4. “Why Is Petrol Red?”

The Experience of Skilled and Semi-Skilled Labor in East and Central Africa

This chapter is also about the interpretation of vampire stories as a genre, but relies largely on oral material to do so. Documentary evidence provides a context and a contradiction to some of the interview material, but it does not shape the chapter. In part this is because almost all the quotations come from interviews with former migrant laborers, men whose experiences of work and descriptions thereof spanned about sixty years. The rich detail of their accounts and their recollections of real or imagined training regimes, expertise, and on-the-job camaraderie provide far more data about how men performed the tasks for which they were paid than would published job descriptions and official statements about how discipline and efficiency were to be improved. Unlike in the previous chapter, I am interpreting many of these oral accounts as if they were true, or accurate. Such an interpretation allows me to examine what a man said happened at work and thus allows for a close scrutiny of the day-to-day processes of discipline and differentiation constructed there. Taking these accounts as histories of working gives me a description of a set of regional issues and concerns that I argue are best understood and interrogated on a regional, transcolonial level of generalization. This analysis is no less specific because it is based on vampire stories from Tanzania interpreted with vampire stories from Uganda and Kenya; indeed, I argue that a regional reading of the genre offers much greater specificity about African concerns about technology, labor, and the various bondings of men and machines than any source read locally could do.

Vampires and Wage Labor

Several scholars have suggested that vampires are a perfect metaphor for capitalism. One of the things that made vampires such a powerful image in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was their extractive power, and how with all their distinctive clothes and equipment, they came to embody the idea of bloodsucking foreigners draining the lifeblood of humbler folk. African vampires, however, are more complex and layered. They are not generalized metaphors of extraction and oppression but ways for working men to express the subtle and contradictory anxieties that might accompany their good fortune at finding gainful employment. Historians of labor in sub-Saharan Africa have stressed the systemic nature of African participation in wage labor: the fact that the methods of recruitment and retention were as much a part of the rhythms and disciplines of the workplace as the actual labor was. As a result, work is perhaps the most neglected aspect of labor history, as Frederick Cooper has pointed out, and the ways in which workers subverted and interrogated the labor process while on the job have rarely been examined or are relegated to the marginal terrain reserved for the hidden struggles and silent resistances of a dispossessed labor force. This chapter proposes something quite different, to add to this literature the study of how working men thought about and debated the nature of their work.

The vampires in this chapter are thus a category of analysis; they are epistemological. They describe not only the extraction of blood, but how it occurs, who performs it, and under what conditions and with which inducements. I argue that it is possible to read—or more precisely, to hear—specific vampire accusations as a debate among working men about the nature of work: not its material conditions or remuneration, but how the experience of skilled or semi-skilled labor and involvement with machines could change the men who were so engaged. This is not the only possible interpretation of vampire accusations, of course, but it is the one that conforms most closely to the details and the emplotment of working men’s accounts. The men quoted here were colonial policemen, firemen, health inspectors, tailors, and railway workers who rose from unskilled apprenticeship to become engine drivers. All describe these vampires in similar terms, noting the secrecy of the work, the intensity with which it was supervised, and the impossibility of knowing who exactly did it, so the vampires known to laboring men had definite characteristics. Interpreting vampires from working men’s accounts does not tell us more about these vampires than other sources might, but may provide insights into the storytellers’ view of the world that other sources do not: it allows us to examine differentiation in the labor process and within the labor force in the words and categories of laboring men.

Most of the data presented here come primarily from interviews with former laborers and artisans—men who were not specialized storytellers at all—conducted in rural western Kenya in 1986 and in and around Kampala, Uganda, in 1990. These men were roughly the same age—born between 1910 and 1935—and had had overlapping life experiences: many of the Kenyans were migrants to Uganda, and many of the Ugandans had worked in supervisory positions there and in Kenya. The Kenyan material was presented to my research assistants and me as men’s stories. Many of the returned migrants I interviewed in rural western Kenya claimed that once home, they never told their wives these stories, because “my wives were adults and could get the stories from other sources,” ^[1] or “none of my wives could realize the seriousness of these stories, but”—turning to my male research assistant—“a man like you can realize the value and seriousness of any story.” ^[2] One man, Anyango Mahondo, who claimed to have done the work of capture himself, said that he “could not tell anyone, not even my wife” about it, even after he had told my assistant.^[3] Conversely, Zebede Oyoyo, who claimed to have narrowly escaped the clutches of Nairobi firemen in a “town toilet” in 1923, told everyone about it: “Why not? I am lucky to have escaped and therefore must talk freely about it.” ^[4] Ugandan men did not tell these stories in gendered ways that I could discern, but as stories that required the expertise of men like themselves. The two men I interviewed in English noted that they too had wondered about bazimamoto and had done “research as you are doing now” many years ago.^[5] Another man said he “followed it closely” since 1939 “because I did not believe it. I came to the conclusion that it was not true because I didn’t find anyone claiming that one of his relatives had been taken.” ^[6] What kind of stories were these, that were so contested, and so gendered, and that were withheld or broadcast, believed or researched according to individual experience?

Working men told stories about occupations when they told stories of vampires. If blood is taken to be a universal, ungendered, nonspecific, life-giving fluid, its removal is terrifying because of what is imagined to be removed. But if blood is thought to be gendered— and many African peoples assume that women have more blood than men—then the loss of blood is far more alarming to adult men than to adult women.^[7] But in either case, blood is the most ambiguous of bodily fluids; according to context, it can signify life or death. Other bodily fluids, semen or breast milk, do not. It is possible that stories about blood, and specific forms of its removal, articulate and point out ambiguities. When the systematic removal of blood is associated with a specific occupational group, it suggests that the ambiguities have to do with certain kinds of labor.^[8] Read as stories about blood, vampiric firemen represent certain reservations about specific skills and the alliances made through on-the-job training, hierarchy, and an extended working day.

In many ways, these stories fit the format of urban legends; most people believed that it was a well-established fact that firemen captured people for their blood. But the use of folkloric categories does not adequately describe the extent to which these stories were debated and contested by their narrators with each telling and retelling. Many of my informants insisted that these stories were false because they had never met anyone who knew a victim. In Uganda, George Ggingo explained that these stories arose when Africans were unwilling to participate in colonial medical experiments and it was necessary to kidnap them.^[9] Ofwete Muriar in Kenya said he was “convinced that these people came from hospitals because nowadays people are required to donate blood for their sick relatives.” ^[10] Still others said that they had doubted these stories until postcolonial violence convinced them that anything was possible.^[11] In 1923, the Tanganyikan Swahili newspaper Mambo Leo published letters about mumiani variously signed “Adiyisadiki” (“Believer”) and “Asiyesadiki” (“Nonbeliever”). The believer knew of a long, narrow building behind a toilet in Nairobi where men called Zima Moto wore black clothes; anyone who entered the building who was not Zima Moto never came out. Women disappeared from the town as well, going to the shops in the evening and leaving their shoes there. The nonbeliever ridiculed the believer’s facts: women disappeared because they were skilled at leaving their husbands, he wrote. Moreover, he had been to Nairobi and “there are two kinds of people there, those placed there by the government, their job is to be ready to put out fires in town, there are people like this in Europe, and then there are the second kind of people, who clean the toilets in town.” ^[12] As late as 1972, a Tanzanian newspaper ran a half-page article explaining that firemen did not kill people.^[13] One month later, “Nearly Victim” wrote to the editor refuting the article and asking, “Where did hospitals get their supply of blood in those grim days, before Independence? People used to disappear mysteriously in those days…or didn’t you know that the blood was used to treat the white man only?” ^[14] But some people were aware of the ambiguity of these stories: “It seems these stories were true, first of all considering that they existed as stories and those who lost their relatives…can prove it. However, those people whose relatives were not taken can say these stories were false.” ^[15]

Vehicles and Vampires

Where vampires are thought to be firemen, they are called by some version of the Swahili term wazimamoto, the men who extinguish the fire, or heat, or light, as in brightness, but not as in lamp. Many East African vampire stories—even when told with other terms for vampire—contain generic fire brigade vehicles; many other vampire stories involve cars or vans. More often than not, captives were put into a vehicle and taken away, sometimes to be kept in a pit in the local fire station, “the property of the government.” ^[16] There is an obvious association between the red of fire engines and the red of blood—firemen’s “equipment is always red and so is blood, therefore any African in the olden days could easily conclude that they were involved in bloodsucking,” Anyango Mahondo said^[17]—but it should be noted that most of my informants generally did not make this association. In the late 1950s and 1960s, however, Europeans had their own set of rumors about the dangers of driving red cars and told of whites in rural East African being beaten or killed for driving in red vehicles.^[18] But Africans were less concerned with color than with the characteristics of vehicles; Abdullah Sonsomola spoke of “cars which bore a cross,” ^[19] for example, and Peter Fraenkel cites Northern Rhodesian’s fears of “a grey land rover with a shiny metal back.” ^[20] Africans were especially concerned to point out that the vehicles they described had no lights and often no windows.

Vehicles in wazimamoto stories were not only dangerous, they were found in the most unlikely places and relationships. An old man in Kampala claimed that in the days when “the only departments with cars were the police and fire brigade,” the Yellow Fever Department captured people, “but since they had no motor vehicles of their own, they had to use the fire brigade department’s motor cars,” which was how this rumor began.^[21] In rural Tanganyika during World War II, a blood drive to supply plasma to troops overseas failed because a fire engine was always stationed by the small airstrip and Africans assumed that the blood was to be drunk by Europeans. Years later, it was said that the blood of unconscious Africans was collected in buckets and then rushed to Dar es Salaam in fire engines.^[22] In Dar es Salaam in 1947, according to a former superintendent of police, a blood transfusion service was established, but it had no transport of its own, and so fire engines carried blood donors to the hospital, giving rise to the rumor “that the vehicles, usually with a European volunteer in charge, were collecting African males for their blood and that it was a plot by Europeans to render them impotent.” ^[23] Officials’ folklore about the fear of fire engines was such that during Christmas 1959, police in Mbale, Uganda, patrolled the African townships in the local fire engine to keep even the criminals inside their homes.^[24]

Trucks and cars were out of bounds as well. Early in 1939, when the governor of Northern Rhodesia visited the liberal settler Stewart Gore-Browne at his palatial estate in Northern Province, his car was followed by a windowless van. This caused great suspicion; it was said that Gore-Browne and the new governor “were concocting plans for kidnapping on a large scale.” ^[25] Batumbula in the Belgian Congo traveled in vans to find victims, sometimes taking men and their bicycles to their grim destinations. In the 1940s, a Belgian priest on the Belgian side of the Luapula River was said to imprison Africans in the belfry of his mission church until he drove them in his van to Elisabethville, where their brains were eaten.^[26] A former miner in colonial Katanga recalled “the last straw was that batumbula began to chase victims in an automobile in the day time.” ^[27] In Lamu, Kenya, in the mid 1940s, Medical Department trucks patrolled the streets, “and, should [one] come upon a straggler [it] draws from his veins all his blood with a rubber pump, leaving his body in the gutter.” ^[28] In the early 1950s, in northeast Tanganyika, it was said that malaria control trucks carried bodies whose blood would be drained.^[29] A few hundred miles to the south, an engineer in charge of building bridges was thought to be mumiani.^[30] A few years later in western Kenya, “motor vehicles painted red” drained the blood from lone pedestrians captured along the Kisumu to Busia highway; the blood was then taken to blood banks in hospitals.^[31] In eastern Northern Rhodesia in 1948, children were lured to trucks on the road at nighttime, made helpless and invisible with the banyama’s wands, and taken to towns across the border in Nyasaland, where they were fattened on special foods while the European employers of banyama drank their blood; they returned home “very emaciated.” ^[32]

The intimate relations of Europeans, when enclosed in vehicles, were extremely suspicious. In rural Tanganyika in the late 1950s, a white geologist was attacked; he aroused local suspicions because there were curtains on the windows of his truck.^[33] In 1959, in what was then Salisbury, Rhodesia, a “courting couple” in a parked car in an isolated spot were attacked because of “an almost firm belief” that Africans were being captured and drugged and loaded onto a Sabena aircraft, on which their bodies were “cut up and canned during the flight” to the Belgian Congo.^[34] Vehicles operated by Africans were no less suspicious. Throughout the 1960s, the first African-owned bus company in western Kenya, Ongewe Bus, was said to carry kachinja after dusk. Passengers had to take great care not to sit beside strangers.^[35] Automobiles could be transformed to perform dreadful tasks. In western Kenya in 1968, travelers were afraid to accept rides, because the wazimamoto had cars with specially designed backseats that could automatically drain the blood of whoever sat there. In 1986, this story was told as something that had happened in the past; ten years later, a researcher heard of cars with specially designed straps to keep victims still as their blood was removed.^[36] Cars had become especially important in the era of AIDS: not only could they help kachinja obtain blood, they enabled them to take it across borders where cleaner, foreign blood was so desperately needed.^[37]

Locating Bureaucracy

What are these stories about? They are about vehicles in unexpected places, used for unintended purposes; these are stories about borrowed transport. But was this borrowing symbolic or literal? Did it represent permeable administrative boundaries or simple lapses in colonial funding and vehicle allocations? Were the signs and symbols of bureaucratic authority being contested in a popular discourse or were official cars being appropriated by underfunded bureaucrats? While I doubt that the Ugandan Yellow Fever Department took blood samples from fire brigade vehicles—Kampala did not have a fire engine until after 1932—everywhere but in Nairobi fire fighting equipment was routinely used, by all accounts badly, by police. Dar es Salaam did not have a fire brigade until 1939; Mombasa until 1940; and Kampala until 1953. Until then, Nichodamus Okumu Ogutu said, “we only heard about wazimamoto but never saw any.” ^[38] Officials however maintained that untrained police forces were usually unable to contain fires in those cities: “[T]he manipulation of the fire appliances in the event of emergency is left to the unskilled, untrained, and undrilled efforts of a few African constables.” ^[39] But where there was a formal and well-organized fire brigade, it did not do much better. Nairobi’s fire brigade had its own quarters, a fire master, and two fire engines, but there was a commission of inquiry in 1926 to investigate why it was so incompetent, and nine years later it had received only forty-two fire calls and put out five fires.^[40] In 1939, the Nairobi Fire Brigade failed to put out a fire in the Secretariat Building.^[41] Kampala’s Fire Brigade could do little about the increase in arson between 1953 and 1958, and the fire damage to stored cotton was especially severe in the dry years of 1953 and 1957.^[42] But shortly after they were built, fire stations became sites of great power and significance. In 1947, a riot at the Mombasa Fire Station badly damaged a fire engine.^[43] In 1958, in Kampala, a man was arrested for trying to sell his friend to the fire station; he asked for 1,500/- and was arrested while waiting for the fire master to bring his money. When he was sentenced the magistrate said, “People must know that the Fire Brigade is not buying people, but is intended to extinguish fires in burning buildings and vehicles.” ^[44] In Dar es Salaam in 1959, William Friedland, a visiting professor at the university, observed “an occasional African crossing the street to get as far away from the fire station as possible and running when in front of the station.” ^[45] Nevertheless, people feared the Medical Department as well, and men and women in Kampala named various departments in Entebbe that received the blood—the Welfare Department, the Yellow Fever Department, the Veterinary Department. They may not have been confused, however. They may have been stating the problem of these stories: how do you locate extraction in bureaucracy when bureaucracy seems so fluid?

Indeed, suppose our own academic questions about narrative and bureaucracies were anticipated in, or even essential to, how these stories were told? What if the confusion of services and terrors was in fact the emplotment? What if “What were fire engines doing in the places they did not belong?” meant “What sort of society puts fire engines on runways and blood-draining vehicles on the streets at night?” Africans did not misrepresent ambulances—vans with tubes and pumps inside them—but they misrepresented their motives: the trucks did not cure sick people, but attacked those unlucky enough to be walking alone at night. These stories may be a colonial African version of a complaint one hears daily in Africa: that officials have failed to keep the streets safe. These narratives make access, mobility, and safety into issues for debate and reflection. They problematize Western technology and the vehicles in which the advantages of that technology were delivered to Africans.

The presentation of cars in stories, even stories about vampires, reveals popular ideas about the interaction between culture and technology, between bodies and machines. In many societies, automobiles generate their own folklore, becoming the vehicles of older symbols and associations, while their symbolic value is equal to their material worth. That vehicles could be controlled, modified, and transformed may have reflected the imagined powers of their manufacturers or the real needs of their owners. Cars can take people away; motoring and roads are ways of erasing boundaries and reclassifying space.^[46] Such reclassifications did not always seem disembodied. In 1931, in central Tanganyika, an African “agreed readily” to get into the car with the district officer and a Dr. Williamson and to give them the names of the rivers along their route, “but upon the Doctor’s asking him to show his tongue, he leaped out of the car and fled in terror.” ^[47] Cars were fearsome depending on who was in them and where they were going or where they were parked. The vanette behind the governor’s car, the fire engines on the runway, and the courting couple’s darkened car implied the contradiction of orderly relations: they were parked in confusing spaces that blurred boundaries.^[48] But the blurred boundaries may not have been those between the Yellow Fever Department and the fire brigade; they may have been those between certain kinds of employment and machines: one man’s blurred boundaries were someone else’s identity. Uniforms, drills, and daily polishings of equipment made some jobs appear categorically different from the sort of casual labor a man could take up and abandon with ease. In 1935, for example, Nairobi firemen polished equipment and drilled nine and a half hours a day; the nightly lookout had to report “every fifteen minutes.…This is salutary from a disciplinary point of view, as well as keeping the guard awake.” ^[49] It was a job without the boundaries of a working day. Wazimamoto “dressed in fire brigade uniforms in the daylight,” but at night they were “doing this job for Europeans who were at that time their supreme commanders.” ^[50] Such discipline and authority changed their demeanor, of course: “[T]hey are only brotherly during daylight, but at night they turn ‘mumianis.’” ^[51] Such work paid better than the most lucrative casual labor: a woman in Tanzania was sure her husband was mumiani because he went away for weeks at a time and always returned with money: “[A] thief cannot always be lucky. One day he might miss or be caught. But my husband always comes back with money so I am sure he is mumiani.” ^[52]

Concealing Men

These stories do not tell us anything about the living African men inside the vehicles.^[53] Cars without windows cannot reveal the men inside; they were known to be hidden, or at least undetectable. One man said he could not be sure of the race of bazimamoto in Kampala because they always did their work at night.^[54] Another claimed that they were chosen for their jobs with great secrecy and caution. “It was not an open job for anybody, you had to be a friend of somebody in the government, and it was top secret, so it was not easy to recruit anybody to begin there, although it was well paid.” ^[55]

If vehicles without windows or lights concealed their occupants, they also hid the work of fighting fires, and the labor process of capturing people: “I only heard that wazimamoto sucked blood from people but I never heard how they got those people.” ^[56] “The act was confidential.” ^[57] The relationship of the vehicles—and their specific sounds—[scured the work. In Nairobi in the 1940s, Peter Hayombe recalled, “Their actual job was not known to us. All we were told was that they were supposed to put out burning fires. Whenever there was a burning fire we would hear bell noises and we were told that the wazimamoto were on their way to put it out.” ^[58] But many people also heard that the wazimamoto “ambushed people and threw them in a waiting vehicle,” ^[59] and “the victims used to call out for help when they were being taken in the vehicle,” ^[60] but even men and women who had narrowly escaped capture did not know much more. Late one night in western Kenya in 1959, a woman “found a group of men hiding behind a vehicle that had no lights of any sort.” She ran and hid, but they looked for her until “the first cock crowed and one of them said ‘Oh, oh, oh, the time is over.” ^[61] In rural Uganda that same year—across eastern Africa, 1959 was a year of widespread blood accusations^[62]—a man was awakened by villagers “saying that the place had been invaded by bazimamoto.” He hid behind a large tree and “narrowly evaded capture.” In the full moon’s light, he could see their car and their clothes—“black trousers and white coats”—but could not describe what they did: “Afterwards I heard that several people had lost their blood.” ^[63]

Even men who claimed to have done this work, either as firemen or policemen, described a labor process that had more to do with hierarchies and automobiles than with co-workers. Anyango Mahondo said that capturing Africans was essential to discipline, rank, and on-the-job seniority, and he described the organization of work as a relationship to a white man and a waiting vehicle.

When one joined the police force [in Kampala] in those olden days, he would undergo the initial training of bloodsucking.…When he qualified there, he was then absorbed into the police force as a constable. This particular training was designed to give the would-be policeman overwhelming guts and courage to execute his duties effectively.…During the day, we were police recruits. Immediately after sunset, we started the job of manhunting…we would leave the station in a group of four and one white man, who was in charge. Once in town, we would leave the vehicle and walk around in pairs. When we saw a person, we would lie down and ambush him. We would then take the captured person back to the waiting vehicle.…We used to hide vehicles by parking them behind buildings or parking a reasonable distance from our manhunt…the precautions we took were to switch off the engine and the lights.^[64]

Here, knowledge of the vehicle is described in much greater detail than is knowledge of the white man. The extension of the working day is taken for granted in this account. What does it mean when people describe technology, equipment, and modified vehicles in ways that obscure descriptions of work and the time the work takes? The absence of light and useful windows, the “shiny metal back” made these vehicles closed, protected, and opaque. Their insides were not known. Men who could describe the insides of pits could not describe the insides of trucks. Dangerous vehicles and the modifications specific to them made the men who performed the work of capture safe, secluded, and anonymous; even they could not describe what they did. But veiling labor with different mechanisms—curtains, no lights, shiny metal backs—kept it secret and indicated that something the public should not see was going on inside. Veiling labor focused attention on it, and on the need to maintain secrecy, and made it the object of scrutiny and speculation.^[65] Making certain jobs hidden relocated them in the realm of the imagination; while certain kinds of workers might complain about a lack of public awareness of their jobs, that lack of awareness gave the public enormous control: their description of what went on in the hidden vehicle went unchallenged by the men in the cars.^[66] When Africans asserted what went on inside these vehicles, they were imagined as places of the most frightening productions: the Sabena aircraft on which Africans recently turned into pigs were canned. To counter the fears of what was inside a curtained van, a district officer in Tanganyika gave villagers a tour of the inside of a white geologist’s van; he thought that if they saw what the curtains actually hid—a bed, a table and chairs, and a photograph of a fiancée—he could guarantee the young man’s safety.^[67] When the anthropology student John Middleton first came to northern Uganda in 1950, his funders had given him a bright red van, closed in the back, “and the rumor had gone round among the Lugbara that he used it to go out and steal babies to eat before touching up the paintwork with their blood.” But a local mechanic was able to install rear windows “so that all and sundry could more easily inspect his possessions.” ^[68]

Revealing Labor

The veiling of labor was frequently done with metal and electrical equipment. In Kampala, it was commonplace to explain that the term bazimamoto referred to the use of automotive equipment, not to firefighting. “These people did their job at night, so when they approached somebody they would switch off the lights and in Kiswahili to switch off is kuzima and the light is moto. ” ^[69] This translation of Kiswahili into Luganda is wrong; kuzima taa means “to put out the light”; kuzima moto means “to put out the fire.” But it is a mistranslation that reflects the importance of automobile equipment in Ugandan vampire stories.

And what is that importance? It seems to be a knowledge of the mechanics of engine sounds and electrical systems. It was a technical knowledge known only to a privileged few, whose specialized skills then concealed the labor process by which it was acquired. A labor process, according to Marx, is the “hidden abode of production,” discernible only when one leaves the noise of the factory floor.^[70] Elsewhere, a trade unionist’s description of the labor process collapses the boundaries between bodies: “The brains of the foreman are under the worker’s cap,” said Big Bill Haywood, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World.^[71] Some of the material presented here, however, suggests that the secrecy of the labor process may have been concealed by laborers themselves. Work routines learned on the job may have produced an unexpected camaraderie. A man who was a railway fireman in Nairobi from 1936 to 1958 described a fabulous subterranean system of technical sophistication:

Pipes were installed all over the town. People never used to know the exact place where the pipes were, but us, we used to know. Whites were very clever. They used to cover the pipes and taps with some form of iron sheets. When a fire was burning anywhere we would go locate the tap and fix our hoses up.…Running water was there throughout the year, therefore we never experienced any shortage of water at anytime of the year.^[72]

Nairobi in the mid 1930s had two fire engines and 508 hydrants, and virtually no funds for hydrant or water distribution system repair.^[73] Nevertheless, this fireman’s account praises informal knowledge, which could only be learned on the job, or from co-workers’ conversations and anecdotes, especially in places where recruits were hired off the street and did not graduate from training programs.^[74] In this account, the informal expertise of firefighting—passed from white man to black man—was knowing where the pipes were hidden, not putting out fires. A Holy Ghost Father in Tanganyika complained about a young African whose informal knowledge dominated a conversation about machines. The priest was explaining to a few Africans that “the driving power” in cars and airplanes was petrol, when a well-traveled African remarked that he had once seen a car filled with petrol and had seen that the petrol was “reddish…according to him the power of the petrol was derived from the fact that there was human blood in it! And his opinion met with general support.” ^[75] Understanding the technology of how things worked was part of the experience of African migrancy, as was talking about what they were not allowed to fully understand. In 1923, a man wrote to a Tanganyikan newspaper that wazimamoto worked near the toilets the government built in Nairobi “but afterwards gave no permission for people to use those toilets.” ^[76] In Kampala, it was said,

They kept victims in big pits. Those pits were made in such a way that no one would notice them. Whites are very bad people. They are so cunning and clever.…The job of police recruits was to get victims and nothing else. Occasionally, we went down the pits, and if we were lucky saw bloodsucking in progress but nothing more.…Those pits were really hidden, and even those working within the police station could not notice them. The pits were built horizontally, and at the entrance they built a small room. To hide the whole thing from everyone the entrances were covered with carpets.…The blood was sucked from the victims until they were considered useless. When that day came, they would die and then be buried in a more secret place, known only to the government.…people were buried at night to keep the secret.^[77]

My point is not that the knowledge of technologies, times and places was more important than the work itself, but that the knowledge that was otherwise secret bonded a few select Africans to specialized procedures. In November 1934, Godfrey Wilson’s assistants told him of the “highly” paid African men “sent out by the government” to kill other Africans and take their blood, which hospitalized Europeans required. “The Government says to them ‘if you are caught, we will not be responsible, you will be killed.’” ^[78] In 1958, in eastern Northern Rhodesia, prison warders overheard rumors that the local station of the Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, called the White Fathers, were about to kidnap Africans and had already marked their victims with “the Sign of the Cross which was not visible to the intended victim or to his fellows but only to the Europeans and their African henchmen.” ^[79] The invisible signs, the secrets of the pipes and the pits, the allocation of responsibility, reveal another dimension to workers’ own and popular perceptions of the advantages—technological and social—of semi-skilled labor. Those popular perceptions underscored the bonds between wazimamoto and the men they employed. In Tanganyika in the early 1930s, a chief complained that “tricksters” extorted money by carrying “bottles of red ink” that spilled when they deliberately bumped into passers-by. Claiming that “they were servants of ‘mumiani’” who had just spilled the bottles of blood they were taking to their “masters,” they then told these strangers they now needed more blood. The frightened strangers gave them money to get rid of them.^[80] Europeans’ anecdotes had it that after the riots at the Mombasa Fire Station in 1947, whites in a wealthy suburb ended their dinner parties “sharp at eight” so that the servants who lived in town could “march together” home, carrying “spears and other warlike gear” to fight off mumiani.^[81] Bonds between workers and employers were different from those of blood. According to a Tanganyikan man, when a man came to greet his brother who worked for wazimamoto in Nairobi, his brother quickly sent him away: “[L]eave right now, if my friends see you here you are dead. Let me ask you,” wrote a believer, “someone who comes to see his brother at work, should he die?” ^[82]

Occupational folklorists have described how technical expertise is parodied by those so skilled—the airplane pilots who board a plane with a white cane and dark glasses to frighten their passengers—as a challenge to managerial authority.^[83] Bolivian tin miners performed ceremonies that denied the importance of skill, “to make the tools help us in our work.” ^[84] African historians who have been able to compare oral and written accounts of the same skilled labor have shown how specialized, skilled labor portrays itself and is portrayed in words of privilege and superiority. Mine managers’ views of Basotho shaft sinkers in South Africa, for example, encouraged their sense of superiority but also praised their camaraderie; Basotho shaft sinkers spoke of their favored status in the mine compounds and of the high wages their specialization offered.^[85] Workers’ narratives may reveal the tensions and conflicts at the workplace that managerial accounts omit. Workers’ oral narratives about technology, however imprecise and inaccurate they are, are a way to foreground ambiguities and conflicts about the work itself. The man who boasted of the knowledge of hidden pipes he shared with “clever whites” was proud of his on-the-job training. He also insisted that in his twenty-two years as a railway fireman, he never saw anyone captured, although he admitted that “on seeing us people used to run in all directions.” ^[86]

But other men saw certain kinds of skills as courting danger. A Ugandan man said that bazimamoto “operated in villages during the night. A bell would be tied up to an electricity pole and when it was rung, immediately a vehicle would drive by to pick victims. Once a man was captured near my home. He was one of the Uganda Electricity Board workers.” ^[87] African concerns about mechanization, about the technological nature of skilled jobs may have been expressed in vampire stories: the physical conditions of workers on the job—the subject of so much investigation by employers and scientists—were also debated by the workers themselves.^[88] These concerns do not seem to have been about the societal impact of mechanization, but about a gendered boundary between men and machines that could refashion potency and performance.^[89] Blood accusations were most public in the mines of colonial Katanga after mechanized shovels were timed and tested against a team of pick-and-shovel men.^[90] People in Dar es Salaam in the late 1950s and 1960s feared for the potency of men who went to give blood in fire engines, or thought that firemen had injections that made men “lazy and unable to do anything.” ^[91] Twenty years later, Tanzanians claimed that certain houses in Mwanza, on the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, stole peoples’ blood. “The front door is made of wood, and they have written ‘Danger, Electricity’ on it. But if you touch it, straight away the electricity catches you and your blood is sucked out.” ^[92]

Vampire stories were most private when occupations were neither challenged nor explained. The return home leveled the distinctiveness of the most extraordinary careers: “All policemen in those olden days were the agents of wazimamoto.” But “when someone was a policeman he remains so even after leaving his job. Policemen are always careful what they leave out. Retired policemen cannot tell you what they were doing during their working time.” ^[93] The same man who described how best to park a car when capturing unwary Africans said he could not tell anyone about it. “How could I do that after swearing to keep secrets? The works of policemen were very hard and involved so many awful things some of which cannot be revealed to anyone. Because of the nature of my work I could not tell anyone even my wife…even my brothers I could not tell.” ^[94] Storytelling both presents personal identity and allows it to be negotiated and redefined by the audience; withholding stories may permit personal and professional identity to be rigidly maintained.^[95] These stories were not explanations; they were accusations: they did not explain misfortune, but imputed work, identity, and loyalty.

Tools of Empire

When studying narratives about vampiric firemen in Africa, it is important that we identify what was weird and unnatural in these stories to their tellers and not become overly concerned with what seems that weird and unnatural to ourselves. It is easy for Western scholars to get bogged down in the issue of blood-drinking Europeans, but that is in fact the most natural part of the story, demonstrated over and over by community and common sense: “Of course the stories were true.…People used to warn each other not to walk at night.” ^[96] But what was unnatural and weird to the people who told these stories may well have been those things that were rare and unnatural in their daily lives—cars and electricity.

But these stories are not simple condemnations of technological change and motor transport; medical technology and cars and electrical equipment were, in narrative and in daily life, mediated through a very African medium—working men. Specialized equipment was used by small specialized occupational groups, and for these men, technology had an intense meaning: they talked about it in interviews more than they talked about work. For the most part, technical knowledge was apportioned so sparingly and so slowly that it began to defy natural laws: in this way, railway firemen could claim that they had water even in the dry season. In reality, the allocation of specialized tools and tasks to a few skilled laborers kept most people in ignorance of how automobiles or electricity poles actually worked; on a symbolic level, this kept technology from becoming naturalized in any way.

The very peculiarity of cars, lights, and mirrors made the men who could use them a little peculiar as well. The new tools not only bonded men to machines in odd ways—whatever went on inside the curtained truck?—but bound men to mechanization. Marxist theorists of the labor aristocracy have described how the work rhythms required by the technological demands of new industries identified skilled workers with management in nineteenth-century England.^[97] Although the same processes did not take place in non-industrialized Africa, it is likely that their specialized tools and techniques placed skilled laborers under their employers’ control in ways that unskilled laborers had never been managed. Such a man might know where “the clever whites” hid their pipes, or pits, or signs, or have had the on-the-job training “to execute his duties effectively,” but he was, in the process, never insulated from his employer’s supervision and commands, or the vulnerability these commands brought him.

Tools and technology have recently been studied as one of the ways in which Europeans dominated the colonized world; they were supposed to overpower Africans or to mystify them.^[98] But the contradictory meanings of tools in these stories is too intricate, and too dense, to be explained in any single way. The tools in these stories have been assimilated; to some extent, they were already familiar objects, whatever their origin.^[99] What made them fearsome was how and why they were used—both in narrative and as narrative. On the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, there were mupila, “white balls of drugs,” thrown into the path of a lone traveler, to whom the banyama then spoke. “If he answered all his power left him, his clothes fell off, and he no longer had a memory or a will.” ^[100] In the southeastern Belgian Congo in the 1940s, flashlights had the same effect.^[101] In Dar es Salaam, thirty years later, “They use many things to catch people. Sometimes they use a mirror…your mind changes and you just follow to any place they go.” ^[102] Tools themselves, properly used, could disempower ordinary Africans. Those who were skilled enough to use them lost something too—not their sense of direction, but their identity: they became invisible.

In these narratives, technology reveals unnatural acts—not bloodsucking or odd behavior in parked cars, but the regimented labor process required by technology: on-the-job training, rank, time discipline, and intense supervision, even after hours. The cars and lights and mirrors in these stories were not the only Western, specialized tools introduced into colonial Africa, but they are the only such equipment that regularly appears in vampire stories over a wide geographic and cultural area. These technologies did not arouse accusations about the forcible removal of blood because they were foreign or even because they were associated with a dominant power; they feature in these stories because they aroused the greatest anxieties.^[103] But they did not arouse anxieties because they were imperfectly understood or imperfectly assimilated or because automobile lights had not become a “natural” African symbol; they aroused the greatest anxiety because these were technologies that exposed other kinds of relationships. The presence of bells or cars without lights in so many personal narratives about vampires reveals the extent to which these new tools and technologies meant something terrifying to individual Africans. They were not terrifying in and of themselves, but because of how they were used and by whom. The relationships of hardened control over a few privileged workers revealed by the new technologies of cars and bells and lights were intrusive to the point of extracting blood, intensive to the point of supervising skilled labor on the job or after hours. Men and women in Uganda who translated bazimamoto as “the men who turn off the light” had a powerful, mechanical term to describe the work that extracted blood, the skilled Africans who carried it out, and the whites who supervised them. Naming the vampires after what they did to a car pronounced their work unnatural; it made it clear that these tasks were performed at night, well beyond the standards and the norms of the working day. Thus the term captured the distinctions between the skilled workers, the European overseers, and the population whom it was their job to abduct.^[104]

But how are we to make sense of these particular arrangements of metal and electric lights and blood? Which was most horrible, the draining of blood or the use and abuse of familiar tools and trucks? Certainly, assertions about the nature of work, wages, and progress are made by the vehicles without lights, rubber pumps, and bells in these stories,^[105] but these images were always animated by employed Africans. In Kampala, the bazimamoto “employed agents who lived among the people and had cars.” ^[106] But was it the owners, the drivers, or the cars that took the blood? Such a question may make distinctions that the storytellers I have quoted studiously avoided. While my informants were crystal clear that the bazimamoto were humans, most described the technological aspects of human agency. They did not distinguish a clear-cut boundary between man and machine, and if we attempt to impose such a line, we may lose sight of the questions and anxieties that made the line between man and machine so blurred: if someone works with specific tools in a specific mechanized space, or even when he is taken to donate blood in a fire engine, how can he retain his masculinity, his humanity? What kind of being lives in a truck with curtained windows, and what kind of beings reproduce in the backseats of parked cars?^[107] Indeed, did the men who worked closely with machines—drivers, passengers, men who worked with electricity or mechanical shovels—rehearse biological or mechanical reproduction?^[108]

But if African workers were concerned about what happened to men who got too close to machines, employers and officials favored the idea that Africans could be dazzled by technology. In 1933, for example, a European wrote to the Tanganyikan government explaining the origins of mumiani: a Parsee who lived near Mombasa in 1906 who “would attract natives to his house by means of a magnetic glass.” ^[109] If Africans imagined that these technologies sucked blood or made men impotent, officials explained them as simple misunderstandings. The Tanganyikan African who told his fellows that petrol was red because of blood simply misunderstood the additives in British army petrol, wrote the priest; other Africans were said to have misunderstood roofing tar, bottles of red wine, or why fire engines were red.^[110] But employers and officials wanted tools and structures that would impress Africans. The same year that the Nairobi Fire Brigade put out five fires, the fire master complained that he had no sliding pole to help him get to fire engines quickly: as it was he had to dash through his sitting room and down a narrow flight of stairs; he wanted a pole placed outside his bedroom window. “My desire is the efficiency of the brigade.” ^[111] Many years later, when Indian merchants gave Uganda the gift of a large clocktower to be erected on the roundabout of the Kampala Fire Station in 1954, they installed two loudspeakers to amplify the chimes. One faced the town and the other the suburb of Katwe—so well known for rumor that the popular term for street talk was “Radio Katwe.” It was hoped that these chimes would wake up workers in Katwe and that eventually the loudspeakers could be used to broadcast announcements there.^[112]

Conclusions

Why did African men represent the conflicts and problematics of the new skills and economic regimes in stories about public employees who sucked blood? The simplest answer is perhaps best: no other idea could carry the weight of the complications of work, identities, and machines. First, it is a metaphor of colonial origin; despite official attempts to link it to “traditional” practices, most African informants said bazimamoto emerged in the late teens and early 1920s. Second, these vampires were described with all the tools and technologies, all the uniforms, titles, and rank and authority of colonial bureaucracies: vampires were encumbered with all the formalities and inefficiencies of colonial public services. Their dreadful night duties explained the senseless routine and the discipline of their daytime jobs. That capturing Africans was a job for some Africans, requiring intense secrecy, organization, and supervision, made vampires uniquely well suited to represent the conflicts and ambiguities of labor, because vampiric firemen were not an established fact: many people doubted their existence, and insisted that the rumors began when Africans misconstrued European actions. The debate was not merely about whether or not colonial vampires existed, but about the nature and the attributes of certain kinds of labor. The disputable character of wazimamoto was part of its significance; such disagreements continually posed the questions, did an identifiably separate group of skilled laborers exist and, if they did, what was their impact on the wider society?

Notes

The title of this chapter is the title of a section of F. G. Schreerder’s “Mumiani,” Book of the Holy Ghost Fathers 44, 3 (1948). I am grateful to Peter Pels for this reference.