapies, shifting strategies if an illness persisted, in pursuit of effective cure.34 These interventions, particularly if the healer was not a medium, occurred in tandem with propitiation of spiritual forces—efforts to properly maintain ancestral graves or shrines, offering gifts of food, livestock, or goods to a medium—as well as complying with a healer’s instructions to restore balance and health to relationships. Alongside efforts to address an individual’s manifestation of illness, healers and mediums also worked to resolve misfortunes on a different scale when illness became more widespread or frequent in Ganda society. Serious or widespread illnesses—those that redounded to impact a household, family, or larger population—might be attributed to correspondingly serious disruptions in relations between people and a lubaale or, conversely, to the behavior of the kabaka, who himself held secure the health of the kingdom’s population.35
Some maladies might resolve with the use of medicines a healer made; others might have historically required consultation with a lubaale or ancestral spirit for resolution. In such cases, islanders would have sought solutions for illness and misfortune from kubándwa mediums, including those of the lubaale Mukasa. Appeals for healing to deities other than Mukasa are less well documented, but Cohen notes that the Ssese Islands were “a veritable hive of deities,” with sixty deities associated with the islands in diverse interlacustrine traditions.36 Several of the powerful balubaale with connections to the Sseses also had lineage links to Mukasa. Musisi, lubaale of earthquakes and progenitor of Mukasa, had one of his two principal temples on Fumve Island, where offerings might be made to keep the earth calm. The lubaale’s powers also extended to affect fecundity and pregnancy, in both invocations of his potential to impact pregnant women and in amulets bearing the same name that were associated with fecundity and childbearing.37 Wanema, father of Mukasa and another powerful deity, historically had his temple on nearby Bukasa Island, which was also renowned as Mukasa’s birthplace.38 Buswa forest on Bugala was sacred to Mukasa’s son Mirimu, a lubaale with implications for victory in battle.39 Kagwa’s research tallied another six minor deities located on Bugala Island, another specifically on Bugala’s Buninga peninsula, and seven more on Bukasa Island.40 These other deities, alongside appeals to other prominent balubaale such as Kaumpuli, who had a mainland shrine, could have offered islanders connections to other kubándwa mediums in addition to those oriented to Mukasa when seeking relief or healing.41 Deep associations with potent, generative forces were woven into island names: Bugala Island’s name resonated with the root -gàlá, which glossed “physical force of life” and