Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda

3. Clanship and the Pursuit of Collective Well-Being

clanship and the pursuit of collective well-being 3In the previous chapter I argued that when listened to as an audience seated at a healer’s shrine might have done, the Kintu narratives can be understood as describing a series of changes in the practices of spirit mediumship and the expansion of territorial cults. As narrative accounts of the process according to which itinerant mediums sought out alliances by transforming territorial misambwa spirits into regional, portable spirits, these narratives highlight the confluence of public healing and politics in early Ganda history. Converted misambwa spirits continued to operate at shrines located in specific territories. Yet the authority they initially derived from their connections to the particular territories with which they were associated now extended beyond the locations of their principal shrines. This chapter builds upon the insights gleaned from the Kintu narratives by examining why their principal characters also figure as the founders of Ganda clans. Why, in other words, do our earliest glimpses into the distant Ganda past appear in the form of clan histories? And what do clans have to do with transformations in public healing practices? The answers to these questions guide our e√orts to set the Kintu narratives into historical motion and represent the opening phases in the long and winding history of clanship in Buganda. At the center of this story lies the relationship between clanship, transformations in public healing, and the development of a banana-based farming system in Buganda. The many conversations I engaged in about the meaning of clanship revealed a connection between clanship and Ganda notions of individual as well as collective well-being. These conversations both suggested that we might best examine the clan concept from the perspective of public healing and also pointed to a novel way of approaching the interpretation of more formal, structured clan histories. David Schoenbrun’s historical linguistic work on the history of spirit ∏∫ : beyond the royal gaze mediumship and banana cultivation in the Great Lakes region and Holly Hanson’s examination of the transformations in productive, social, and spiritual relationships that accompanied the transition to land-intensive banana farming in Buganda o√er a way to anchor the insights derived from Ganda clan histories and less formal conversations about clanship within a broader regional narrative. The combination of these various sources of evidence and scholarly insights suggests the following scenario: Beginning about the fifteenth or sixteenth century, Baganda expanded upon earlier knowledge of banana cultivation to develop a land-intensive banana-farming system. The opportunities for permanent settlement and the accumulation of wealth in the form of perennially fruiting banana trees rendered bananas a potentially lucrative long-term investment. The gradual transition to intensive banana farming, however, also generated social tensions related to property inheritance and succession that posed significant challenges to the communities living along the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria. In the face of these challenges, Baganda developed dispersed therapeutic networks that reconfigured the boundaries of public healing. They did so by transforming previously territorial spirits into portable spirits capable of ensuring the health of disconnected groups of people. This process drew upon the talents of itinerant mediums and lay at the core of clan formation. The webs of shrines situated on clan estates drew together communities whose leaders possessed a variety of skills, thus forging a powerful connection between clanship, collective health, and the composition of knowledge. Treating clans as compositions of knowledge shifts attention away from the focus on kinship that dominates conventional explanations of clan formation . By discarding the commonly encountered notion of clans as gradually expanding kin groups, this chapter allows alternative historical explanations of clanship and clan formation in Buganda and elsewhere. For the people living along the northwestern shores of Lake Victoria about the sixteenth century, the clan concept facilitated the composition of knowledgeable communities through a reconfiguration of the boundaries of public healing. Mobile spirits ranged over sometimes vast geographical spaces, extending the reach of their e√ective capacities and drawing dispersed communities into a collective endeavor cemented by the language and practices of clanship. In a gradual process that coincided with significant changes in agricultural production, the disembodied life forces of deceased leaders were transformed from ancestral ghosts into territorial spirits and then into mobile spiritual entities before finally achieving status as the founders of Clanship and the Pursuit of Collective Well-Being : ∏Ω clans. As the...