Government House, Entebbe.

There are many who advocate the abandonment of Entebbe as the administrative capital and the restoration of the seat of Government to Kampala. But the expense of transferring public offices and buildings lately erected to another site is altogether beyond the slender resources and not among the most urgent needs of the Uganda Protectorate. Great improvements have been effected recently in the sanitation of Entebbe. The bush and trees, which added so greatly to its picturesque appearance, have been ruthlessly cut down; and with them, mirabile dictu, have vanished the mosquito and the sleeping-sickness tsetse-fly. Half a mile away on either side of the settlement are groves which it might easily be death to enter; but the inhabited area is now quite clear.

Besides, the general unhealthiness of the country so far as the European is concerned is not local to Entebbe. It is widely spread in slightly different degrees throughout the whole of Uganda; and Kampala is certainly not exempt. Finally, there is a reason of a different character which ought to impose a final bar on any return of the Imperial Government to the native city. Uganda is a native state. Much of our success in dealing with its population arises from the fact that we work through and by the native Government. And that Government could not fail to lose much, if not all, of its separate and natural identity if it were overwhelmed by the immediate proximity of the supreme Administration.

UGANDA
Founded by permission of the War Office on the Map of Africa No 1539.
Stanford's Geogr Estabt. London.
[View larger map.]

For a new station in an almost unknown land, Entebbe certainly presents many remarkable evidences of progress. The slopes of the lake shore are covered with pretty villas, each standing in its own luxuriant garden. There is an excellent golf course, and a very bright and pleasant society. Guardian over all this stands the Sikh. There are two companies of these soldiers, one at Entebbe and the other at Kampala, who, being entirely immune to local influences of all kinds, constitute what Mr. Gladstone used to call the "motor muscle" of Imperial authority. I have always admired the Sikh in India, both in his cantonments and in the field. But somehow his graceful military figure and grave countenance under the turban as he stands erect beside his rifle on guard over British interests six thousand miles from the Punjab, impresses the eye and the imagination with an added force. He is a picked volunteer from all the Sikh regiments, who delights in Uganda, thrives under its, to him, milder sun, lives on nothing, saves his doubled pay, and returns to India enriched and proud of his service across the sea. If at any time considerations of expense, or the desire to obtain a complete homogeneity in the military forces of the Protectorate, should lead to the disbandment or withdrawal of these two companies, those who take the decision will have incurred a responsibility which few would care to share with them.

So far as human force is concerned, the British power in these regions is at present beyond challenge. No man can withstand it. But a new opponent has appeared and will not be denied. Uganda is defended by its insects. It would even seem that the arrival of the white man and the increased movement and activity which his presence has engendered have awakened these formidable atoms to a realization of their powers of evil. The dreaded Spirillum tick has begun to infest the roads like a tiny footpad, and scarcely any precautions avail with certainty against him. This tick is a dirty, drab-coloured creature the size and shape of a small squashed pea. When he bites an infected person he does not contract the Spirillum fever himself, nor does he transmit it directly to other persons. By a peculiarly malevolent provision of Nature this power is exercised not by him but by his descendants, who are numbered in hundreds. So the poison spreads in an incalculable progression. Although this fever is not fatal, it is exceptionally painful in its course and distressing in its consequences. There are five or six separate and successive attacks of fever, in which the temperature of the victim may rise even to 107 degrees; and afterwards the eyes and hearing are temporarily affected by a kind of facial paralysis. Road after road has been declared infected by this scourge, and officer after officer struck down as he moves on duty from place to place. The only sure preventive seems to be the destruction of all old grass-huts and camping-grounds, and the erection along the roads of a regular system of stone-built, properly maintained and disinfected rest-houses, in which the traveller may take refuge from the lurking peril. And this will have to be done.

But a far more terrible shadow darkens the Uganda Protectorate. In July, 1901, a doctor of the Church Missionary Society Hospital at Kampala noticed eight cases of a mysterious disease. Six months later he reported that over two hundred natives had died of it in the Island of Buvuma, and that thousands appeared to be infected. The pestilence swiftly spread through all the districts of the lake shore, and the mortality was appalling. No one could tell where it had come from or what it was caused by. It resisted every kind of treatment and appeared to be universally fatal. Scientific inquiries of various kinds were immediately set on foot, but for a long time no results were obtained, and meanwhile the disease ran along the coasts and islands of the great lake like fire in a high wind. By the middle of 1902 the reported deaths from Trypanosomiasis, or "sleeping sickness," as it has come to be called, numbered over thirty thousand. It was still spreading rapidly upon all sides, and no clue whatever to its treatment or prevention had been obtained. It seemed certain that the entire population of the districts affected was doomed.