Februar 2024

## PLAGUE NARRATIVES FROM THE GREAT LAKES

Evidence of the Second Pandemic South of the Sahara

By: David L. G. Miedzianogora

History

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ABSTRACT: The second plague pandemic spread across Eurasia during the 14 th century and continued until the 19 th century. Recent contributions have argued that it also spread to sub-Saharan Africa. Here, I  support  that  argument  by  presenting  a  study  on  the  first  emergence  of  plague  in  the  kingdom  of Buganda based on a combination of sources. These include notes from missionaries sent to Buganda by the Church Missionary Society in the 19 th century, early ethnographic work on the Baganda, and Apolo Kagwa's published oral history of the Baganda kings, as well as a critical review of the archaeological record  from  the  region  and  studies  on  East  African  plague  genomes.  I  suggest  that  the  most  likely introduction of plague into the region was the turn of the 17 th century, which is then discussed in a broader African context. This highlights that sub-Saharan societies should be included in global studies of the second pandemic.

KEYWORDS: plague, African history, Buganda, the church missionary society, the second pandemic

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## Introduction

Plague, the disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis , has a millennia-long history in human societies. 1 Most infamous is the medieval Black Death, which killed between a quarter and half of the population throughout Europe and the Middle East (Benedictow 2021: 869-75; Dols 1977: 212-23). However, this was not an isolated epidemic but the first major outbreak in what historians have termed 'the second pandemic' (Tab. 1). This encompasses a lengthy and global phase of the history  of  plague  characterised  by  recurring  outbreaks  throughout  Eurasia  beginning  in  the  14 th century and continuing until the 19 th century. Christian Europe, as well as the Islamic Middle East and North Africa have been the primary focus of scholarly study, but by now major studies have also appeared on the second pandemic in Central and East Asia (Green 2020; Hymes 2014; 2022; McGrath 2021; Slavin 2023a; 2023b). Attempts have also been made to include sub-Saharan Africa in  the  emerging,  global  narrative  of  the  second  pandemic  (Chouin  2022:  145-49).  Yet,  the conventional explanation still holds that plague only appeared south of the Sahara during the third pandemic which began in the mid-19 th century in the Yunnan region of China and subsequently spread across the globe from Hong Kong beginning in 1894 (Bramanti et al. 2016: 3-7). This is despite increasing evidence pointing to the contrary. Decades of studies on the African past have clearly demonstrated that sub-Saharan polities were connected through trade with the Muslim states of North Africa and the Middle East and, on occasion, western Europe and Asia (see Mauny 1978; Fauvelle 2018). This would have provided many opportunities for plague bacteria to spread beyond Name The first pandemic The second pandemic The third pandemic Time period Geographic spread North Africa, East

1 The present article is based on a dissertation delivered in partial fulfilment of the BA in History at the University of Copenhagen in June 2023. I wish to extend my thanks to Avner Shamir who supervised the project, as well as Monica Green who helped me think critically about the genetic evidence for plague in sub-Saharan Africa, Gérard Chouin who generously shared his thoughts about medieval plague on the subcontinent, and Guillem Mas-Fiol who shared tentative results about his research on the 1.ANT strain that seem to support some of the general conclusions drawn in this article, all of whom made the project possible. Thanks are also due to the editors of Culture and History .

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Africa*

, South Asia*

Tab. 1. Geography and time period of the three plague pandemics. Asterisks denote possible spread but a lack of scholarly consensus.

|                             | Central Asia* , East                                                                                                                                |
|-----------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 13th/14th-18th/19th century | Asia* Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, sub- Saharan Africa*, South Asia*, Central Asia,                                                       |
| 19th century-present        | East Asia* , Russia Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, sub- Saharan Africa, the Americas, Australia,                                            |
|                             | South Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, Russia Tab. I. Geography and time period of the three plague pandemics. Asterisks denote possible spread but a |

the Sahara. Genetic studies of plague bacteria even point directly to their introduction into subSaharan Africa during the second pandemic in the Great Lakes region of East Africa (Green 2014: 35-45; 2018: §34-39). Additionally, the major abandonment of sites throughout West Africa during the mid-14 th century is increasingly being interpretated as a direct consequence of the Black Death, placing equatorial West Africa squarely in the middle of the deadliest epidemic in human history (Chouin 2018: §10-21). Although an increasingly substantial body of evidence for the presence of the  second  pandemic  in  sub-Saharan  Africa  is  amassing,  several  questions  persist,  not  least determining exactly when the second pandemic spread to different parts of the subcontinent and why the timing and mode of its spread might have varied across regions (Chouin 2022: 147-49).

In this article, I contribute to the research on the timing and mode of spread of the second pandemic south of the Sahara by providing a study of the history of plague in Buganda, a kingdom located on the borders of Lake Victoria in modern-day Uganda, which became a powerful political player in the region during the middle of the 19 th century. My main questions are whether plague can be

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identified prior to the third pandemic around the Great Lakes, how it spread to the region, and which impact it had on the populations. My focus on Buganda owes largely to biased availability of source material, even though I will argue that plague in the region likely predates the kingdom. In addition, this article also provides a roadmap for how to study plague prior to the third pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa by combining different kinds of source material with distinct strengths and weaknesses.  Genetic  sources  are  becoming  increasingly  important  for  histories  of  disease  by emphasising directly the causative agent of a specific disease (Green 2022). This has even allowed historians to hypothesise the presence of diseases in parts of the world where other sources are absent or underexplored, e.g. , the Indian Ocean (Green and Jones 2020: 40-48). Uncertainties concerning the  exact  mutation  rate  of  plague  bacteria  and  the  high  mobility  of  humans  disturbing  the evolutionary processes that form the assumptions behind genetic models mean that the conclusions drawn  from  these  studies  should  be  used  cautiously  by  historians  (Eaton et  al. 2023).  The archaeological record is a key source when written or oral sources are absent, but it can also be used in  combination with these sources by highlighting material aspects of the past (see Renfrew and Bahn 2020 for an introduction). For example, similar material objects suggest cultural cohesion and can be used to establish chronologies, the changing density of a site through time can be used to explore population histories, and radiometric dating such as carbon 14 can provide unambiguous calendar  dates  for  when  things  happened  (within  a  margin  of  error  of  several  generations  and considering  best  practice  is  followed;  see  Chapple  2013).  This  type  of  evidence  can  therefore highlight aspects of the past that may not be evident from textual or oral sources, yet it cannot directly show the presence or absence of plague since, e.g. , site abandonment, a possible indications of  plague,  might  be  the  product  of  several  factors,  disease  but  one  among  them.  As  it  concerns Africa, written sources are compounded by the often colonial context of their production or the significant time frame that has passed between the events described and the production of the text, as well as an often poor understanding amongst Western-trained historians about the context and biases of traditional, oral sources (see Henige 1982). Whilst these sources all have their combination of issues, by combining them it becomes possible to test inferences about the second pandemic in Africa from a variety of angles, strengthening the conclusions that I draw.

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This article does not represent the first study of plague in Buganda. The importance of the Great Lakes  region,  including  Buganda,  for  understanding  the  spread  of  the  second  pandemic  in  subSaharan Africa has already been proposed by Monica Green (2018) in a study on the biogeographical history of the 1.ANT plague strain, which is endemic to the region, while the main corpus of texts I examine have previously been studied by Henri Médard (2005). Green's study did in many ways pave the way for the present article, yet she focused mainly on the genetic evidence, whilst  Médard's study assumed that the Great Lakes was one of the ancestral homes of plague, and thus failed to consider when the disease first appeared in the region. Subsequent genetic studies have now shown that the disease did not originate in Africa, however, but in East Asia (Morelli et al. 2010). This study therefore adds upon both previous studies. In the case of Médard, my sources are consulted with the explicit aim of understanding when and how plague appeared in the region, therefore asking a fundamentally different question than Médard. In the case of Green, I analyse a wider range of sources, bringing in new perspectives and strengthening the conclusions of her study.

In fact, little work has been published which explores the possibility of plague in sub-Saharan Africa preceeding the third pandemic, safe for studies assuming that East Africa was the ancenstral home of plague, which is now known to be wrong (see Sussmann 2016: 325-37). The first major attempt to call for a historicisation of plague in Africa was voiced by Green (2014) when she proposed that historians of plague should widen the geographic lens with which the disease was studied and take the notion of 'pandemic' seriously. Prior emphasis had been largely on Western Europe with a few landmark studies on the Middle Eastern experience of plague (Dols 1977; 1979; Conrad 1981) or the origins of the second pandemic (McNeill 1976: 149-74; Norris 1977; Dols 1978; Norris 1978). More recent contributions have begun to draw on notions of plague grounded in genetics, and there are  now histories  focusing  on  the experience of  plague  beyond these  (Varlık  2015;  Varlık  2020; Hymes 2014; 2022;  McGrath  2021;  Green  2020;  Slavin  2023a;  2023b;  Mengel  2011;  Tsiamis 2022: 105-22, 153-84). Yet, Africa remains underexplored, with only a 2018 special issue of Afriques standing out as having specifically focused on the question of plague in Africa prior to the third pandemic (Chouin 2018; Derat 2018; Gallagher and Dueppen 2018; Green 2018), as well as a recent article by Chouin (2022), with most other Africanists simply alluding to the presence of the disease  (see  Mitchell  2004:  14,  114,  201).  In  fact,  a  major,  recent  monograph  on  the  second

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pandemic found it viable to adamantly reject the notion that plague spread beyond North Africa (Benedictow 2021: 174-75). Nevertheless, evidence is increasingly  appearing  which  suggest  that plague did spread beyond the Sahara prior to the third pandemic, and this article seeks to contribute to these studies.

The sources I consult are a combination of the correspondences from the missionaries of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Buganda, oral histories of the Baganda, 2 the archaeological record of the region, and genetics. Based on these sources, I will argue that plague in the Great Lakes predates the third pandemic and dates to the second pandemic, most likely the turn of the 17 th century. This adds  to  an  emerging  narrative  of  the  second  pandemic  in  sub-Saharan  Africa  which  not  only emphasises the presence of the disease but also its history across the subcontinent. Questions for future studies include understanding exactly which regions were struck by the Second Pandemic across the African continent, when it spread to different areas, and which differences and similarities might have existed in different parts of Africa and why.

## Identifying historical plague epidemics in precolonial Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa has often been excluded from global histories of plague. One of the principal reasons for this is due to the paucity of the source material. The Christian and Muslim worlds were characterised by a developed writing culture during the 14 th century, when the second pandemic initially  spread  to  these  regions.  This  allowed  contemporaries  to  record  the  appearance  and consequence of plague for posterity. The same was not the case in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where oral traditions were the primary method of recording the past. This has led Africanists to develop supplementary approaches suited to the oral sources available in many parts of Africa in addition to traditional methods from documentary history ( e.g. , Henige 1982), as well as a greater emphasis on archaeological data. Despite the lack of written sources compared to Europe, North Africa,  and  the  Middle  East,  the  conclusion  that  there  exists  no  contemporary  evidence  for  the spread of the second pandemic into the subcontinent is unsubstantiated (see, e.g. , Benedictow 2021: 174-75).  In  fact,  writings  by  travelers,  colonists,  and  traders  to  Africa  mention  plague  on  the

2 The kingdom is called Buganda, the people Baganda.

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continent as far back as the 14 th century (see Spinage 2012: 1336-59), and what is needed, therefore, is a proper understanding of the available sources and how these can be used to probe the history of plague.

Most  of  the  textual  sources  in  precolonial  Africa  derive  from  travelers  to  the  subcontinent. Beginning in the 19 th century,  these  were  increasingly  European  explorers  and  missionaries  who travelled  to  the  interior  of  Africa  to  map  the  continent  and  spread  their  faith.  They  produced numerous texts on the subcontinent and, although highly biased in their descriptions of customs, beliefs, and cultures, these texts can be used critically to reconstruct the history of African peoples (McKittrick 2003). This is also the case for the history of disease on the continent, although caution should be exercised in projecting modern diseases into the past based on written documents (see Cunningham 2002). Nevertheless, it is possible to show a relationship between disease symptoms as they appear in premodern texts and the symptoms that we associate with specific diseases today: if  we  have  no  reason  to  suspect  rapid  evolution  in  a  disease  changing  how  it  is  symptomatically expressed today compared to the historical case we are studying, it is parsimonious to propose the presence of a specific disease in the historical record based on specific symptoms described in our sources, so long as we have no reason to be skeptical of the author of the source when it concerns disease descriptions, and can show that the presence of the disease is otherwise historically viable. Whilst this can produce a likely historical scenario, only genetic studies can positively identify a disease in the historical record, making genetic studies an important supplement to the historian of disease.  Most important is the study of ancient DNA (aDNA) which allow plague and other diseases to be studied directly through their causative agent, in this case Y. pestis (Spyrou et al . 2019). By comparing the  genetics  of  modern  and  ancient  plague  strains,  it  is  possible  to  determine  where different populations of the bacterium appeared, how and when they evolved, and reconstruct the routes they travelled from one place to another. In the case of Africa, a 2018 paper by Monica Green argued that the presence of the modern plague strain 1.ANT in the Great Lakes region was the product of a distinct evolutionary history of plague in East Africa, meaning that at some point in the past, plague was imported into East Africa where it underwent a distinct evolutionary history (Green 2018). However, determining the introduction of the strain into Africa is difficult, as current age estimates differ widely for 1.ANT (Eaton et al. 2023: 6-7). This can be solved by the publication

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of  more  genomes  from  the  region.  While  work  is  currently  underway  to  produce  more  modern 1.ANT genomes, the  most  important  research  to  determine  the  evolutionary  history  of  1.ANT would be the sequencing and publication of aDNA belonging to the strain. This would provide a better understanding of when and where different strains diverged from each other. Consequently, it would become possible to test the two current hypotheses for the introduction of the strain into the Great Lakes. On the one hand is Green's interpretation of a second pandemic introduction of 1.ANT into Africa while an alternative proposed by Sussman (2016) argues that the disease only entered  the  region  during  the  turn  of  the  19 th century.  As  it  stands,  these  hypotheses  are  both congruent with the genetic evidence and which is to be favoured depends on the Interpretation of other historical evidence. This article will argue that Green's hypothesis should be supported when taking the historical evidence available for the region into account.

The  following  paragraphs  present  an  analysis  of  a  combination  of  documentary,  oral,  and archaeological sources for the history of plague in Buganda.  Buganda is the focus of the study due to the rich source material available for the kingdom, much of it produced by missionaries welcomed by the king ( kabaka ) Mutesa during the mid-late 19 th century, detailed ethnographic work during the early 20 th century, and availability of published versions of the oral histories of the Baganda. The Great Lakes and East Africa in general harboured many polities and future studies of these may help produce a stronger regional narrative of the history of plague in this part of Africa. Although the publication of new genetic data is necessary to fully understand the history of plague in the region,  there  is  also  value  in  revisiting  old  material  and  interpreting  it  in  light  of  the  emerging narrative of the presence of the second pandemic on the continent. The present study does the latter with the explicit aim of proposing an improved hypothesis for the history of plague in the Great Lakes by considering a greater variety of evidence for the region than previous studies. Yet, it is only through the publication of aDNA from the region showing the presence of plague bacteria in human remains that the presence of the disease can be indisputably demonstrated. This applies not only to East Africa but to the subcontinent in general, just as it did to Europe and the Middle East until recently  (Little  2011).  Nevertheless,  studies  like  the  present  article,  which  draw  on  an  array  of sources, can produce detailed and testable hypotheses that future genetic studies can either refute or validate, whilst providing a framework within which to interpret the same future genetic studies.

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Februar 2024

## Kawumpuli: the plague of Buganda

Here, I will analyse the missionary records produced by the CMS missionaries during the late 19 th century and the oral histories of the Baganda as they relate to the presence of plague prior to the third  pandemic.  Around  the  same  time  that  Buganda  became  politically  powerful  and  began exercising  imperial  power  over  a  range  of  subjected  peoples  in  the  region  from  the  1840s (Osterhammel 2014: 445), trade routes began to connect the kingdom with the East African coast. Muslim, and later Protestant and Catholic, missionaries were invited to court, where they vied for religious  dominance  against  each  other  and  the  traditional  religious  institutions  of  the  Baganda (Brierley and Spear 1988: 601-4). It was in this context that missionaries from the CMS arrived in 1877 to spread their version of Christianity in one of the most powerful polities in the East African interior.

In June 1881, A.M. Mackay, one of the two British missionaries in the kingdom at the time, noted in his journal that a disease known locally as kawumpuli was spreading in Buganda, which he directly likened to the 'black death, which, in former days, carried off millions of beings in Europe' (Mackay 1882a: 478). In a letter sent to the CMS later the same month, the diagnosis was softened, describing kawumpuli as 'closely akin to, if not quite identical with' the plague epidemics known from Europe (Mackay 1882b: 98). However, as the outbreak continued, this reservation on the nature of the disease was abandoned, and in subsequent correspondences with the CMS the disease was either referred to as 'plague' or 'black death', not just by Mackay, but by all the missionaries ( e.g. , Mackay 1882c: 727). They themselves saw a direct link between the version of plague that they experienced in  Buganda  and  the  plague  that  they  had  learnt  about  in  Europe.  The  word  kawumpuli  may, however,  also  refer  to  epidemic  diseases  in  general,  much  like  'plague'  in  English  and  French (Médard 2005: 89-90). In addition, the missionaries had little medical training, and their diagnosis of  plague  might  have  been  wrong.  The  mention  of  kawumpuli  can  therefore  not  be  equated uncritically with plague, although I will argue below that other lines of evidence strongly suggest that most of the mentions of kawumpuli by the CMS missionaries do, in fact, refer to the presence of Y. pestis bacteria. It is important to note, nevertheless, that not all mentions of kawumpuli by the

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CMS missionaries is likely to align with plague, and any analysis focusing only on the missionary records is likely to over-estimate the prevalence of the disease.

Kawumpuli  remained  a  deadly  disease  throughout  the  time  of  the  mission  in  Buganda,  with outbreaks noted in 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1885, 1887, 1889, 1890, and 1891, all preceding the spread of the third pandemic from Hong Kong in 1894 (Mackay 1882a: 477-81; Mackay 1882b: 98; Mackay 1882c: 727; Mackay 1883: 532-47; O'Flaherty, 1884: 223-24; O'Flaherty 1885: 242; Mackay 1885: 725; Mackay 1887a: 492; Mackay 1887b: 624; Mackay 1888: 18-19; Walker 1890a: 363;  Walker  1890b:  371;  Walker  1890c:  618-619;  Walker  1890d:  623;  Walker  1890e:  771; Baskerville 1892: 105). Based on the descriptions of the disease, these outbreaks seem to have varied in mortality, but since the missionaries did not keep statistics on the virulence of the disease, it is impossible to recreate its death toll. Nevertheless, the missionary and ethnographer John Roscoe noted in his work on the Baganda from 1911 that their population had been halved, from around 3 million when the kabaka Mutesa took the throne in 1856 to around half by his death in 1884, although plague was not mentioned as a possible cause (Roscoe 1911: 6). Nor was disease in general, but the testimonies from the missionaries make it clear that outbreaks happened in the 1880s and early  1890s,  thus  making  it  likely  that  disease  was  a  principal  component  in  the  halving  of  the Baganda. Indeed, the political decline of Buganda in the late 19 th century needs to be understood in the context of climate deterioration and a virulent disease environment (Gooding 2022: 221-29). The numbers given by Roscoe should not be taken to be exact, of course, but they strongly indicate a steep population decline during the late 19 th century among the Baganda.

Apart from mentions of its high lethality, descriptions of the epidemiology of kawumpuli are almost absent  from  the  missionary  records.  Mackay  and  R.H.  Walker,  another  of  the  missionaries, remarked that the disease produced 'swollen glands' or 'ulcers' (Mackay 1883: 547; Walker 1890e: 771). A little later, G.K. Baskerville, who arrived in Buganda in 1891, noted that the disease existed in two forms: 'externally it produces swellings in various parts, and may be cured in the above way [by bursting the blister]; but if it is internal, no cure is known' (Baskerville 1892: 105). This may seem to disregard Y. pestis as the causative agent of kawumpuli since the only cure for the disease would be antibiotics which remained unknown for decades. But it may also be explained by the

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mortality rates of bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic plague. The swellings noted by Baskerville correspond to the buboes produced by bubonic plague, whereas the internal variant may correspond to pneumonic and septicaemic plague where the infection does not produce visible symptoms. The latter forms have a substantially higher mortality rate than bubonic plague, killing almost all their victims if left untreated. As such, the cure for the 'external' variant noted by Baskerville, which only made recovery 'probable', but not certain, would be due to a lower fatality for that specific type  of  plague  rather  than  an  actual  cure.  The  epidemiological  characteristics  of  kawumpuli,  as described by the CMS missionaries, are congruent with modern plague. This is substantiated by the inability of the early missionaries to contain the disease when it was first reported in 1881. In June 1881, Mackay had sent his then only companion at the mission site in Buganda, P. O'Flaherty, to kabaka  Mutesa's  court  to  introduce  measures  aimed  at  controlling  the  outbreak  of  kawumpuli (Mackay  1882a:  478).  Six  measures  were  proposed,  including  drinking  hot  water  and  weekly cleaning of the house. These were introduced by Mutesa, and although the capital did become less polluted, the outbreak continued (Mackay 1882b: 98). This led Mackay to conclude in October 1882 that the disease must be endemic in the area, moving from region to region and 'periodically breaking out in alarming virulence' (Mackay 1883: 547), although he continued pleading for the adoption of his programme to halt the spread of the disease (Mackay 1885: 725).

The idea that kawumpuli was endemic in the area is supported by the Baganda conception of the disease. When Roscoe produced the first substantial ethnographic work on the Baganda in 1911, he noted that plague, 'which had been known for many years, was more feared than any other sickness' (Roscoe 1911: 102). Since Roscoe wrote some years after the Third Pandemic had entered subSaharan Africa, this is, on its own, of course not strong evidence of the earlier presence of plague in Buganda. However, he also remarked that the Baganda had a highly developed 'cleansing ceremony' specifically  for  plague  (Roscoe  1911:  310);  complex  rituals  develop  over  sustained  periods, suggesting that the Baganda's history with plague preceded the arrival of European missionaries. In fact,  CMS  missionaries  only  describe  a  handful  of  Baganda  seeking  their  medicine  to  cure  the disease, despite the Baganda '[dying] off like flies' (Mackay 1885: 725), lending credit to the idea that they had their own forms of treatment. If the Baganda had a long history of interaction with plague, a key question, then, is determining when it began.

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This can be illuminated by turning to the origin story of the god (lubaale) of plague: Kawumpuli. 3 Before  attaining  godhood,  Kawumpuli  was  the  deformed  child  of  Kayemba,  the  brother  of  the kabaka Jjuuko. The child soon died and entered the pantheon of deities in the traditional religion in Buganda as the lubaale of plague. To save the country from the epidemic disaster that would follow  if  his  spirit  was  ever  let  loose,  the  hole  in  which  Kawumpuli  was  believed  to  reside  was rigorously kept sealed. However, this was not enough to save the kabaka, for he died when he one day looked toward Bulemeezi, the region in the north of the kingdom where Kawumpuli was kept. If taken literally, the story places the beginning of the worship of Kawumpuli in the late 17 th century, since this was the time that Jjuuko reigned as kabaka according to the Buganda king lists (Kagwa 1971: 195). It  could  even  be  argued  that  what  killed  Jjuuko  was  the  disease  kawumpuli,  which would explain the sudden introduction of a new lubaale into the Ganda pantheon. 4 In fact, Apolo Kagwa, prime minister of Buganda and the first to compile the king list in written form and publish them in 1901, noted that this event in the genealogy of the kabaka was regarded by the Baganda 'as the  origin  of  pestilence',  and  linked  fatal  diseases  with  swollen  glands  as  a  symptom  directly  to Kawumpuli (Kagwa 1971: 53). He described several outbreaks of the disease, most convincingly one caused by rats during the rule of the kabaka Kyabaggu in the mid-18 th century, and notes how the disease often led to the abandonment of old capitals and establishment of new ones (Kagwa 1971: 83-84, 93, 96). In other words, the Baganda had developed specific ways of dealing with kawumpuli, suggesting a centuries-long history with the disease in the kingdom.

Uncertainties surrounding the historical accuracy of the king lists complicate the literal interpretation. Despite stretching back to the 14 th century, critical appraisals of the king lists suggest that the early period of the first eight kabaka should be interpreted as mythical rather than historical (Atkinson 1975). Although Jjuuko postdates the mythical kings, he, too, may be a mythical figure. This is based on biographical details in his canon more reminiscent of a creation myth than royal exploits, supported by the possibility that his name is a Bantu derivation of the word for divinity ( juok )  in  the  Lwo  languages,  which  contributed  significantly  to  the  Ganda  vocabulary  (Wrigley

3 The following is the version of the story as it is told in Roscoe (1911: 309).

4 Médard argues that Kawumpuli was imported into the pantheon from the Buvuma Islands at the same time since he was 'an atypical deity, unrelated to the rest of the region's pantheon' (Médard 2005: 87, my translation).

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1996: 79-84, 178-82). A historical reading remains possible, however, based on the ability to link a total solar eclipse in 1680 with a story about a priest who ordered the sun to set after which 'darkness enveloped the earth' during the early reign of Jjuuko (Kagwa 1971: 47-48). Therefore, the historical precision of Jjuuko's reign is ambiguous, meaning that any reconstruction of the history of Buganda based on his chronology can only be hypothetical. Despite these apparent issues with the king lists, they nevertheless suggest that at the time of recording in the early 20 th century, the Baganda had a history  with  kawumpuli  which  was  long-ranging  enough  for  the  disease  to  play  a  role  in  oral histories,  whether  one  favours  a  mythical  or  literal  reading  of  them.  Considering  also  the  CMS correspondences, it seems quite likely that the beginning of this history predated the third pandemic, and it might even by hypothesised that it might correspond in time with the tale of Kawumpuli and, thus, have been introduced around the 17 th century, although other evidence is needed to strengthen that hypothesis.

The reports from Buganda were not isolated. In 1859, the explorer Richard Francis Burton noted that Muslim traders had heard of 'táún' (henceforth: ta'un ), the Arabic word for plague, when they first arrived in Karagwe, a kingdom bordering the west of Lake Victoria (Burton 1859: 387). The traders themselves used the word ta'un to describe the epidemic, which is significant since it was the word that was used throughout Islam for the disease caused by plague bacteria beginning with the second pandemic (Arıcı 2021), unlike the word waba' , which simply designates any epidemic disease (Dols 1977: 35). Since plague outbreaks occurred in both Egypt and Syria at this time, the traders would have been familiar with the disease (Dols 1979: 175-77). Thus, it is likely that the disease they identified as plague was just that. As it stands, there are myriad mentions of plague by travelers, colonists, and traders throughout Africa as far back as the 14 th century (Spinage 2012: 1336-59), but apart from the mentions by the CMS missionaries in Buganda in the 1880s and 1890s, and the mention by Burton in 1859, it is difficult to determine the exact meaning of the reference. Several of  these  earlier  mentions  may  therefore  have  referred  simply  to  epidemic  outbreaks  of  any  kind rather than the presence of plague bacteria. The same cannot be said for the reports from Buganda, nor that of Burton, which seem to be likely instances of Y. pestis bacteria.

Februar 2024

## A population collapse

As  mentioned  earlier,  the  dating  of  the  introduction  of  plague  into  the  Great  Lakes  remains ambiguous based on the genetic evidence (Eaton et al. 2023: 6-7). The Buganda king lists suggest that it may have happened around the late 17 th century, but this is based on a historical reading of events that happened centuries prior to its recording, and they may be mythical. In this section, I will  argue  that  the  archaeology of  the  region  supports  the  interpretation  of  the  oral  and  written sources I outlined above, which together provides a strong case for a 17 th century introduction of plague into the Great Lakes region.

Archaeological studies can serve as a useful addition to historical studies, or a viable alternative when no written sources are present. In the case of the Great Lakes, prior to the kingdoms that appeared during the 18 th century, another development had taken place by the end of the 1 st millennium with the adoption  of new  subsistence practices, namely  cattle herding and  banana  agriculture (Schoenbrun 1993). Subsequently, the archaeological record exhibits the development of hierarchical  societies  throughout  the  region  with  major  sites  appearing  throughout  the  area  that would later comprise Buganda and its immediate neighbour Bunyoro, such as the earthworks of Munsa,  Mubenda,  and  Bigo,  or  the  town  of  Ntusi,  all  requiring  a  significant  labour  force  to construct and sustain the occupations attested from the archaeological excavations of the sites. These sites have been suggested to belong to a single polity, Kitara (Sutton 1993a), preceding Buganda and its neighbouring kingdoms, but based on the differences between the sites in both chronology and the nature of the finds it is more likely that they represent different political entities competing over resources (Robertshaw 1997: 18; Robertshaw and Taylor 2000: 13-19). Whatever the exact political nature of this phenomenon, the sites all seem to have been abandoned around the turn of the  17 th century  (Robertshaw  and  Taylor  2000:  19;  Iles,  Robertshaw,  and  Young  2014:  49), although a few late radiocarbon dates and scattered finds suggest minimal occupation or use may have continued in later centuries.

The oral traditions of the Baganda or Banyoro rarely mention these earthworks. They were therefore probably not direct  antecedents  to  the  later  kingdoms,  but  rather  their  abandonment  should  be interpreted as a break between two political systems in the region (Robertshaw and Taylor 2000:

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19). Researchers have favoured either a social explanation or an environmental one for the sudden, widespread  abandonment  (Chrétien  2003:  69).  The  shift  from  large,  central  sites  to  scattered homesteads does suggest a demographic change, and this may have been caused by climate-changeinduced famine, 5 although it may also have been caused by the introduction of novel diseases to which neither the human nor animal population of the region harboured any resistance. In fact, the high  fatality  associated  with  the  first  wave  of  the  second  pandemic  fundamentally  changed  the economic and social situation in Europe ( e.g. , Bailey 2021), and similar change may have occurred throughout impacted regions in Africa, including the Great Lakes. To better understand the shift from settlement mounds to scattered homesteads, future systematic studies considering the evidence for different causes behind the shift need to be conducted.

Nevertheless, the archaeological record in combination with the oral and written record does make it  possible  to  propose  a  hypothesis  for  the  shift  between  the  Kitara  political  system  and  later lacustrine kingdoms. Beginning around 1500 CE and culminating around 1800 CE, a humid period was followed by a period of increased aridity (Marchant et al. 2018: 41), putting a strain on the Kitara system, which then fully broke down with the introduction of a highly fatal disease during the  late  17 th century.  Afterwards,  plague  would  have  focalised  in  local  rodent  populations  and continued to circulate in its new hosts in the wild, occasionally spilling into human populations (see Slavin  2023a  for  a  study  exploring  this  mechanism  in  depth  in  a  Central  Asian  context). Abandonment of settlements struck by epidemics may have become an integrated way to deal with such events to minimise the spread of contagion, as attested for the Baganda during the 18 th century. In fact, during the third pandemic in the early 20 th century, medical experts throughout the Great Lakes remarked that many of the peoples under colonial rule had sophisticated ways of dealing with the spread of plague as well as local terms for it, lending further support to the idea of a locally known rather than novel disease at that point (Green 2018: §46-55). Based on a combination of written, oral, and archaeological sources, the most likely introduction of the second pandemic into the Great Lakes was around the end of the 17 th century.

5 The abandonment did happen during a period of climatic instability in the region (Robertshaw et al. 2004: 540-42).

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## Interlacustrine plague narratives in an African context

If plague spread into the Great Lakes, it is likely that it also plagued other regions. This might have provided centres from which it could spread into the Great Lakes during the turn of 17 th century, as well as regions that were infested from the Great Lakes. Likely centres from which plague could reach Lake Victoria include trans-Saharan trade routes, the Nile, or through the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf (Green 2018: §57-65). Whatever the exact route taken by the pandemic, its origin as it concerns sub-Saharan Africa were the North African or Middle Eastern trade centres with links to  the  Islamic  coasts  of  Africa.  These  regions  saw  continued  epidemics  throughout  the  second pandemic (Dols 1977; 1979; Conrad 1981), and plague bacteria could easily have been transported southwards along maritime or trans-Saharan trade routes. Another region that was likely affected by plague is equatorial West Africa, where the abandonment of sites during the 14 th century has been argued to be indicative of plague; notably, the Ghanian earthworks (Chouin and DeCorse 2010; Chouin 2012), Kirikongo in Burkina Faso (Dueppen 2022), as well as both the Malian Jenne-Jeno complex (Dueppen and Gallagher 2016; Gallagher and Dueppen 2018) and the mounds of Sadia (Huysecom et  al. 2015).  Indeed,  the  sheer  number  of  abandoned  sites  throughout  the  region strongly suggest that something major happened at this time (Dueppen 2016). Although not all sites were  abandoned, many experienced stark decreases in population size at this time. The dating of the sites is particularly interesting, as a mid-late-14 th  century abandonment due to plague would mean that sub-Saharan West Africa should be included in histories of the Black Death, the original spread of the second pandemic, which reached Europe and the Middle East in 1347. It makes sense that the pandemic spread south as trade between North and West Africa was highly developed by then, moving traders and pilgrims along known, well-traversed caravan routes through the Sahara ( e.g. , Mauny 1978).

Two issues concern this evidence. First, the dating of the abandonment is based on carbon 14 dating which,  due  to  the  margin  of  error,  makes  it  impossible  to  create  a  fully  secure  chronology. Consequently, some sites may well have been abandoned prior to the introduction of the Black Death  in  West  Africa  (see  Sanderse  2019:  35-42).  Nevertheless,  the  geographic  spread  of  the abandonment suggests a regional pattern which needs to be explained. If not plague: then what? As

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Chouin and DeCorse have remarked with regards to the Ghanian earthworks, but which applies to the whole region: 'it seems that only one event can possibly explain such a large-scale phenomenon: the occurrence of the Black Death' (Chouin and DeCorse 2010: 143). Although other possibilities should continuously be investigated, the strongest explanation for the abandonment of major sites throughout West Africa is the introduction of plague into the subcontinent.

The second issue is the lack of direct evidence, which has been dealt with at length as it concerns 17 th century  Buganda  throughout  the  article,  but  which  is  even  more  problematic  during  14 th century Africa as a whole. Whereas the 1.ANT strain shows that plague did appear around the Great Lakes with a likely dating to the second pandemic, no such plague bacteria have been proven to exist in West Africa. Nor are there any definitive indications of plague in any textual sources, although several sporadic mentions occur after the arrival of the Portuguese (Spinage 2012: 1336-59). In fact, the silence of the traveler Ibn Battuta, who journeyed to West Africa in 1352 and returned in 1354, and who would therefore have experienced or heard about ongoing plague epidemics in the region, has been taken as a strong indication that the Black Death remained north of the Sahara. This is especially the case since he and his editor, Ibn Juzayy, reported no less than ten outbreaks throughout the Rihla ,  a  written  account  of  Battuta's  travels.  Furthermore,  despite  other  parts  of  his  travels having been severely questioned, his African journeys have been largely accepted as fact (Waines 2010: 8-26). If Battuta did not report on plague in West Africa in the 14 th century, the logic goes, then plague was not present in the region.

It is intriguing, then, that this key eyewitness for the spread of plague in the Muslim world has only recently been the subject of sustained critical discussion concerning the validity of his account of the plague. This work was undertaken by Claudia Maria Tresso. She concluded that Battuta is a reliable  source  for  the  spread  of  the  Black  Death  in  the  Muslim  world  yet,  importantly  for  the present  discussion,  he  may  have  been  silent  on  some  occasions  when  he  encountered  plague. Notably, no mention is made of plague ( ta'un ) or epidemic ( waba' ) in either Mecca, Baghdad, Tunis, or the Delta Region, despite these locations being affected by the Black Death during his sojourn there (Tresso 2021: 169, footnote 158). Therefore, it is entirely possible that the same was the case in West Africa and that Battuta's silence on plague should not be equated with absence of the disease.

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In fact, Tresso points out that the passages on plague break with the tone and style throughout the Rihla which merits explanation: she suggests either that this was due to pragmatic decisions taken during the preparation of the manuscript or that it was a literary device (Tresso 2021: 170-74). Whatever the  reason,  her  examination  of  Battuta  proves  that  the  absence  of  direct  evidence  for plague in West Africa is not the same as evidence of its absence. The mass abandonment of sites during  the  mid-14 th century  is  currently  best  explained  by  West  Africa  being  part  of  a  broader Afroeurasian experience of the second plague pandemic, despite the pressing need to produce direct evidence to support this hypothesis.

If the Black Death ravaged West Africa in the mid-14 th century, the same does not seem to have happened on the eastern coast and its hinterland. It has been noted that several sites were abandoned or show signs of stark decline (Green 2014: 44-45; 2018: §36), yet the dating is ambiguous in this part of Africa. Great Zimbabwe, for example, was abandoned in the 15 th century and not during the mid-late  14 th century  as  would  be  congruent  with  a  Black  Death  (Chirikure  and  Pikirayi  2008; Hoffman 2010; Pikirayi and Chirikure 2011). The mosque in Kilwa declined concurrent with when it would be expected for an introduction of the Black Death (Sutton 1993b), but most other sites on the western littoral of the Indian Ocean show signs of abandonment only by the 15 th or  16 th century (see contributions in Wynne-Jones and LaViolette 2018). Whatever led to the decline of the Swahili city states was a complex process that occurred over centuries, and what is needed is a systematic  review  considering  the  possibility  of  plague  in  this  process,  beyond  the  scope  of  the present article. If the disease was associated with the decline, it was more likely a later introduction of the second pandemic rather than the arrival of the Black Death. Consequently, as has already been noted by Chouin, the eastern and western parts of Africa exhibit two very different histories of plague due to different environments and ecologies (Chouin 2022: 145-48). Yet the issue remains to demonstrate the presence - circumstantially or definitively - of plague in East Africa beyond the Great Lakes region.

If plague did appear on the East African coast, the disease could have been transported to the Great Lakes through intermediary trade connections. Despite the common notion that the Great Lakes were largely isolated  until  the  mid-19 th century  (Chrétien  2003:  26),  the  presence of  bananas,  a

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South Asian domesticate, at Munsa dating to the fourth millennium BCE suggests a more integrated history  of  commerce connecting the Great Lakes with the western Indian Ocean littoral than is usually assumed (Lejju, Robertshaw, and Taylor 2006). The presence of cowries at Ntusi shows that there were trade connections with the Indian Ocean throughout the occupation's history (Kusimba and  Kusimba  2005:  403).  I  am  not  suggesting  sustained,  direct  commercial  relations  between Swahili  trading  towns  and  Kitara  sites  on  the  far  side  of  Lake  Victoria.  Rather,  what  should  be imagined is a mosaic of interactions at different scales which, through intermediate stages, would have connected the far interior of eastern Africa with the coasts (Kusimba 2018). These networks may well have been able to spread Y. pestis bacteria from Swahili towns to the interior of Africa and vice versa.

In conclusion, this article has attempted to take seriously the possibility of plague predating the third pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. This goes against the stance taken by most researchers, who due to the difficulty of the source material have tended to argue that plague was a strictly Eurasian phenomenon. But by combining archaeological, genetic, oral, and written sources in novel ways, I have here attempted to answer when plague entered the continent and how it spread. Based on my analysis of Baganda oral histories, missionary records, the archaeological record from the region, and  the  presence  of  the  1.ANT  plague  strain  in  eastern  Africa,  it  seems  likely  that  the  second pandemic  did  spread  to  the  Great  Lakes  region,  and  that  this  likely  happened  during  the  17 th century.  Adjacent  regions  would  likely  also  have  experienced  plague  in  distinct  ways,  and  the approach  taken  in  this  article  can  be  successfully  applied  to  other  parts  of  Africa,  although adjustments will have to be made to account for different source material. As such, this article serves as an attempt to take seriously the possibility of the second pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, and thereby begin to include the subcontinent in global histories of plague. Several questions still remain to be answered to achieve this goal, such as whether or not plague became endemic in West Africa despite  a  likely  introduction  during  the  first  spread  of  the  second  pandemic  in  the  14 th century (Chouin 2022: 148), whether the breakdown of several polities in the East African coast during the 14 th -16 th centuries can be associated with plague, as discussed above, and whether certain parts of Africa evaded the pandemic altogether, and if so, why. As these and other questions relating to the second pandemic south of the Sahara are answered, our narratives about Africa's place in the world

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will  become  increasingly  refined.  This  article  has  attempted  to  begin  answering  some  of  these questions as they relate to Buganda and the polities that immediately preceded the kingdom, and has tried to improve our understanding of the early history of plague in the kingdom. It remains for future  research  to  extend  this  narrative  to  other  parts  of  the  continent  and  further  qualify  the conclusions  drawn  throughout  this  article.  Only  then  can  we  begin  to  comprehend  the  full implications of the deadliest pandemic in world history.

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- Spyrou, Maria A., Bos, Kirsten I., Herbig, Alexander and Krause, Johannes 2019. 'Ancient pathogen genomics as an emerging tool for infectious disease research'. Nature Review Genetics , 20(6), pp. 323340. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41576-019-0119-1
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## Utrykte kilder

- Church Missionary Society Periodicals - Adam Matthews Digital: https://wwwchurchmissionarysociety.amdigital.co.uk.
- o Baskerville, G. K. (1892). Personal journal. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 17(Feb.), pp. 103-108.
- o Mackay, A. M. (1882a). Personal journal. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 7(Aug.), pp. 476-490.
- o Mackay, A.M. (1882b). Letter dated 24 June 1881. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 7(Feb.), pp. 98-100.

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## Februar 2024

- o Mackay, A. M. (1882c). Letter dated 26 March 1882. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 7(Dec.), pp. 725-728.
- o Mackay, A. M. (1883). Personal journal. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 8(Sep.), pp. 532-549.
- o Mackay, A. M. (1885). Personal journal. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 10(Oct.), pp. 711-727.
- o Mackay, A. M. (1887a). Letter dated 2 January 1887. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 12(Aug.), pp. 489-493.
- o Mackay, A. M. (1887b). Letter dated 8 March 1887. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 12(Oct.), pp. 620-630.
- o Mackay, A. M. (1888). Personal journal. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 13(Jan.), pp. 18-28.
- o O'Flaherty, P. (1884). Letter dated 31 August 1883. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 9(Apr.), pp. 220-224.
- o O'Flaherty, P. (1885). Letter dated 10 October 1884: The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 10(Apr.), pp. 241-244.
- o Walker, R. H. (1890a). Letter dated 24 October 1889. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 15(Jun.), pp. 361-370.
- o Walker, R. H. (1890b). Letter dated 5 December 1889. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 15(Jun.), pp. 370-371.
- o Walker, R. H. (1890c). Letter dated 23 December 1889. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 15(Sep.), pp. 618-620.
- o Walker, R. H. (1890d). Letter dated 3 February 1890. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 15(Sep.), pp. 623.
- o Walker, R. H. (1890e). Letter dated 5 February 1890. The Church Missionary Intelligencer and Record 15(Nov.), pp. 770-771.

## CULTURE AND HISTORY Nr. 01

Februar 2024