Sleeping Sickness, Island Enclosure, and the Making of a Modern State in Early Colonial Uganda

In the decade that followed the 1900 signing of the Uganda Agreement, an estimated 200,000-300,000 individuals in this newly forming nation died. Colonial administrators and contemporary scholars alike have attributed their deaths to an outbreak of sleeping sickness, a disease transmitted through the bite of blood-sucking tsetse flies. Hardest hit were former residents of the over one-hundred strategically important islands that fringe Uganda's southern coast. In 1904, European and African agents of Uganda's colonial government began forcibly depopulating islands and relocating islanders to sleeping sickness concentration camps where no "sleepers" reportedly left alive.

While sleeping sickness was and still is a real and fatal disease, by situating islanders within their longer history of opposition to the expansionary desires of pre-colonial and colonial mainland-based polities that the 1900 Uganda Agreement sought to solidify, I argue that sleeping sickness control efforts were part of a political project, rather than a medical one. Analysis of newly available colonial archival documents challenge past attributions of islanders' deaths to sleeping sickness, and instead suggest that most early deaths resulted from battles fought to reign in adversarial mainland-based polities, and later deaths from "treatments" with arsenic, or from pneumonia contracted in sleeping sickness camps. By reconstructing practices of provisioning along Uganda's pre-colonial littoral, including the active use of vegetation that would otherwise created ideal habitat for tsetse flies, I further demonstrate that historical littoral residents worked to limit the spatial extent of the disease. Forced depopulation of the littoral as part of sleeping sickness control efforts actually increased the spatial extent and virulence of the disease. By the time islands were opened again for resettlement in the 1920s, islands and islanders were enrolled as subjects of Uganda Protectorate government and a mainland-based King in spite, or perhaps to spite, their previous efforts to remain independent.