Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda

5. Clanship, State Formation, and the Shifting Contours of Public Healing

clanship, state formation, and the shifting contours of public healing 5The convergence of public healing and political authority discussed in chapters 2–4 compels us to reconsider the process of state formation in Buganda. The gradual emergence of a bureaucratic state apparatus and the militaristic nature of territorial expansion from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century transformed deeply embedded concepts of collective well-being. Rather than e√acing previous conceptions and practices, however, the state-formation process directed e√orts to ensure collective well-being toward the maintenance of a more muscular political center. These undertakings prompted transformations in clan practices, involved innovations in the relationship between public healing and military endeavors, and resulted in the emergence of distinct forms of organized violence designed to meet the needs of shifting realities. During this period, clan formation served as a means of engaging an emerging state apparatus in a political environment characterized by escalating violence and increasing vulnerability for large segments of the population. The observation that clans and clan formation played a central role in the state-building process introduces a new set of historical actors into a discussion ordinarily dominated by kings and their royal representatives. Highlighting the contribution of clans to Buganda’s territorial expansion, however , hardly e√aces the manner in which the developments emanating from the kingdom’s mobile royal centers a√ected community-building processes in outlying areas. The success of royal ideology was dependent on its capacity to persuade the communities who came to constitute Buganda’s clans to conceive of their collective well-being as intimately connected to the health and prosperity of the kingdom itself. This gradual process involved the creation of royal medicines, the nationalization of clan-based spiritual entities , and the transformation of dispersed groups of occupational specialists and their followers into clan networks. By focusing on the shifting ∞≥≤ : beyond the royal gaze contours of clanship and the interactions between multiple forms of authority from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, this chapter examines how the struggles that characterized the emergence of the Ganda state both drew upon older notions of public healing and inspired momentous changes in long-standing e√orts to compose healthy and prosperous communities. territorial expansion and the development of a state apparatus At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Buganda remained a tiny kingdom whose royal center was at Bakka, in Busiro, about fifteen miles northwest of Kampala. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the kingdom included territories stretching from the Katonga River to the Nile and deep into the interior (see map 7).∞ Scholars have long recognized the midseventeenth -century reigns of Kabaka Kateregga and his successor, Mutebi, as inaugurating the period of military development and territorial expansion that would ‘‘eventually transform an obscure little kingdom, one of dozens in the forest lands fringing the Lake, into the formidable state ‘discovered’ by Speke and Grant in 1862’’ (see table 1).≤ In a militaristic period that most commentators point to as initiating the practice of appointing royal nominees to replace local rulers, Kateregga oversaw the incorporation of the territories of Butambala and Gomba into the emerging Ganda state.≥ Mutebi’s rise to the throne involved an unprecedented level of force and fatalities, an indication that violence had become a prominent feature of Ganda politics and that ‘‘ambitious politicians could raise armed followings.’’ Upon securing the throne, Mutebi launched a series of attacks in the areas just beyond Buganda’s western and northern borders. These attacks resulted in the acquisition of valuable cattle-grazing lands in the territories of Busujju and Ssingo and, as in the case of Kateregga’s conquests, the replacement of the local rulers with the generals who had led the military campaigns.∂ The next major period of territorial expansion occurred during the reign of the mid-eighteenth-century kabaka Mawanda. Historians of Buganda have pointed to the reign of Mawanda as the most significant period in the development of the Ganda state.∑ Mawanda established chiefships for the territories of Kyaddondo, Bulemeezi, and Kyaggwe, whose inclusion in the kingdom shifted Buganda’s orientation eastward. Kyaggwe represented a particularly valuable addition to the kingdom. Noted for its rich fishing reserves and renowned for its markets dotting the northern shores of Lake Clanship, State Formation, and Public Healing : ∞≥≥ table 1. the kings of buganda 1. Kintu 2. Cwa 3. Kimera 4. Ttembo 5. Kiggala 6. Kiyimba 7...