Following a four-month period of drought in February 2017, Mary Itanda, the rainmaker of the Busoga kingdom (also spelled “Basoga”), invited archaeologist Dr. Terge Oestigaard to participate in a rainmaking ritual at the eastern side of Itanda Falls on the White Nile, located 30km north of Lake Victoria near Jinja. In Busoga epistemology, the Itanda Falls (also alternatively known as the Kalagala Falls among the Buganda kingdom on its western side) are believed to be inhabited by several gods. Most notably, they are home to Itanda, the mightiest god and to whom Mary Itanda is a spirit medium, and the powerful rain god Mesoké. In this book, Oestigaard documents the rainmaking ritual led by Mary Itanda that he witnessed first-hand, contextualising it within debates about the protection of Africa’s cultural and natural heritage and a wider framework of python, rainbow, and rainmaking spiritualities that appear throughout world history.
Building on ideas of “cultural poverty”, Oestigaard describes the mythology of hydrology as an important example of an “intangible heritage” that links culture, nature, and water (12). This kind of intangible heritage continues to be marginalised within developmentalist discourse today, being overlooked in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Agenda for 2030, for example (13). As Oestigaard highlights, the values of cultural pluralism must be incorporated into developmentalist policy, mechanisms, and practices. Culture, history, and tradition are sources of, not hindrances to, modernisation and development.
A world history of rainbows and serpents
Chapter two begins with a history of science narrative on rainbows, before Oestigaard assesses the scientific truth behind the tales of “supersnakes” that have been reported in Africa, Asia, and South America from Ancient Roman times to the present day. In the chapter that follows, he then returns to the rainbow to discuss a history of its global cosmologies, illuminating the interconnected histories of serpent worship and rainbow symbolism. He argues that the study of religious rainbows as a world history is fascinating because they are a natural phenomenon that occur almost everywhere in the world.
Since antiquity, European philosophers and thinkers have been fascinated by the rainbow, which is reflected in the popularity of artificial rainbow fountains that appeared in palatial gardens across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (31). Quite literally, everyone sees the position of a rainbow in the sky differently, depending on where they are standing, and the idea of the rainbow, too, has hardly been static. The rainbow has been variously interpreted in Western thought from its appearance in The Epic of Gilgamesh to the Norse rainbow bridge mythology, with its vivid colours at one time being associated with devil worship in the early modern era (28). In Estonia, it was commonly believed that humans would be sucked up by rainbows if they were to stand directly underneath one (50). Although Isaac Newton’s work on colour theory reduced the rainbow to a mere prism and firmly placed it within the realm of mathematics and optics (26-27), the rainbow’s philosophical and poetic value nevertheless continued to be debated by Romantics such as John Keats (28).
In world cosmologies, the rainbow has most commonly been interpreted as i) a giant serpent or dragon, ii) a bridge between heaven and earth, iii) a celestial bow, or iv) the attire of a deity, such as a scarf or belt. Throughout the world, Oestigaard argues, serpents and rainbows have been a central motif of rainmaking and fertility cults, although a notable exception is Ancient Egypt, where no record of any kind of rainbow cosmology has been found (55). In Arnhem Land, Australia, it is believed that the power of rock paintings can be harnessed to increase the supply of water-snakes in the lagoons to encourage the fall of life-giving rains (48). In South Africa, water-snakes are referred to as doctors or magicians and given special protections as their death is believed to lead to drought (50). Malaysian myths describe drizzle as the poisonous sweat of a serpent that can bury down to the underworld (44). In India, the serpent of the underworld and serpent of the upper world are connected by a rainbow boat (55). In Brazil, the rainbow is called “urine of the great snake”, with the Canella people believing that the rainbow extends from the open mouths of two anacondas (44).
In the Luba cosmology in central Africa, the rainbow is a union between male and female serpents that live in separate rivers. Their union “binds” the rain in the sky through fire, and thus the rainbow prevents rainfall (60). Lake Victoria is one of the core areas of python worship in Africa, however. Not only have rumours circulated about a sea-serpent monster living in the waters of Lake Victoria, but the Bahima and Banyankole people believe that pythons are possessed by the royal spirits (62). In the early twentieth century, women were known to approach a temple in Budu that housed the python god Selwanga, the “giver of children”, to request his blessing for good fertility (63).
Whilst the overlapping history of rainbow and serpent beliefs is notable and the similarity across world cosmologies is at times profound, there is certainly no universal or single narrative of rainmaking. Drawing on the thesis of Robert Blust, who explored dragon beliefs in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, nevertheless, Oestigaard erroneously suggests that serpent-worship is all part of a kind of universal conceptual development that began with the rainbow and extended to the dragon (45). A major shortcoming of this book is Oestigaard’s failed attempt to bolster his theory of serpents and rainbows as a recurring global phenomenon; disregarding all nuance, he insists that certain mythological monsters in Chinese and Indian scripture are either “dragon or snake”. Ultimately, the connection that he suggests exists between the dragons in Chinese cultures and African rock pythons seems a little too farfetched.
A local history of Busoga rainmaking
Oestigaard’s analysis is at its finest, however, when he puts a magnifying glass to the Busoga kingdom in the fifth chapter. This chapter carefully articulates the Busoga rainmaking ritual that Oestigaard learnt from Mary Itanda, who holds special status among the Busoga people as i) a traditional healer, ii) the only medium who can be possessed by and communicate with the mighty god Itanda, and iii) the only ritual specialist of the angry rain god Mesoké. Whilst Itanda is the most powerful of the Busoga gods, it is the worship of Mesoké that takes precedent during times of drought and potential famine.
The water of the Itanda Falls is not itself considered holy, but it is the home to numerous gods, spirits, and ancestors, not all of whom are water deities (68). There is a logic for why Mesoké lives in the waterfall, not in the sky. To provide the necessary life-giving rains to his devotees, Mesoké transports water to the sky by dragging water droplets up through the rainbows that appear in Itanda Falls each morning. The sheer force of the waterfall attests to the power of the gods, who can manifest themselves in various ways. Mesoké is never visible, but other spirits such as his brother Walumbe, the death-god, will use pythons as a transport medium and hence the killing of pythons is forbidden in Busoga culture (67). When embodied by a spirit, a python is not considered dangerous. The spirits, it is believed, have volatile tempers, and they must be appeased through human obedience, good behaviour, and the occasional animal blood sacrifice (72). Mesoké is a particularly ill-tempered god, and his wrath can bring injury and sickness to people. Appeasement of the gods is essential for Busoga livelihood since subsistence farmers are dependent on the life-giving rains (78). Although detested by Pentecostals and born-again Christians, traditional Busoga rainmaking beliefs and healing practices co-exist with other religious beliefs, especially Christianity and Islam (67).
As Mary Itanda explained to Oestigaard, the erratic rainfall in 2017 was caused by the spirits being angered by the building of the Isimba dam, which began in 2015, and they could only be appeased through the sacrifice of a goat. After recovering full consciousness from being possessed by Mesoké, Mary proceeded to the shrine at Itanda Falls, where all participants sat in a circle around the sacrificial goat, each placing one hand on its back. The Spiritual Mother then spat local beer onto the people and the goat, before the goat’s throat was slit by one of the assistants and its blood was sprinkled over the shrine and an adjacent tree before being offered to the river. The goat’s blood was offered to Mesoké, and its liver to the other gods. The ritual ended with the giving of four coffee beans at another small shrine for the purpose of protection against evil. The rainy season that ensued was better than expected, and harvests that year were bountiful (82).
A continental history of rainmaking in Africa
In chapter six, Oestigaard returns to a macro-historical approach, contextualising the Busoga ritual as part of a broader history of rainmaking practices across the African continent. Rainmaking is so widespread across Africa, Oestigaard speculates, because the continent is prone to drought and there are limited opportunities for irrigation. Thus, many farmers are solely dependent on the rain (92). Agro-water variability is larger in Africa than in most other parts of the world, and mythology, including hydrological mythology, plays its most fundamental role among non-literate communities. We see some similarities between the Busoga and other African tribes, but also many differences. According to the cosmological systems of the Wagenia tribe living in the Kisangani rainforests in the Congo, for example, water is considered life-giving and it is essential to their initiation rituals. Almost every Ik village is said to have had a rain-making tree, around which rain-dances would take place. Among the Ngbandi, moreover, the waterfall spirit Bekpwa reveals himself from time to time as a rainbow, whilst the evil spirit Banda will occasionally poison the water’s fish, making them inedible (102).
The final chapter reflects on the marginalisation of African history within Western-produced historiographies and the implications of colonial genocides, epistemicides (killing of indigenous people’s knowledges), and linguicides (killing of indigenous people’s languages) that continue to be felt in the region. Arguing that “uneven histories create uneven futures”, Oestigaard provides an overview of the racist portrayal of African history in the Western imagination and the problems associated with trying to squeeze African history into a “Eurocentric straitjacket” (114). For development efforts to be successful, Oestigaard ultimately argues, they must be rooted in culture and tradition, and, in this case, they must recognise the role of water in constituting society and religion (120).
Conclusion
This book navigates the history of rainmaking on a variety of scales, from the local to the global. I have structured this review based on Oestigaard’s varying scales of analysis, however, partly because his ever-shifting scope of his discussion was disorientating and, at times, disjointed. Where Oestigaard treats this as a single narrative, I felt the compulsion to re-draw the distinctions between micro- and macro- historical phenomena. For a publication with the subtitle Heritage, poverty and sacrifice among the Busoga in Uganda, I was certainly surprised that only one chapter was dedicated to a local history of the Busoga in Uganda; I was anticipating an explanation for the framing of Busoga rainmaking practices as a world historical narrative, but no rationale was ever given.
The real value of this book, I felt, is not its commentary on rainbows and serpent cosmologies across time and space, but its lucid description of the water-world of the Busoga kingdom, as revealed through Oestigaard’s narrative of the rainmaking ritual headed by Mary Itanda in 2017. In this regard, it makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on both rainmaking and development discourse in Uganda. Whilst I appreciated the wider African context that Oestigaard explored, the repeated look toward Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America seemed to detract from the point that he was initially trying to make about the especial need to protect the cultural and natural heritage of Uganda’s Itanda Falls, a point that he unfortunately did not return to at the end of the study.
Cover photo: “Musoga Chief Outside Grain-Store,” CMS Awake 204.17 December 1906, 138. Accessed via AM Digital, Church Missionary Society Periodicals.
Carissa Chew 