IntroductionFootnote 1
Prior to the 1980s, the majority of fish swimming in the waters that fringe Uganda’s highly crenelated southern shores were small, diverse, and often brightly colored.Footnote 2 Residents of these littorals still call these fish enkejje, and continue to recognize these fish for their unique reproductive habits. Footnote 3 Whereas many other types of fish release their eggs into the open water after spawning or tend to them within the confines of their nests, enkejje mothers raise their fertilized eggs almost entirely within their mouths.Footnote 4 After their eggs transition into small fry, mother enkejje periodically release their young into the water and continue for at least several weeks to take them into their mouths when predators appear, and release them again when danger has cleared.Footnote 5 Once these small fry have learned sufficient skills and grown large enough to survive on their own, their mothers release them into the water to become their own free-swimming fish. This reproductive strategy, known to English speakers as maternal mouthbrooding, was and still is readily apparent to fishworkers and littoral residents who have the time and interest to find a quiet place on the shore with a clear view into the water below.
Enkejje were and to a lesser degree still are required accompaniments to curative and commemorative practices along the northern shores of Africa’s largest body of freshwater. This body of water is known to English speakers as Lake Victoria, to residents of Uganda’s contemporary southern littorals as a sea called Nyanja, and by historic residents of Buganda as Ennyanja Nalubaale, a sea formed in relation to powerful feminine ancestors.Footnote 6 In addition to enkejje’s abilities to treat the symptoms of measles when consumed boiled into a thick soup, these fish were used to neutralize taboos associated with childbirth and to mark the death of family members at funerals.Footnote 7 More importantly for the argument offered here, enkejje once featured – and indeed still do feature – within an underexamined suite of ritual practices known to Luganda speakers as okwalulá abaana and reasonably glossed in English as “hatching the children.” During okwalulá abaana, grandmothers and aunts symbolically test the legitimacy of their children based on prior evaluations of the behaviors of their mothers. Healthy children whose mothers demonstrate appropriate decorum and aptitude in a number of practical tasks are granted the status of legitimate family members and are given family names by maternal elders superintending the testing ceremony. By passing okwalulá abaana, children become people, and their mothers become official members of the families into which their children are hatched.
Multispecies ethnography encourages scholars to examine humans as emergent through relations with other agentive beings.Footnote 8 More than simply new topics of inquiry and sources of methodological innovation, the study of relations between people, animals, plants, and other beings offers opportunities for theorizing what it means to be human beyond conceptualizing difference as variations on the “standardized human (a species, generally Euro-male).”Footnote 9 Examining social phenomena as emergent through asymmetrical and sometimes mutually dependent relations between humans and our “significant others,” those other-than-human beings with which some people insist on coming into being, refocuses analytic attention away from the always-already existence of people and the groups we form towards their continued emergence.Footnote 10
Historians may hesitate to embrace the somewhat speculative nature of multispecies ethnography as a mode of inquiry. After all, it is difficult, maybe impossible, to truly understand what other-than-human beings may think about humans (and this only becomes a concern if we entertain the possibility that humans are not the only beings capable of thinking).Footnote 11 However, if, as John Lonsdale has argued, ethnicity is formed through internal debate over what constitutes socially responsible behavior within groups themselves, we may also examine ethnicity as emergent through encounters with other-than-human beings that people intentionally engage within ritualized practices of “ourselves-ing.”Footnote 12 Indeed, relations between people and other-than-human beings reveal fresh opportunities for analyzing the creation of persons and the relationship between persons and things that Jane Guyer argues should undergird any model of wealth-in-people.Footnote 13 Attending to the specificies of enkejje and how they feature within events where groups are formed reorients analyses of descent politics beyond an often implicit focus on male interests towards the work of grandmothers, aunts, and mothers. Through the practices of hatching the children with enkejje, senior women debated and evaluated the desired qualities and quantities of the most foundational units of the body politic – male and female children constituted relationally as persons through their status as legitimate family members. With an abundance of wealth in enkejje, and inspired by enkejje’s unique reproductive proclivities, senior littoral women composed expansive families and constellated cosmopolitian communities along the southern shores of what would become Uganda.
Invisible Fish/Invisible Histories
Okwalulá abaana has received limited attention from scholars concerned with the political and social history of Buganda. The few scholars who have considered the hatching of the children gloss this event as providing yet another example of patrilineality, patrilocality, and overall patriarchal control over women’s reproductive and social lives.Footnote 14 This interpretation, I suggest, is largely due to the fact that the conditions under which the sources used to analyze this historic event were written over one hundred years ago, as well as the influence these sources had on the codification of cultural histories passed down to scholars by other means.
At a fundamental level, English-language accounts of African vernacular concepts suffer from a translation problem. In Luganda, the most widely spoken language along Uganda’s southern littorals, titles denoting political authority such as kabaka (for heads of state) and omutaka (for heads of clans or major clan subdivisions), professional affiliations such as muvubi (fishworker) and musawo (doctor), and titles reserved for those with exceptional spiritual authority such as kabona (ritual expert), lubaale (guardians), Mukasa (the head lubaale), or jjajja (grandparent or ancestor) do not mark their holders as either male or female. The most common English translations of these titles, however – more and less implicitly – do. When kabaka is translated as king, omutaka as chief, muvubi as fisherman, musawo as medicine man, kabona as priest, lubaale as god, Mukasa as chief of the gods, and jjajja as grandfather, English speakers tend to envision these positions and the individuals they reference as male, whether or not they actually were.Footnote 15 These titles may well have marked the individuals that held them as masculine, but as Sylvia Nnanyonga-Tamusuza has argued, this did not necessarily mean they were held by biological males.Footnote 16
The most widely consulted historic ethnographic sources for the hatching of the children, as well as precolonial cultural history in this region more generally, are John Roscoe’s 1911 and Apolo Kagwa [Kaggwa]’s 1918 ethnographies of the Baganda people and the Buganda territory more broadly. Footnote 17 Both texts were written following tumultuous transformations in the lives of littoral residents that profoundly shaped the contours of how historic forms of ethnicity were documented and later remembered through these texts, namely: 1) after all of the several hundred islands skirting Uganda’s southern shores were formally incorporated into Buganda’s administrative domain in 1900 (whether or not residents of these islands considered themselves Baganda, and many did not);Footnote 18 2) after all women were “removed entirely from the palace” of Buganda’s colonially reordered kingdom around 1906 and by extension the formal domain of high politics;Footnote 19 and 3) after Uganda’s colonial government ordered the depopulation of all mainland and island littorals in 1907 and declared all fishing not explicitly supervised by Europeans illegal in 1908, ostensibly to protect residents against an emerging outbreak of sleeping sickness.Footnote 20
Roscoe and Kagwa’s accounts situated fishwork within masculine domains of activity. There is, however, ample evidence for historic forms of water transportation and fishing in the region in which both men and women participated. Even Roscoe noted: “Women sometimes took their places in a canoe as paddlers, when there was a shortage of men,” and that these women “kept pace with the men in paddling.”Footnote 21 Colonial administrators, travelers, and ethnographers noted that women fished alongside men with traps, nets, and hook-and-line gear. In littoral communities that specialized in producing and trading fish, “the men are not the only fishers, the women also [take] an active part in the work.”Footnote 22 For example, one observer noted that “the women spend much time” in their dugout canoes, “sitting fishing with rod and line; the men confine their efforts to setting fish traps, huge baskets which are anchored to some patch of sudd a little distance beneath the surface.”Footnote 23 Those fishing with this “simple hook” were said to be “extremely clever, for a bite means a sure catch.”Footnote 24 Although men may be strongly associated with “the rod” in more recent years, this was certainly not the case in some specialized fishing communities just over one hundred years ago. Even spearfishing in swamps, perhaps the most quintessentially masculine form of fishing, required a canoe where “the woman paddles slowly along, the man stands or sits in the bow, holding a long light spear pointed ready for instant action.”Footnote 25
Perhaps the most refreshing, productive, and visually striking form of fishing that took place was the combined use of baskets and nets described by Johnston below, a form of fishing that put fishworkers in intimate contact with enkejje:
They bring two very long ropes, one end of each of which is firmly secured to the shore. One rope lies weighted, along the bottom under the water, the other floats on the surface, but from it hangs a fringe of papyrus stalks. The two ropes above and below correspond with its other, and are connected at intervals with strings to ensure their correspondence, while the fringe of papyrus strips make this arrangement into a kind of pliable fence. This, by means of canoes, is brought back to the shore till it describes rather more than a semi-circle. The bringing round of the rope serves to chase all the fish that are between it and the shore towards the mouths of the big wickerwork traps which are placed in a row in the shallow water. The women at the same time, walk up and down dragging traps of smaller mesh, in which they collect numbers of small fish.Footnote 26
Enkejje mothers brooding their fish in their mouths would have found this practice disruptive to the care of their young. Those trapped within the confines of nets and baskets may have involuntarily released their young into the water and tried to scoop them up again. Many young enkejje, too young to survive on their own, would have been lost. This struggle would have been immediately apparent to women wading and dragging traps, nets, and baskets in the clear, sandy-bottomed waters where the type of fishing Johnston described took place.
Imagining okwalulá abaana along Uganda’s southern island and mainland littorals within a more historically nuanced social context – one within which littoral localities, especially islands, were interconnected, but relatively autonomous from the mainland Buganda State; where king mothers, king sisters, and female lubaale mediums and priests had their own followers, lands, and powers over life and death; and where women actively fished, processed, and traded fish alongside men – requires new methodological tools for examining how children – and by extension their parents – came to belong in the cosmopolitan communities that have long populated Uganda’s southern littorals.
A more accurate ecological context is required too. When Roscoe and Kagwa were writing their accounts, enkejje were by far the most abundant type of fish available along Uganda’s southern shores. In the decades that followed the introduction of the Nile perch into Lake Victoria, most enkejje were consumed out of existence – not by people, but by growing populations of Nile perch.Footnote 27 And yet, contemporary accounts of Lake Victoria’s fisheries tend to begin as if Nile perch have always existed there. One otherwise careful political historian of pre-colonial Buganda recently noted, “widely eaten fish included lungfish, barbels, catfish and the type known to Europeans as Nile perch.”Footnote 28 In the 1980s alone, an estimated 65 percent, or approximately two hundred species, of these fish were “eradicated” by the Nile perch and concomitant transformations in the aquatic ecology of this body of water. Indeed, for fisheries ecologists, this “may well represent the largest extinction event among vertebrates” experienced throughout the entire twentieth century.Footnote 29 What does this mass extinction event mean for the historiography of this region?
By the time historians of the Great Lakes region began researching and writing serious critiques of the nationalist and royalist historical canons in the mid-1980s, enkejje had almost completely disappeared from Ugandan, Kenyan, and Tanzanian waters. Without a material, visual referent for these fish in their historic abundance, enkejje have thus far been unable to animate the historical imaginations of even the most attentive scholars working to advance methodological approaches for analyzing social histories of recent and much more distant pasts. Indeed, similar to the historical and anthropological study of the Nuer, where, according to John Burton, “the piscatorial theme has been all but obfuscated by the anthropological romance with pastoralism,” banana cultivation has been overemphasized in studies of pre-colonial political histories of Buganda.Footnote 30 Although enkejje have become much more rare in recent decades than they were at the turn of the twentieth century, it is still possible to see them tending their young through the clear waters that encircle the many islands skirting Uganda’s southern shores, places where residents do not eat their food (emere) without sauce (enva) made from fish.Footnote 31
How Enkejje Hatch Their Young
All enkejje are maternal mouthbrooders; that is their eggs and small young are raised for weeks and sometimes months within their mothers’ mouths. The presence and importance of this reproductive strategy would have been obvious to the men and women who fished the inshore littoral. Mouthbrooding fish demonstrate a degree of care for their eggs and small young that is virtually unrivaled in any other type of fish.Footnote 32 It is this reproductive practice, evolutionary ecologists argue, that has encouraged enkejje to develop the complex and continually dynamic bodily forms, food-provisioning strategies, and ability to inhabit diverse ecological niches for which they are famous.Footnote 33 In so doing, they focus their energies on raising a small number of young well, rather than releasing as many eggs as possible in hopes that many survive. It is the ability of mother enkejje to care for their young, as well as the ability of their young to follow their mothers’ social cues, that ultimately matter to the survival of enkejje fry and their eventual hatching as free-swimming juvenile fish. Although I do not want to equivocate people with fish, and do not claim to know how gender is constituted among enkejje, for legibility when describing the reproductive practices of enkejje below, I use the gendered pronouns her/she to refer to female enkejje and him/his to refer to male enkejje.
The most successful males are often the largest and most brightly colored, and display particularly attractive “quivers,” that is, an appealing “high-frequency shaking movement of the body.”Footnote 34 These physical abilities usually translate into a given male enkejje’s proficiencies in building or locating a safe place for the couple to mate – a secure rock shelter or a comfortable sand bower. A female enkejje will generally only release her eggs for males who have made adequate homes for themselves, even though she will ultimately only spend a short amount of time there. If she is enticed by a male enkejje’s looks and behavior, but his “home territory” is unimpressive, she may simply swim on to evaluate the next attractive potential mate.
After a female enkejje decides that a given male might be worth her precious eggs, she swims within his nest long enough for a male enkejje to begin gently nudging her abdomen with his snout. This encourages female enkejje to release “one or a few eggs” onto his nest and immediately scoop them up into her mouth.Footnote 35 Males with the most reproductive success have developed particularly attractive “pseudo-egg spots” on or near their anal fins, which encourage fertilization to occur.Footnote 36 Aspiring enkejje mothers assume that these pseudo-eggs are their own and try repeatedly to scoop these up too. As this happens, males release their sperm, ideally directly into the mouths of female enkejje. An aspiring mother’s desires to protect visible eggs are strong, and she will try several more times to pick up the male’s false eggs, before repeating this processes with the same male, or trying again with another male altogether.Footnote 37 After she is convinced that all of her eggs are safely within her mouth, the aspiring mother enkejje simply swims away and the male enkejje plays no further role in tending their young.
Successful mothers scoop their eggs into their mouths quickly. There are good reasons for this. Other fish, including some male enkejje, specialize in eating the eggs of enkejje, so eggs left too long may be food for other fish.Footnote 38 More interestingly for our purposes, in the process of quickly picking up eggs, mother enkejje sometimes scoop up eggs belonging to other enkejje or other “tribes” of fish altogether. Although it is difficult to know whether this would have been a practice that historical littoral residents observed, female enkejje have been observed in experimental settings “stealing” eggs from other enkejje mothers and tending to them instead of or alongside their own.Footnote 39 Enkejje have also been observed scooping up the eggs of other “tribes” of fish and raising them as their own, even though these other fish may end up eating all of their host’s own enkejje eggs before they have had a chance to reach the fry stage.Footnote 40 Given the possibility that mother enkejje may intentionally or accidentally foster mouthbrood eggs from other fish, when I refer below to the eggs and young that a mother enkejje raises as “hers,” I am referring to all eggs and fry that she tends in her mouth, whether or not they are actually her own biologically related young.
An aspiring mother enkejje continues to hold her fertilized eggs within her mouth while they transition into small fry. These not yet fully “hatched” fish learn to swim first within the comparatively safe confines of their mothers’ mouths. During this time, she does not eat, as all her attention and all the space in her mouth must be dedicated to her young brood.Footnote 41 Soon, her eggs transform into small fry, and the members of her brood gain their bearings slowly and safely within the confines of her mouth. When her young are large enough to try swimming for themselves, she releases them into the water for brief periods of time. These new mothers carefully guard their young, teaching them what to eat and how to find sheltered nooks between rocks or amongst roots of floating vegetation where they can safely rest and rejuvenate themselves. Throughout this guarding period, mother enkejje continue to scoop up their young into their mouths whenever they sense danger is near. Eventually, mother enkejje release their young into the water for the last time. This period of care is naturally transformative. Young enkejje learn the skills required to survive and receive subtle guidance on which mates they ought to seek out for their own reproduction in the future.Footnote 42
Still, not every young enkejje fully hatches into a free-swimming adult. It is entirely possible that a mother enkejje will be eaten by a larger fish, or caught in a fishing net while she is “holding.” If that does happen, littoral residents report that mother enkejje will release her eggs abruptly, “vomiting” them out, hopefully into the open water and not the belly of another fish, the bottom of a boat, or into a tightly woven fishing basket.
When and Why Did Children Begin to Hatch?
It is unclear exactly when families living along Uganda’s southern littorals began practicing okwalulá abaana. According to Rhiannon Stephens, ceremonies testing the legitimacy of children (okufulumya omwana) and naming children after ancestors (okugulika omwana or okwalula omwana) were ongoing in Busoga at least as early as the sixteenth century.Footnote 43 It is possible they began much earlier. David Schoenbrun’s examination of the shifting terrain of food production and social life in this region suggests that between 900–1100 CE collections of family units or homesteads (ndá; lulá plural) became the focus of social relations and clanship. Indeed, the semantic domain of lulá, Schoenbrun notes, “is ‘inside’ the body, quite often the womb itself.”Footnote 44
The families (ndá; lulá plural) into which children were hatched through okwalulá abaana ought not to be conceived of in the “nuclear” sense – as bounded units of mother, father, and child, or even in the “extended” sense – as including grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins. Families along these historic littorals were (and in many ways still are) compositions of many different people that together formed the basic units of successful communities, rather than accumulations of biological relatives. Historic residents of these littorals formed families tied to each other through the tasks they “carried out: fishing, hunting, farming, and herding, the bearing and raising of children, and the practical tasks of craft production, house building, and caring for the sick and departed.”Footnote 45 According to Lucy Mair’s ethnographic work in the early twentieth century, “these are the people who would attend funeral ceremonies, turn up to support a relative in a court case, join in attack or defense in a blood-feud, and possibly combine to pay a fine.”Footnote 46 The size of these groups, Schoenbrun reminds us, “likely ranged from ten people to hundreds,” and they may well have been strongly matrifocal.Footnote 47
More recently, Schoenbrun has focused on shifting material and metaphoric relations between people and pythons to reveal new forms of clanship emerging in response to conflict along these littorals beginning around 800 CE.Footnote 48 As Andrew Reid reminds us, this same period is one during which “fishing (as a source of protein) and other activities on the lake[sic] became intertwined with inland agricultural (carbohydrate-rich) production in a successful combination that was one of the key features of the resultant kingdom of Buganda.”Footnote 49 As previous connections between spiritual authority and territorial specificity were increasingly “dislodged, coopted, or suppressed” through the conceptual and practical work of spirit mediums and their interpreters, littoral residents innovated a new polysemous term for clanship, ekika, to encompass “big homestead; clan, family.”Footnote 50 Ekika reflected more expansive notions of belonging that mediums constellated across dispersed communities into what Neil Kodesh calls “networks of knowledge” directed towards healing in and around lubaale shrines.Footnote 51 These are the very same figures and shrines for which the pre-Lake Victorian body of water, Ennjanja Nalubaale, was named.
Lubaale are difficult beings and concepts to translate into English. Early Luganda-English dictionaries described lubaale as “a spirit, a demon; a false god; an idol.”Footnote 52 Much more recently, Kodesh has described them as “national spirits,” titles of “distinction reserved for those spiritual entities whose efficacy reaches beyond a particular territory or clan network and ensures the well-being of the entire kingdom” – status that lubaale gained, according to Holly Hanson, sometime around the seventeenth century.Footnote 53 Lubaale are not, however, properly purely religious or spiritual entities. They are beings made real through material and affective encounters with and conversations about the objects and phenomena with which particular lubaale are associated – for example, Kiwanuka is known through lightning, Ndaula through eruptions of boils on the skin, Musoke though waterspouts on the Nyanja, and Namusoke through rainbows.
Fish, rain, winds, waves, children, and especially twin children composed the lubaale Mukasa’s domain.Footnote 54 As a figure translated in early English-Luganda dictionaries as the “queen of the gods,” contemporary littoral residents and historians alike tended to reference Mukasa in English with masculine pronouns.Footnote 55 According to Kagwa, Mukasa “was supposed to be very good and kind, and considered everybody his [sic] child, never killing anyone.”Footnote 56 When Mukasa came to visit estates within this lubaale’s dominion, “all the prisoners” were purportedly “set free.”Footnote 57 Mukasa’s efficacy was once ensured through the affectively charged work of assembling, assisting, feasting, and healing at Mukasa’s shrines.Footnote 58 For the first English missionaries in Uganda, Mukasa’s expansive progeny and radical peacefulness rendered Mukasa “the greatest liar, and the greatest rebel of all.”Footnote 59
Scholarly attention to Mukasa tends to focus on this lubaale as a single figure represented by a medium and priest, connected to the Buganda Kingdom through exchanges between Kings and Mukasa’s main shrine on Bubembe island.Footnote 60 Prior to at least the early 1900s, however, there were once “many temples to Mukasa” and many more mediums and priests who worked in service of Mukasa in those shrines.Footnote 61 Similar to the reported singularity of Mukasa, Mukasa’s ties through marriage and descent to feminine figures like Nalwanga, whose shrine was immediately adjacent to Mukasa’s on Bubembe, and whose primary task, according to Roscoe, was “assisting childless women to become mothers,” are also absent from the historiography of Buganda.Footnote 62 Neither is attention given to Nalwoga, still remembered for doing the same work on Nsazi by residents of that island, or to Nagadya, a fertility figure who once presided over a shrine called Bulam, or “life,” near Entebbe where Nkumba University now stands. Nagadya’s priest, perhaps not coincidentally, was called Furu, another name for enkejje.Footnote 63 Mukasa’s kin were situated in places where enkejje were historically abundant and available for both men and women to catch. More than simply offering advice on becoming pregnant, perhaps these littoral figures offered guidance on and possibilities for hatching socially recognized children.
Building on Steven Feierman’s suggestions that public healing events were designed to ensure both personal reproduction and group survival, Kodesh has linked the development of clanship to achieving the social purposes of natality in Buganda’s lubaale shrines. For Kodesh, the increased violence and an influx of captives from wars experienced in the region in the eighteenth century provided a “willing constituency of people seeking to reduce their vulnerability through participating in the public activities at shrines.”Footnote 64 This was particularly the case for lubaale shrines located on islands, where, according to Gomotoka, writing in the 1930s, people “found freedom” in places where “it was possible to gain riches through fishing.”Footnote 65 The continued disruptions to the peaceful conduct of social life throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, particularly along mainland and island littorals over which multiple authorities violently competed, would have made this all the more necessary.Footnote 66
The practice of okwalulá abaana may well have been one way that littoral residents negotiated repeated moments of intercultural convergence and emerging crisis by innovating ways to bring outsiders within littoral families “as wives or husbands” and grant their children “legal status as insiders, as ‘us’ not ‘them.’”Footnote 67 Enkejje, with their visually striking reproductive practices, uniquely nutritious flesh, and sheer abundance, were crucial to that process.
How Some Children Were Hatched
For John Roscoe the “marriage of the parents was unimportant” compared with the initiation rites of okwalulá abaana that featured enkejje.Footnote 68 Indeed, as Rhiannon Stephens has recently demonstrated, raising socially recognized children was more important for women than marriage with respect to their “identity, social status, and political and religious authority.”Footnote 69 Children who were officially determined to belong to a particular family held rights to inherit land and property belonging to their families, whether or not their parents were officially wed.Footnote 70 Mothers who successfully demonstrated their ability to raise healthy and well-behaved children, while also being productive and pleasant potential members of families, I suggest, “hatched” socially recognized children, whether or not the father(s) of their children were biologically related to the families into which their children were ultimately found to belong.Footnote 71
There are two practical conditions that must be met before okwalulá abaana may begin. First, the children must be able to sit on their own.Footnote 72 This was first affirmed at a ceremony culminating in okukuza omwana, or the strengthening of the child.Footnote 73 When an infant was approximately three months old, the father’s mother came to the mother’s home early in the morning. Grandmothers then sat the child on a mat with the “soles of their feet placed together to balance them, and barkcloths tucked round them for support.”Footnote 74 According to Mair, grandmothers then gave infants able to sit up in this way their “personal name.” This name “was the name of an ancestor, and was selected by a sister of the father, or sengawe,” and the duty of the aunt in this event was to “select a name which was ‘likely to be lost.’” Footnote 75 After the child had successfully sat on its own supported by barkcloth, those in attendance ate a celebratory meal which the child’s mother had prepared.Footnote 76 Following this event, the child was seated in a similar manner every day and “receives vocal and affective approval from his mother or others until he [sic] is able to maintain a sitting posture by himself [sic] with no support.”Footnote 77
Although I have been unable to find accounts of children unable to pass okukuza omwana, it is likely that this occasion offered an opportunity for maternal elders to offer recriminations, as well as guidance and support, for mothers and fathers whose children were not adequately progressing. Indeed, if infants became sick prior to the time when they were to be officially hatched, sexual impropriety by the mother, and especially the father, was to blame.Footnote 78 According to Kagwa, the child would die “if a mother or a father wronged another person during the time between the birth of their child and its naming.”Footnote 79 If a child showed signs of “nausea and general debility” attributed to their parent’s improper behavior, the “spouses accused each other of misconduct,” and an okukansira ceremony would be performed.Footnote 80
During okukansira, if the father was thought to be the guilty party, the child would be given medicine to induce vomiting. If the mother was considered at fault, the child would already be frequently vomiting and an antiemetic was instead administered. If the child was unable to vomit and failed to improve, for Kagwa, this “showed that the sickness was due to some other cause and the parents were innocent.” More than simply a possible medical treatment to induce or stop vomiting, okukansira may have been especially important for parents of children who fell sick and died. Parents of children who died before they were officially hatched were exonerated from any suspected wrongdoing, easing their guilt about the loss of their child. Still, because of the possibility that their actions may harm their children, parents were very “careful to have no intercourse with anyone else until after the naming ceremony.”Footnote 81
Secondly, many children could be tested in the same ceremony, but at least two children, one of either sex, first had to be eligible before preparations would begin.Footnote 82 Children to be tested did not have to be born of the same mother or father; however, because both biological sexes were required, children to be tested could be anywhere from a few months to many years old, depending on the family into which children were being hatched. The centrality of the male/female pair across families of several mothers and fathers within okwalulá abaana references and reinforces the importance of Mukasa’s dual-gendered nature, as well as more expansive notions of parentage and family in use at the littoral.
Before the ceremonies took place, the mothers of the children went to the shores of Ennyanja Nalubaale to cut reeds (eggugu), which they then burned into ashes and combined with water to make salt. Mothers brought this salt with them to the home of an elder family member who hosted the ceremony. It is worth noting that the second most senior priest of Mukasa’s main shrine was also named Ggugu, a figure whose name is semantically linked to salt, trade, and mats for sitting.Footnote 83 Once assembled, all guests in attendance, except for the mothers, share a meal of matooke steamed in their peels and soup made from enkejje and mushrooms cooked in the salt the mothers had made.Footnote 84
Mothers expecting their children to hatch would sit on a new barkcloth given to them by the host of this occasion with their children on their laps (some accounts also say sitting beside them). Their mothers-in-law, the potential grandmothers of the children, sat across from the mothers and a large woven waterproof basket was placed between them.Footnote 85 The grandmothers poured banana beer, milk, salt, and water into the basket. Mothers then handed the umbilical cord of her child, which they had been preserving for some time, to the grandmothers. The grandmothers would then smear the cord with ghee and then drop the cord into the basket. As the cord entered the water the grandmothers would, “This is the child of so-and-so,” mentioning some of the ancestors of the family. If the cord floated, the children were considered legitimate members of the family. If the cord sank, the child was considered to be “wild,” that is, not of the family that had assembled.Footnote 86
The stakes of failing to hatch could be quite high. According to contemporary elder women, children who failed to hatch quickly became sick and died.Footnote 87 Mothers whose children failed the test could be harshly admonished by members of the families into which their children were determined not to belong. They could be accused of adultery, beaten, and/or banished entirely from family estates, and left to try and hatch their children into a different family altogether. Still, there is evidence to suggest that the results of these tests were not always treated as conclusive.Footnote 88
Children who passed the test were washed in olweza and ebbombo, two herbs associated with Mukasa and bringing blessings to children, and most especially blessings to twins. More than simply luck, these herbs were and still are used to treat a variety of other illnesses.Footnote 89 Then, senior women would take the basket containing the umbilical cord, milk, water, and beer to a banana garden on their family’s land, and insert the cord into the top of the stem of a banana plant. If the confirmed child was a girl, the cord was placed in a banana plant grown for food (nakitembe); if it was a boy, it was placed in the stem of a variety used to make beer (embidde), materially joining the body of the hatched child to particular places and the consumptive well-being of littoral families. After this, the mothers were required to fetch firewood or water for the host of the ceremony to show their continued obedience to family elders. Only then were mothers permitted to have their share of the matooke and enkejje sauce that symbolized the unity of the family. After the meal was over, the mothers went inside the home of the elder hosting the ceremony and he (or she) “jumped over” each mother, while the mother told the child that the elder was its father. Given that Mukasa’s medium was a “private person, of chief’s rank” for most of the year and that islands were sometimes ruled by the wives of mainland Kabaka, the Kabaka’s mother, princesses, and the Kabaka’s sister, it is entirely possible that through okwalulá abaana, women also became fathers.Footnote 90
The following day, each mother again sat on her barkcloth outside, and the senior woman who conducted the legitimacy test sat on the opposite side. Holding a piece of cooked enkejje in her right hand and a piece of cooked matooke in the other, the mother-in-law placed her hands on the knees of her daughter-in-law and began slowly reciting the names of her child’s ancestors. As she moved backwards from the recently deceased towards ancestors deceased long ago, she moved her arms slowly up to her daughter-in-law’s mouth, into which she placed the matooke and then the enkejje fish. After this, the grandmother went to her grandchild and began again to slowly list the names of the child’s ancestors. When the child giggled after hearing one of the names, the grandmother named that ancestor as the child’s guardian. In Luganda, this process of naming a child after another person is known as bbula, a transitive verb also meaning to “bring up (from water); restore to a former state; rescue; salvage; revive.”Footnote 91 A child’s laughter demonstrated that the ancestor being revived was pleased to take on his or her duty as guardian.Footnote 92
Okwalulá abaana offered a way for elder littoral women to consolidate group identity and maintain access to land while also offering guidance on proper behavior and provisioning practices for newcomers. Senior women, not men, were responsible for testing children (and by extension their mothers). The results of these tests were not arbitrary. Grandmothers and aunts who guided the practice of okwalulá abaana, required that new mothers were proficient in a number of important productive domestic tasks, including basket and salt making, and raising healthy, well-fed babies. Indeed, it was known that senior women would influence the results of these tests; as Lusembo noted, “Apparently the umbilical cord was manipulated according to the knowledge about the child.”Footnote 93 According to Mair’s observations around 1930, “at the ceremony which I saw, so much butter was used that only a miracle could have prevented them floating.”Footnote 94 This is also reflected in several proverbs reflecting on the qualities of mothers and their children by likening children to umbilical cords and mothers to materials used to wrap umbilical cords for storage and display. For example, ayagala omulongo: Ayagala n’olukoba, “one who loves the child: also loves its mother (the strap in which the cord is wrapped up).”Footnote 95 And tokyawa mulongo: ng’oyagala olukoba, “don’t despise the umbilical cord, if you like its wrapping.”Footnote 96
Although this essay focuses on a fairly elaborate version of okwalulá abaana, legitimacy of would-be children of particular families were at times tested much more easily. Women of the Mpindi (“small bean”) Clan, for example, once marked the successful birth of a child into their families only after the child’s mother consumed a roasted enkejje sprinkled with banana flour. These enkejje had to be eaten by mothers in the opposite way that one might eat a pickled herring. Rather than holding the tail and letting the small fish slip down one’s throat, in Mpindi legitimation ceremonies, enkejje were consumed tail first with its “fins and the ridge of spikes along its back left on.”Footnote 97 Children of mothers who ate these fish easily were known to belong. According to Roscoe, “if the fish stuck in her throat” the mother was accused of adultery, and “the child was disowned.”Footnote 98 These penalties may seem harsh, but these “tests” were not necessarily exclusionary. After all, it was relatively easy to prove that children belonged to Mpindi clan families – all a mother needed to do was practice eating roasted enkejje tail first. Most families would have wanted to “pass” as many potential members as possible, thereby expanding their potential territorial authority both in space (across land and sea) and in time (from one generation to another).
Concluding Thoughts on Fish, Children, and Littoral Lineality
Accounts of okwalulá abaana differ on the order of activities and their complexity; however, elders I interviewed were very clear on one point: the fish used in this ceremony “were enkejje and nothing else.” Enkejje, when boiled in a sauce, makes a special kind of soup, they say — it is thick, but not too thick. According to contemporary littoral residents, the act of eating enkejje soup demonstrates that all in attendance have come together as one family.
For Roscoe, enkejje were given to mothers as a “charm to effect rapid child-bearing, just as the fish swarm by thousands in the shallow waters of the lake [sic].”Footnote 99 Mair contests Roscoe’s interpretation “that the sprats were a fertility-symbol” by referencing “the explicit native statement that they are used because they come from Sesse, the island in the Lake [sic] which is the home of Mukasa.”Footnote 100 I posit that both were correct. The sheer historic abundance of enkejje were nutritionally and symbolically important for conceiving and hatching socially recognized children. Particular types of enkejje were used to hatch children because they were associated with lubaale shrines known for their abilities to enhance the fertility of women and hatch socially recognized children.
There are at least four named types of enkejje that were once used in okwalulá abaana in Buganda: enkejje enganda (of Buganda), enkejje engadya (of Nagadya), enkejje enkasa (of Mukasa), and enkejje ensese (of Ssese).Footnote 101 Because many types of enkejje are no longer with us, we do not know whether these were blue or yellow, spotted or striped, or big or small, or whether they ate snails, scales, or other fish. That is, we do not know whether any physical characteristics or dietary preferences of specific enkejje types made them well suited for use in okwalulá abaana. It is possible that the actual physical characteristics of specific types did not matter much at all. What is important, however, is that these were enkejje associated with littoral locales and that these places were associated with the “networks of knowledge” that Neil Kodesh demonstrates were assembled around lubaale shrines so crucial to the kinds of families that constellated forms of clanship and kingship that developed in Buganda.
Enkejje provided historic littoral residents with a consistent source of bodily nourishment and fascinating material with which to develop a flexible symbolic repertoire for contemplating the most foundational constituents of the body politic – persons constituted through their acceptance in an expansive family unit. At its most basic formulation, whole enkejje made whole bodies, families, and polities at the littoral possible. Central to this interpretation of okuwalulá abaana are close associations between raising socially recognized children and a continued abundance of small fish for women, men, and children to catch, distribute, cook, eat, and become persons and families with. Like wetlands that buffer potential flows and depositions of nutrients and contaminants between the dry world of humans and the wet world of fish, enkejje once mediated between the competing authorities of littoral ancestors, and the needs and desires of the living and the not yet fully born.
When women, men, children, and the families they form are analyzed as historically constellated through their relations with each other and with fish, conventional wisdoms about patriarchy and patrilineality are called into question. Attention to enkejje and okwalulá abaana reorients analyses of the politics of descent away from the often unmarked male domains of tribes, kingdoms, and even clans towards the work of grandmothers, aunts, and mothers in family estates and lubaale shrines. Grandmothers and aunts, not grandfathers and brothers, were responsible for hatching children. Through okwalulá abaana, senior littoral women consolidated group identity by superintending, debating, and passing judgement on the health of children, the desired qualities of their mothers, and ultimately the conduct of proper behavior in the cosmopolitan families and communities they formed.
