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public healing, political complexity, and the production of knowledge 1‘‘That is where we gather to beat the drums and call the spirits,’’ explained Ssalongo Benedicto Walusimbi, a healer and prominent member of the Civet Cat clan, referring to the sacred site, or kiggwa (pl. biggwa), located on the clan’s principal estate. ‘‘The existence of a kiggwa is very important in Buganda,’’ he continued, ‘‘because it is where people who believe in their totems [clans] meet.’’ He then elaborated by describing how clan members gather at the kiggwa to ‘‘talk about the past’’ and to ‘‘feast, drink, beat drums, and sing and dance in order to praise the spirits for having kept us alive.’’ In the past, many biggwa included a large conical shrine that housed a clan’s most prominent spirits for similar public gatherings , during which clan members engaged in ceremonies designed to ensure their collective well-being and provide relief from collective problems such as famine, epidemics, and warfare. Yet these days—and most likely in the past as well, judging from early twentieth-century ethnographies— biggwa also function as places where individuals seek cures for conditions such as madness, epilepsy, and infertility, all of which, according to Walusimbi , are ‘‘usually linked to the spirits of your clan.’’∞ A series of shrines located on secondary clan estates and individual homesteads provide the links connecting individual searches for treatment and the collective endeavors undertaken at biggwa situated on primary clan estates. Individuals who fall sick or experience di≈culties in their personal relationships might first approach a shrine for relief. If these e√orts prove unsuccessful , however, they then visit the kiggwa to determine the cause of their problems. According to Walusimbi, The di√erence between a shrine and a kiggwa is the scale of operation. A shrine is operated by a single person like me to act as a place of healing. A kiggwa brings together many people, similar to a big hospital like ≤ : beyond the royal gaze Mulago. When the shrine fails, a person is referred to the kiggwa. The kiggwa acts like a headquarters because you find very many people there from all di√erent levels of the clan—household, lineage, patrilineage—all connecting to the kiggwa. The person who heads the shrine is appointed by the ancestral ghosts of the ancestors who operated at the shrine previously . But a person cannot operate from a shrine that does not belong to his or her clan. You construct it on your own but it has to be connected to the clan. For example, a person from the Civet Cat clan cannot operate from a shrine that belongs to the Bushbuck clan. For a person to construct a shrine he has to seek permission from the head of the kiggwa because the shrine belongs to the clan.≤ My conversations with healers about Buganda’s past revealed how the underlying logic informing individual pursuits of treatment and collective clan endeavors described by Walusimbi extends to the perceived historical relationship between Ganda clans and the kingdom’s well-being. Just as a kiggwa brings together a series of shrines to promote a clan’s collective health, Baganda recall the historical contributions of their respective clans in promoting the kingdom’s collective health. George William Kalule, a healer and head of a lineage in the Colobus Monkey clan, captured this connection in his description of the initial encounter between Kintu, the purported founder of Buganda, and Kasujja, the original ancestor of the Colobus Monkey clan. Kalule explained that Kasujja was already settled in Buganda when Kintu arrived in the area. Upon meeting Kintu, Kasujja gave him the skin of a leopard, which would protect the incoming ruler. This leopard skin was the territorial spirit (musambwa, pl. misambwa) Mayanja, who created the Mayanja River and appears in the form of a leopard. ‘‘Kasujja told Kintu that the leopard skin was now his musambwa,’’ Kalule recounted, ‘‘and this is why it is Mayanja who protects Buganda . . . and all its people.’’ He then reiterated that Mayanja was once Kasujja’s musambwa and explained that the territorial spirit retains a connection to the Colobus Monkey clan, because its members are descendants of indigenous inhabitants of Buganda. Kasujja may have given the musambwa Mayanja to Kintu, Kalule concluded, but its power resides in the Colobus Monkey clan, which explains why ‘‘one of the misambwa that protects Buganda is the same as that which protects our clan.’’≥ These two conversations highlight a central concern of...

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