CHAPTER VIII. 



SLEEPING SICKNESS. 



While I was on service at Hoima I received in- 

 structions to proceed down the Nile to Nimube 

 and Gondokoro for the purpose of enlisting recruits 

 from the tribes inhabiting those districts ; but these 

 orders were subsequently cancelled owing to the 

 prevalence of sleeping sickness. 



I now propose to devote a short chapter to this 

 dreaded scourge. 



The disease known as sleeping sickness is 

 apparently not indigenous to Uganda, but has been 

 imported during recent times from the Congo. It 

 is known that it made its appearance in Busoga 

 very shortly after a large force of Emin Pasha's 

 Soudanese had settled in that province, having 

 come from the territories west of Lake Albert. 

 The first cases actually reported by Dr. Cook, of the 

 Church Missionary Society, were from the Busoga 

 district in 1901, where, in the following year, it 

 became epidemic, and spread all around the northern 

 shores of Victoria Nyanza, from Buddu on the 

 west to Kavirondo Bay on the east. The disease, 

 moreover, had a remarkable distribution, confinino- 

 itself to a narrow strip of lake shore and to the 



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