8. Citizenship and Censorship

Politics, Newspapers, and “a Stupefier of Several Women” in Kampala in the 1950s

This chapter is about news and current events—how they are spoken about, written about, and sometimes not written about, and the play between these. It is about how men and women in postwar Uganda talked about what happened (and what did not happen and what was not said to have happened) and how that talking has been theorized by oral historians. Because many of my sources are, in fact, African newspapers, I want to theorize how Africans read them. This chapter discusses oral and written accounts of the trial of Juma Kasolo, a despised agent of bazimamoto in Kampala, which coincided with the events leading up to the deportation of the Kabaka of Buganda. It shows how the two stories, oral and written, and oral and unwritten, might comment on each other. I argue that the formulaic elements in a local vampire story straddle oral and written media and became a way to talk about current affairs. This chapter is about how different stories were reported or not reported in different media—which made the newspapers, and which newspapers, and which were primarily part of oral testimonies—and how citizens—ordinary and official—interpreted these stories.

Vampires, Politics, and the Colonial Situation

It is possible to interpret the vampire accusations and vampire riots of the 1940s and 1950s as an additional idiom with which the grievances of the postwar era were articulated. Charges that white mine managers ate an African strike leader at the beginnings of Katanga labor protests of 1943, a riot at the Mombasa fire station a few months after the general strike of 1947 (and a week before a tribunal announced what wage increases, if any, might be granted), and death threats against government broadcasters said to sap the will of Northern Rhodesians who opposed the Central African Federation in the early 1950s can all be seen, without too much imagination, as popular expressions of protest.

But is that all they were? Were these expressions of protest merely that—opposition to an existing regime—or did the way in which a well-known belief becomes a cause for public alarm and outrage speak to concerns that were not directed against employers or Europeans, but were part of local struggles, directed at the social and economic tensions and fissures of a particular time and place? This has been the begrudged insight behind many of the fragmentary writings by Europeans about African vampire rumors. In a 1948 letter to Max Marwick, Clyde Mitchell—both were doing anthropological fieldwork in Central Africa for the first time—described vampire beliefs in Nyasaland but wondered why whites were held responsible but black people were accused and attacked by other black people:

Africans kidnap unsuspecting fellows at the dead of night and cart them off to the Whites who drain their blood to use for their own purposes. For this the Blacks are well and truly paid. The Whites are licensed from the boma to do this and the blood is used to make European medicine. The interesting thing about this is the way in which hostility is directed to the Europeans probably through a misinterpretation of blood transfusion. But the interesting thing is though the Whites are the real villains of the piece, i.e., the prime movers of the crime, the real hostility is directed to the Blacks in their employ. Just how you explain this I don’t know. It is hostility directed to those who threaten the integrity of the in-group. Is it that the Whites by reason of their position of authority are father images and are thus above overt hostility? What is it that gives these people this Hamletic make-up of being unable to express their aggression against their oppressors. Recently a policeman was killed in Limbe because he was believed to have been one of cinjacinja.^[1]

But are the issues here how responsibility for colonial bloodsucking was allocated, or who were accused of such vampirism and attacked for their roles in it? Or are the allocation of responsibility and accusation different things—the first, the clear elucidation of structure, a chain of a command, and accountability, and the second, the naming of the person locals want gone from their immediate environment? Those who captured Africans and took their blood were not responsible for the practice; the reasons they did this work were obvious: “If someone asked you to look for a liter of blood for 50,000/-, would you not do that?” ^[2] A man—or woman—working for whatever agency of the colonial state that required the blood “did this for money, they needed the money, and they could do this kind of work.” ^[3] They might be despised, but their motivations were not unreasonable: it was a job. The allocation of responsibility was about knowledge, the firm and not uncomfortable understanding of how the world worked. Accusation was about power, and who could use it when and where.

If selling someone to the bazimamoto was not personal and had none of the personal enmity associated with witchcraft, why were suspected agents attacked and killed? After World War II, there were a number of newspaper and anecdotal accounts of violence against those suspected of taking Africans’ blood. Does this mean that vampire accusations increased in violence after 1945 or that the sources with which I study them changed? This need not be an either/or question, of course. Increased violence was perceived everywhere in East African urban life in the postwar era, and officials’ anticipation of violence made every crowd a riot, and every mob worthy of police reinforcements. Nevertheless, the evidence for vampire-related homicides is striking: although there were a few attacks on Europeans, Africans—many of them policemen or firemen—were attacked, some of them killed, in Mombasa in 1947, in Dar es Salaam in 1947, 1950, and again in 1959, and in rural Uganda and rural Tanganyika throughout the early 1950s.^[4] Was this, as Mitchell suggests, a sublimation of colonial grievances? Did African mobs attack Africans rather than whites in the heat of the riotous moment? Or were these attacks part and parcel of a range of grievances against both the colonial situation and some individual Africans?^[5] Were the Africans attacked those who had been despised for years? Were the angry mobs swept away by fears of vampires or were they aware—in varying degrees—that vampire beliefs articulated other fears as well?

But how was the oppressor to be identified as colonialism waned in Uganda? In Buganda—one of several kingdoms in the protectorate’s southern, Bantu-speaking half—the relationship between kingdom and colonial state had been uneasy since the official colonial conquest negotiated the legal conditions under which Baganda were to be subject to both the king in his palace at Mengo in Kampala and the Colonial Office in London. The king, the Kabaka, was hereditary, but chiefs and kingdom officials were appointed, based on merit and qualifications determined by British officials: both were accountable to the Lukiiko, the kingdom’s parliament, comprising, after significant struggles, a small number of the Kabaka’s nominees and twice as many elected chiefs and representatives from each county (saza). The Lukiiko was fractious in relationship to the king and the protectorate, the bureaucratic uneasiness matched by the ways in which individual Baganda struggled to be citizens of both states. Many Baganda saw no contradiction in being royalists and modernizers at the same time and sought to move their kingdom to the forefront of colonial politics and those of the world. The frequently repeated anecdote about the young Kabaka’s anger at not being given the same royal status as the queen of Tonga at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation was often told to explain the true place of Buganda in the world, or to explain why Baganda might have such pretensions.^[6]

The kingdom of Buganda, its politics and its pretensions, troubles Mahmood Mamdani’s recent distinction between citizen and subject, non-native and native, as the defining characteristic of all colonial situations. In Africa the non-natives, the urban workers, elites and educated modernizers, were the citizens, empowered by their access to modern institutions of the state, while Mamdani’s natives were maintained in rural Africa by customary law and indirect rule as exemplars of the dark continent.^[7] But late colonial policies were so confused that they could barely bifurcate the people they ruled. Colonial officials were so baffled by how to deal with urban workers and rural guerrillas and unruly kings that they frequently reprimanded these groups in the vocabularies of nation, self-government, and citizenship, which the workers, the guerrillas, and the unruly kings—who already understood the principles—then applied in a wider frame.^[8] Indeed, in Uganda in 1953, the governor dethroned a king because he would not accept the idea of a unified nation-state. The events in this chapter—including the trial of Juma Kasolo in 1953—describe how colonial officials promoted an idea of citizenship that envisioned responsible Africans capable of self-government in part to stifle an older, “traditional” citizenship in which loyalty, gossip, and ties to the palace not only governed citizens of Buganda, but kept them from harm. Many Baganda themselves had sought ways of transforming the kingdom’s citizens from backward Africans to modern ones, but these visions had to do with controlling the flow of information, not making them citizens of a unitary nation-state.

Part of the task of transforming Buganda by Baganda was modernizing the king’s subjects, freeing them from custom, superstition, and their old ways. When a group at the royal court, including the Katikiro, the kingdom’s prime minister, Martin Luther Nsibirwa, encouraged the widowed queen mother to remarry a commoner in 1941, the popular and chiefly outcry was such that Nsibirwa was asked to resign by the British. Almost fifty years later, Baganda spoke passionately about this. “Don’t you see the trouble it caused, that this earth is not at peace?” said Magarita Kalule.^[9] The issue was not seen as one of royal blood purity—difficult enough to conceptualize in a polygamous society—but of rank and status. “What if you had a wife and she remarried your houseboy?” asked Joseph Nsubuga.^[10] “If you are grown up.…and then you hear that your mother is looking around for a boyfriend, wouldn’t you feel ashamed?” said Alozius Kironde.^[11] Rank and status were not separate from the fractious politics of the kingdom, however. Six months after Nsibirwa was reinstated as Katikiro after the riots of 1945, he was assassinated.^[12]

But the same citizens preserving the hierarchies of rank and heritage were Christians and Muslims, farmers, clerks, and laborers. Their relationship to the kingdom of Buganda, its customs, and the elite who were its government, was anything but one of unmediated loyalty. By the 1940s, a movement had begun among urban and rural traders to change how kingdom and clan officials, groups that had been considerably strengthened during the two regencies of the twentieth century, were elected. A growing trade union movement, demands for representative government in the kingdom, and middlemen’s profiteering in coffee and cotton sold abroad led to civil strife in 1945 and again in 1949. Such “disturbances” were commonplace in postwar Africa, but in the polities of southern Uganda, with widespread literacy, many newspapers, and royal and colonial bureaucracies, these disturbances were described in a variety of domains with a variety of narratives. Thus, John Iliffe, writing in 1998, suggested that Baganda populists deliberately spread vampire rumors to fuel the riots.^[13] In Busoga, in the 1960s, for example, a chief magistrate warned the anthropologist Lloyd Fallers, “There are two kinds of Basoga: the first loves Busoga, the second loves the protectorate government. The first will tell you one kind of history, the second will tell you another kind.” ^[14]

The different histories were not about who was a citizen and who was not, but about what determined state citizenship, what the qualities of that citizenship should be, and how it was articulated. But both kinds of histories were about motives, fears, and what lay behind colonial policies. Some modernizers among those who spoke of relations with the colonial government admitted that they had once been so naive as to believe that Europeans did take African blood or ate Africans. The same Busoga official quoted above laughed when he told Fallers that in the early 1940s, when he was a young headman taking a petition to the district commissioner’s office, he had been fed in a room in the DC’s house. “I heard a car outside, and English voices. I didn’t understand and thought I was going to be eaten. The messenger called me to the office where the Englishmen were. On my way, I opened my knife in my pocket in case they tried to kill me! When I arrived, I saw only white faces, and I trembled!” ^[15] Baganda officials were not so amused, and passed their displeasure onto the scholars they spoke to: Paolo Kavuma wrote in his memoirs that the Baganda thought the British “drank blood and killed children because they did not understand what happened in hospitals.” ^[16] David Apter noted that the populist Katikiro Samiri Wamala, who led the struggle against Nsibirwa in 1941, was “the first to reckon with public opinion” but the “public was not particularly well-informed. Common stories were that Europeans drank blood and were vampires (because of efforts to create a blood bank), that mission hospitals killed children (because few maternity cases reached the hospitals until there was difficulty).” ^[17]

The politics of the kingdoms were as layered and distrustful as those of the colonial government and its subjects. In 1949, there were riots, which Baganda said “were between the kingdom and the people.” ^[18] After months of agitation, the Bataka Party—claiming in the name of clan elders that chiefs and officials had ceased to serve them—called Baganda to come to Mengo “to inform the Kabaka [of] the things that are undermining him and our country.” When eight party members were allowed to meet with the Kabaka, he responded to their demands—including the election of chiefs—by citing the 1900 agreement by which Buganda had a special status in the Protectorate. When the police arrived to control the crowd, violence began: 400 officials’ huts were burned in Mengo; shops were looted and many people were beaten; outside Kampala, chiefs’ cattle were killed. Government broke down for a few days until an additional battalion could come from Kenya. Order was restored, and some reforms were instituted, but the Protectorate advised the kingdom to consider its own role in creating an emergency that it could not itself police.^[19]

The riots of 1949 and their resolution led to another development. According to Apter, Baganda “efforts…to avoid control by the Protectorate government began to assume the proportions of an ideology and mythology. In every gesture, benevolent or not, they saw the threat of control.…Baganda and British viewed the intransigence of the other as a cover for hidden motives.” ^[20] During the correspondence and meetings leading up to the deportation of the Kabaka in June 1953, words were read and reread, silences interrogated, and intentions analyzed. A speech in London in June 1953 by the colonial secretary praising the Central African Federation had included a passing reference to the possibility of an East African Federation. The summary in the English-language East African Standard, published in Nairobi, was after many retellings interpreted by the Kabaka and the newly reformed Lukiiko to reveal the true goal of British colonialism: that Buganda would lose its autonomy with the independence of Uganda. A subsequent union of Britain’s East African territories would devour the kingdom; Uganda’s status as a protectorate would leave it as weak and vulnerable as Nyasaland was in the face of the Central African Federation. The new ruler of independent Uganda would be Kenya. That the governor, Andrew Cohen, had come eighteen months before directly from the Colonial Office, where he had been undersecretary for the African colonies, only proved Britain’s long-term plans. Only by demanding a separate independence could Buganda subvert these plans. Mutesa II—writing from his second exile, imposed by the president of an independent Uganda—confirmed that this was now his goal, but since two-thirds of the members of the Lukiiko were now elected, to disagree with them would have been to flaunt “the wishes of my people.” The Kabaka noted that Cohen could have salvaged the situation had he been willing to abandon his fixation on the idea of “a unitary state of Uganda,” which “found no support in the country.” Paolo Kavuma, Mutesa II’s Katikiro, was to later describe himself as the voice of moderation. What, he recalled asking the Kabaka on 6 November, the day of Kasolo’s arrest, did he, the king, consider to be public opinion? “Should we, I asked, regard the crowds which assembled from time to time at Katwe or Wandegeya, two of Kampala’s liveliest suburbs, as representing public opinion?” The Lukiiko asked for a statement that no federation would ever take place in East Africa, and then for a separate independent status for Buganda. Cohen refused, and a nervous Kabaka—trying to balance the demands of anti-royalist parties that nevertheless sought an independent Buganda—went armed to a final meeting with Cohen. But instead of a showdown, the Kabaka’s authority was withdrawn, and he was sent to England on 1 December 1953. Although Kavuma had asked that the Luganda press not cover these talks—and only the anti-royalist Uganda Post refused—the deportation was headline news.^[21] But its greatest power was in the spoken word: when the Kabaka’s sister was told of the deportation, she died of shock at once, and when his brother heard of it on the radio in England, he vomited. Ordinary Baganda, reading the story in the newspaper, were only stunned: a student later said that he took a newspaper to a park bench and read it for several minutes before he realized it was upside down.^[22]

News, Rumor, and Newspapers

Who was to mediate between the king and the governor, the vampires and the officials, the producers and the middlemen, the trade unionists and the Katikiro, and all their different histories? How could people learn what was really the truth, and who was to make sure information was correctly understood? Before he showed his disdain for Baganda public opinion, David Apter was elegiac about the casual, illiterate citizenship practiced around the Lukiiko in the early 1950s. Men sitting on the low window-frames of the Lukiiko building listening to debates; small groups of men and women discussed the news of the day in the royal enclosure; there was a constant murmur of gossip: “For the Baganda, this was the metropole, not London, not Nairobi…Mengo was where the rules of propriety and modernity were laid down.” But the whispered, polite citizenship of Buganda masked distrust and suspicion, fueled by how Baganda heard the gossip all around them: “The Baganda can withhold few secrets from one another.” The intimacy that led to gossip made each man “impute motives to his enemies that he feels sure are real.” This led to a passion for secrecy that almost always failed, as men in public life attempted to obscure the motives for their public acts.^[23] Yet a few years earlier, articles in the Luganda press complained bitterly about the rumors spread by county chiefs and political leaders: “You may hear a big person in the country saying something which does not bear any truth.…One wonders why such people are ever given freedom to rule us.…This is why members of the National Assembly go astray in their thinking, because of rumors they might have heard.” Rumor “shames the nation.” “It is the duty of everyone to always ask whoever tells you something to prove what he tells you before accepting it.” ^[24] “If you hear a rumour which you think to be untrue and then you circulate it you become an enemy of the people. What does one lose by being quiet?” ^[25]

But the question of how to keep Baganda from distorting the truth and telling tales eluded many Baganda, commissions of inquiry, and colonial observers alike. The printed word did not amend the spoken one. When an emergency meeting of the Lukiiko was rumored to be scheduled for late April 1945, county chiefs gathered in Mengo despite a published government announcement that no such meeting was planned.^[26]

Moreover, versions of the printed word were available on every street corner in Kampala. In 1945, there were seven vernacular newspapers published in Uganda, including Matalisi and Gambuze, which had been published in Luganda since the 1920s. After the post-1949 reforms, ten new newspapers were founded by 1954, and only one of the older Luganda papers survived. By the late 1950s, the Uganda Argus was the only English-language newspaper available in Kampala. Of the twenty-four other papers, ten were African-owned and financed—sometimes with missionaries’ help—and two were owned and financed by Roman Catholic missions; the Argus—begun in the mid 1950s, replacing the Herald, published three times a week—was partly European-financed, and the remaining eleven newspapers were funded by some government body, either ministries of development, local government, or information agencies. Seven were published monthly and three weekly; only the Argus was published daily. The newspapers with the largest circulations were in Luganda and owned and financed by Africans: the African Pilot, published Monday and Thursday, had a circulation of 12,000, as did Uganda Eyogera, published Tuesday and Friday. The Argus’s circulation was 8,200, and the East African Standard, published in Nairobi since the 1920s, was widely read in Uganda. The Luganda Uganda Post was published Wednesday and Saturday and had a circulation of 9,000, and the weekly Luganda Uganda Times had a circulation of 5,000. The Uganda Post and Uganda Eyogera were closely allied with political movements—the Uganda Post was the organ of the Uganda National Congress, successor to the Uganda African Farmers’ Union, which was banned along with other trade unions after 1949, and the Uganda Eyogera was founded in 1953 by E. M. K. Mulira and became the mouthpiece of the modernizing Progressive Party, founded in 1955.^[27]

What did such circulation figures mean in East Africa in the 1950s? Many chiefs and functionaries stated that they read two newspapers.^[28] Purchasing newspapers conferred a certain status: not everyone who carried a newspaper could read. Daniel Sekiraata, quoted later in this chapter, described the business of transporting corpses to their rural homes for burial, in which they were dressed them to look like passengers in cars, in suits, with newspapers placed on their laps. Virtually all newspapers were read by more than one person, and many more were read aloud, translated, summarized, amended, and made fun of by a variety of readers for a variety of audiences. Even newspapers written in languages that required years of schooling to read could be read out loud in a few minutes to illiterates. The crowds in Katwe and Wandegeya might not be newspaper readers, but they knew what newspapers said. Where newspapers were sold without subscription—where all purchases of newspapers were on the street—the need of all but the most intensely subsidized to appeal to popular issues was great: popular stories were in demand.^[29] Newspaper reading in Africa is a social event: not every reader was a purchaser, as many people read newspapers on the street without buying them and many more read newspapers handed around to friends, neighbors, and kin. Newspapers travel from reader to reader in neighborhood after neighborhood, county after county. As Isabel Hofmeyr has argued, “illiteracy” in Africa is not a monolithic state: Africans need not read to participate in a complex “documentary culture” in which they take—and just as often reject—ideas from written texts.^[30] In one of the few ethnographies of African reading ever published, Hortense Powdermaker argues that the intense privacy of reading gives a sense of detached sophistication to readers in a preliterate society. According to a young, educated clerk on the Copperbelt, “In a newspaper you can read and re-read the news, so you can understand it properly. Also, a newspaper keeps a record of what has happened, or has been said, but the wireless only says something once and leaves no record for the future which one can refer to.” ^[31] But such an account obscures the fractious street corner argument and performance that accompanied many newspaper readings. As the following section makes clear, children knew what was in newspapers as much as adults did; newspapers read aloud were public culture, an argumentative citizenship in which a person need not be literate to participate. As Ssekajje Kasirye, quoted below, states, reading and understanding were separate, dependent on local knowledge and context as much as the ability to read words on a page. Indeed, Baganda modernizers sought to replace the contestation around the printed word with an authoritative spoken one. Before he became a newspaper editor E. M. K. Mulira wrote that the rise of private land ownership had helped rumors to go unchecked. When the landlord was chief of an area, he “silenced subversive rumours and not much damage was done,” but in recent years, “the peasant and anyone with a piece of strange news is regarded as one of the people-in-the-know” and there is no landlord-chief to correct their misinformation. “Much suffering and suspicion in Uganda is caused by simple misunderstandings—often by the failure of authorities to explain things clearly.” A belief in ordinary people’s expertise and participation had replaced time-honored hierarchies. Mulira argued that whereas people in towns could be protected from misunderstandings by writings, speeches, or posters, rural people should receive radio broadcasts, “one of the best ways of combating rumours.” ^[32]

Such concerns reveal how the newspaper-reading public was imagined. Benedict Anderson has argued that for colonial societies, newspapers occupy a certain place in national consciousness. While the first colonial newspapers were simply appendages to the market, giving shipping tables, prices, and carrying advertisements, their presentation of local and colonial news in local languages made the colony an imagined community—linked by social, political, and commercial announcements—for readers. But what gave the colony its national consciousness was not its newspapers but the knowledge among their readers that there were many newspapers, each invoking community through the ordering of a day’s or a week’s events. That some, elites, would not touch a vernacular newspaper when they could have the week’s events summarized by a metropolitan publication and others cared little for the metropolitan newspapers hardly mattered. What turned the published word into ideas about the nation-state was the very process of the refraction of world events into a “specific imagined world of vernacular readers” in which events elsewhere in the colony, the continent, or even Europe would, over time, appear to be similar to events at home. The world’s events, reported in a single vernacular newspaper, provided the imagined community of readers with a steady flow of similar events, and it was that similarity that encouraged them to imagine similar processes of nationhood across the huge continents under colonial control.^[33] This chapter, and the Baganda modernizers who inform it, argue something very different. First, that well into the 1950s, there were many consciousnesses within African colonies, not all of them formally nationalist. Second, newspapers were not read in isolation from each other; they were taken as a whole, not only by the people, who read many and had many more read to them, but by their editors and reporters, who saw in one vernacular ordering of events a way to comment on other newspapers, not only those in local languages but those approved by the colonial state and written in English. I am not arguing that newspaper readers did not share an imagined community, however, but I do want to suggest that such communities were not imagined through newspapers, but with newspapers–that print capitalism became one of the ways that people spoke, not only about political events, but about the place of newspapers in structuring a vision of what those events meant. Baganda editors and politicians clearly found the reading public to be too suspicious; they refused to believe that printed words alone could be true. According to Mulira, rumors were “a habit.…lazy thinking. You hear a rumor, you believe in it, and then it has become a habit for people, they cannot distinguish between rumor and truth.…We are so lazy, when we hear that, it satisfies our mind, and even if you tell people the truth they will not take it because it is easier to believe the rumor.…So rumors go on.” ^[34] Officials seem to have articulated this somewhat differently. When Andrew Cohen became governor of Uganda in 1952, he budgeted half a million pounds to community development—“mass education…concerned with fostering the spirit of citizenship”—and almost as much money to set up a training center where policemen, seminarians, and estate managers from the Housing Department joined chiefs and community development officers for “the citizenship course” that taught them about “water, health, postal services, wealth, Government, and education.…‘And we teach them also,’ said the Principal, ‘how to read a newspaper.’” ^[35] But if officials believed that the authority of newspapers could combat the power of the spoken word, they also believed that the silences of newspapers could stop the spread of spoken words.

Villains and Vampires

According to my informants, vampires were first noted in Uganda in the early to mid 1920s and persisted until independence. In colonial times, there were a few Africans, who often owned cars, who captured other Africans by subterfuge and drugs and held them prisoner. They either sold them or extracted their blood over a period of months to sell it to a person or government department in Entebbe, the capital. These vampires were the bazimamoto, well known long before there was a formal fire brigade in Kampala. A few informants were at great pains to distinguish whether the bazimamoto were actually the receivers of the blood or those who secured it for others. The bazimamoto, according to most, were the people who purchased the blood, not those who did the work of capture. Individual Africans were named as such in local accounts, as we shall see. “Kasolo was not bazimamoto but an agent of bazimamoto, they were different types of people.” ^[36] There was little confusion about who these people were, however, and no conflation of unscrupulous men about town with the men said to capture people. When my assistants and I mistakenly asked if these men were agents of the bazimamoto, we were corrected.^[37]

Long before his trial in 1953, Kasolo was well known in Kampala’s African suburbs. He was, according to some, a driver by profession, but most of his income came from his work for the bazimamoto. Kasolo and others like him did the work of capturing Africans and either delivered them to the bazimamoto or allowed bazimamoto to come and take blood from these victims. For older residents of Kampala, people born before 1915 or 1920, Kasolo was only known because he was “connected to these rumors.” ^[38] According to Magarita Kalule, “You would just hear of him from a distance.” ^[39] “Yes, Kasolo, they were talking about him…we used to fear him very much because he took people and sold them and he would use any opportunity,” said Julia Nakibuuka Nalongo.^[40] Long before the events described in this chapter, he was despised and fearful of popular reprisals: “When he was traveling in his car and his car had mechanical problems, he would stay in the car while it was being repaired,” said Samuel Mubiru.^[41]

Nevertheless, Kasolo was not the only Kampala man rumored to be an agent of bazimamoto. Many people, including the editor of Uganda Eyogera, which figures prominently in this chapter, remembered Mika:

He had a big house, and in one room was a big pit, and on the pit there was a mat, and on the mat there was a chair. He would take his friends and say, “You’re my special friend, and I want to show you this wonderful thing I have, go into that room and sit on the chair, I’ll be right there.” The man would go sit on the chair and fall straight into the pit, and then the bazimamoto would come and take his friend.

Several others remembered Kanyeka.^[42] Yet none of these men seem to have been arrested, let alone put on trial. Why not? No one doubted that they were personally responsible for many disappearances, but the allocation of such responsibility was not the issue in Kasolo’s trial: accusation and its power in local politics were. Kasolo was not accused and arrested because he was more heinous or more responsible than Mika, Kanyeka, or anyone else in 1950s Kampala: he was put on trial because of the conflicts between his neighbors, his accusers, and his interlocutors at that time. The newspaper accounts I cite are part of those conflicts, retold by journalists to these contentious audiences and to each other in those months of 1953. That Kasolo’s case was heard, in the matter-of-fact tone reserved for an accused “stupefier of several women” stands in ironic contrast to the political events that, just outside the courtroom doors, galvanized both Mengo, the seat of Buganda’s royal government, and the suburb of Katwe in Kampala.

Kasolo was arrested because an angry group of men and women gathered at Kibuye Police Station and demanded that the parish chief of Katwe accompany them to Kasolo’s house, where one man had seen his sister, missing for quite a long time.^[43] Going to the police for help or to resolve disputes was not common in either Katwe or Mengo in the early 1950s. The rule of law was, if anything, shady. Aiden Southall and Peter Gutkind, who did fieldwork in Kisenyi from January 1953 to March 1954, describe the fluidity with which thieves vanished into an urban landscape in which detectives, informers, and criminals were often the same people, their professional identities much more a matter of who was asking than it was a statement about one’s source of income. Blackmail, bribery, and connections to the royal family shaped the apprehension of criminals and recourse to the police. Stories of connection and corruption were commonplace. African beer brewers with relationships to the king’s household were never arrested, although hardly any brewers were arrested without informers’ help. A man caught stealing a bicycle was beaten by a crowd and offered the owner of the bicycle 100/- not to go to the police. The owner demanded 200/-, and the two finally settled on 175/-.^[44] Threats of going to court may have had more power than an actual police presence may have mustered. “You policemen are very notorious and I intend to take you to court because you came to my house and took away my wives. I intend to sue over that,” Kasolo is quoted as having said when he was arrested at his hiding place.^[45]

In the case of Kasolo, the police may have been a last recourse, when rumor and gossip failed to contain the complex bundle of emotions and ideas that Kasolo had come to represent. Kasolo’s actual arrest and trial added a degree of rationality to the irrationality of agents and vampires. As such, the trial did not resolve Kasolo’s innocence or guilt or anything else; it simply indicates the limits of gossip and rumor as a way of resolving social tensions and crisis.^[46] The citizenship of fractious Baganda gossip no longer worked. Indeed, much of the testimony at his trial debated whether or not he was married to two women—and thus raised important questions about the fluidity of urban marriage in Uganda in the 1950s and the stability of households in unstable political situations. Kasolo’s lengthy explanation of the difference between his “town marriage” and his Muslim marriage raised the issue of Kiganda specificity and loyalty and played on widespread Baganda ideas that Baganda Muslims were more backward than their Christian counterparts.^[47]

During the trial, the parish subchief was chastised by the magistrate for not having searched for more women, or indeed for Kasolo, at the time of the search. According to Uganda Eyogera:

One beautiful-looking girl was found in the house and was immediately escorted to Mengo Police Station. Kasolo at that moment could not be traced. When the police searched again, they came upon five women who had been hidden in one room and it was believed they had been forced into that room.

A lot of people turned up at Kasolo’s home, to see for themselves the women whose skin had turned pale and who were being kept in Kasolo’s sitting room then. These five women who had been accustomed to darkness for a long time found it difficult to face the light.

These women were dressed up in different kinds of clothes…the police said they were going to accuse Kasolo of the abduction of people.

Two of the women ran away almost at once, and one simply vanishes from newspaper accounts. “From that day the whole town was full of rumor saying that Kasolo was a stupefier of several women. This is the talk today.” ^[48]

These two sentences should trouble the distinction between rumor and news; the talk of the town was no less reportable than who was found in Kasolo’s sitting room. But this may not be as much a comment on the Luganda press as on our own modern distinction between published “news” and spoken “rumor”—the idea that the printed word contains a degree of credibility and reliability that widespread accusation and gossip does not. Men and women in colonial Uganda may not have subscribed to or even recognized this distinction. The distinctions between varieties of orally transmitted information that contain in the telling an evaluation of reliability might include several gradations of fact and fiction.^[49] Gossip is communication that plays on, and creates, ties of intimacy: it is not by definition either reliable or unreliable. Nevertheless, the story of Kasolo did not appear in the Uganda Herald. While it is unlikely that the raid on a Katwe house would have made the English-language press in Kampala, the sentencings of various thieves did make third- and fourth-page news there. Kasolo’s trial, however, coincided with the events leading up to the deportation of the Kabaka. Reports of these events were censored by the kingdom’s court: Paolo Kavuma, Katikiro of Buganda, asked newspaper reporters not to publish the Lukiiko’s letter rejecting federation—because the governor wanted to discuss it in England first—and only the Herald and the Uganda Post dissented.^[50] Yet what can newspaper censorship mean in a place where ties to the palace were common and constant, where Baganda gossiped and, if anything, overinterpreted that gossip, and where printed newspapers were not thought to contain truth? Newspaper censorship did not censor news; it simply made it more oral than it would otherwise have been. Indeed, the oral may have been more easily censored than the written. One man explained that he could not remember the song that criticized Buganda bureaucrats for the queen mother’s remarriage because the king had banned it.^[51] It is possible that the events of late 1953 may have increased newspaper readership, with Baganda seeking to read the silences and omissions around the royal turmoil, and some newspapers seeking increasingly popular stories with which to sell copies.

How was calling Kasolo a “stupifier” of popular interest? In Kampala bazimamoto stories, trapping Africans with drugs, in particular chloroform, was a common element. In the context of the newspaper story, “stupefier” was synonymous for a number of readers with “agent of bazimamoto.” The impact of chloroform on captives was gendered, as we have seen. Women reported being silenced by it and men claimed it made them unable to walk. When Kasolo was found hiding two months later in the house of a “free woman” near his own, police surrounded the house. According to the newspaper account, he described himself the way one of his captives might have done: “Kasolo refused to come out saying that he felt muscle pain and therefore could not walk except if he was carried by police. He was therefore carried out of the house and dragged to Mengo Police Station.” ^[52]

In the pages that follow I attempt to distinguish which parts of the Kasolo story were being told before his arrest and which parts began to be told as a result of the newspaper accounts of his arrest and trial. This will not reveal which parts of the story are part of an essentially oral, popular culture, but it will show how parts of the story were used in print media and in talk about Kasolo after his arrest. African historians have long sought a pure, uncontaminated orality that reveals an African past, with African cosmologies and African ideas. But as many of the people quoted in this book suggest, there is little point in seeking an orality that is free of the written; stories traveled between the two media, and speakers used elements from written and oral versions of a story to depict urban life, their own memories, and the colonial situation. The question is not which elements of bazimamoto stories reside in which medium but how people thoughtfully used each medium to reconstruct a past that had meaning to them.^[53] The citizenship of urban Uganda was not a passive act: Africans analyzed events by open discussion and disagreement. In recalling Kasolo’s arrest and trial, they were telling stories about authority in Buganda.

The lines between oral and written are not hard and fast, of course. Newspaper allusions to bazimamoto played off the oral genre. Thus, whether or not Kasolo could actually walk is probably not important. The way Kasolo talked about his own legs during the trial played on a number of characteristics and tropes about the victims of bazimamoto. One of the things recalled frequently in oral accounts of Kasolo was that he tied rags onto his legs to get out of one legal obligation or another. “He used to tie a rotten rag on his leg, to pretend he was mad, so he would not have to pay tax,” recalled Ahmed Kiziri.^[54] Sapiriya Kasule, who came to Kampala in 1947, when he was twenty-five, denied that Kasolo abducted people, but allowed that he could not walk. When asked if it was true that Kasolo was arrested with “some people in his house,” he replied: “But it was not like that, he was not arrested with some people as has been said, but he was involved in those riots [1949] and was beaten terribly and only escaped with his legs fractured.” ^[55] Given the intensity of violence in Katwe and Mengo during the disturbances—the editor of Matalisi, for example, was beaten outside his office—this seems likely.^[56]

And Kasolo played on these tropes, or at least the newspaper reporters did. When he was arraigned, he said: “I am Juma Kasolo…I am jobless and have been so ever since.…My legs have become paralysed.” He asked not to have to stand trial because he was so ill and was sent for a medical examination. “When Kasolo reached Mulago almost all the patients and indeed the entire population on Mulago Hill gathered around him to see who Kasolo was.” The doctor examined him and found him fit enough to stand trial.^[57] Ten days later,

Kasolo, in a cruel voice, complained that the judge was not listening to him. It was very sad to see that since he had been taken to prison he had not been given any food. He asked how the court expected him to answer his charges when he was so hungry.…In fact he asked the judge how he would feel if had not taken food for two days and whether the judge would have been able to listen to this case in such a condition.^[58]

The stories and complaints men and women tell in a courtroom are not always those most advantageous to their cases. The images and “facts” and narratives with which defendants tell their stories may have multiple audiences, in and out of the courtroom—and when writing from newspaper accounts of courtroom testimony, this is almost always the case—rather than merely the judge and jury.^[59]

The newspaper account of Kasolo’s trial had a profound impact. In some of the oral accounts quoted below, people talked about what was in the newspaper. But does this mean that people took newspaper accounts more seriously than they did neighborhood gossip? Many African historians have worried that written texts simply drive oral versions of events out of existence. According to these scholars, writing deforms earlier understandings of the past and submerges the pure material of oral transmission.^[60] In the early 1970s, David Henige went so far as to coin the term “feedback” to show that Africans took written accounts of the past and often incorporated them into oral versions, making them less than reliable. Worse, Africans sometimes took concepts from the world of writing and relocated oral historical information in those frameworks.^[61] Such concerns tended to make Africans’ oral traditions impersonal and apolitical: written versions of the past were used, of course, but because they were useful in an argument, or an interview. The reasons to show one’s knowledge of written materials were varied; they sometimes had to do with presenting one’s sophistication rather than one’s history.^[62] Anxieties about feedback ignored one important point—in orality, like electronic music, feedback was manipulated for a specific impact. Indeed, in Kampala, it would seem that knowing what was in a newspaper demonstrated something, whether or not one had actually read the paper or not. George Ggingo, for example, who was thirteen at the time of Kasolo’s trial, said:

We read in the newspaper that somebody was caught when he was keeping people illegally…so the man was taken to court and his victims were six girls, in the range of ten to twenty-five years.…when it was brought out in court…they wanted to know where those people came from. So the man was prosecuted and was sentenced to serve six months.^[63]

What was the oral version of Kasolo’s story? Joseph Nsubuga, born in 1915, spoke with motifs and images that were common to many urban East African vampire stories but with ideas about drugs and consciousness specific to Kampala versions. His description may disclose some of the elements of the story that were specifically oral:

Kasolo had some victims who managed to escape from his house, whom he had captured, then the people could prove that he was selling people.…he was well known, and those who had been there said that he had dug some pits in his house, and he used to cover them with mats, and when you were trying to sit down you would find yourself in the pit, and I think he used some of their drugs, like caliform, as he was keeping them in one room, I think he gave them some drugs to sniff. And they could not get out, but only be unconsciously moving there.^[64]

Bibiana Nalwanga, a woman in her sixties, said it simply: “Kasolo was found with victims in his house and he was asked, what are these?” ^[65] Yonasani Kaggwa, an artisan, began working in Kampala in 1938, when he was twenty. The version he told my assistant and me took the newspaper account and elaborated on it:

One day the government of Mengo investigated and they found he had some people unconscious in his house, they had their blood sucked from them. Ask anyone, they will tell you this story, ask anyone in Katwe…they know this story very well because that person was selling blood…Kasolo was arrested with those women, who were his victims…and definitely Kasolo was in the business of selling people to the bazimamoto, and he was found red-handed with some people in his house, they were unconscious, or he would give them some body-building food, so they would recover, because he had already sucked blood from them.^[66]

These accounts suggest that scholars need not fret about feedback from written to oral texts: rather than worrying about “adulteration” from written sources, I would argue that oral and written texts coexist. They coexist in part because they are inseparable, and in part because what is said and what is published are precisely how people construct and construe their public culture. A generation of African historians, not unlike late colonial modernizers, imagined that the written word had the natural authority to dominate oral accounts, but they were wrong. Storytellers and newspaper readers in Kampala might each retell the Kasolo story using aspects of the oral and written versions; they elaborate on written material with oral and on the oral with the written, but one kind of source does not overwhelm the other. Indeed, in 1990, my assistants and I heard an account of Kasolo from Katwe that did not mention the trial at all. Isaak Bulega, who had been about thirty years old in 1953 said, “Kasolo had a pit in his house, and when you relieved yourself near his house, Kasolo would call you and say, ‘Why are you doing such a thing here?’ Then Kasolo would take you inside his house, and ask you to sit on a mat, which was a trap, and then you would fall into the pit.” ^[67]

Neighbors in Katwe, born in about 1918, did not necessarily have more knowledge than newspaper readers, or at least did not speak with greater specificity than those who did not live near Kasolo. Peter Kirigwa said Kasolo was “a driver…he was looking for money and he was profiting.” ^[68] Another, Adolf Namatura, said:

Not only did I hear about him, I saw him…Kasolo, he was sucking blood.…He would capture people and take them to places where they would get their blood sucked, and that was his work. We didn’t know he was taking them, but he was capturing them, and I saw them. When Mutesa II reigned, he was taken to Mengo and the town clerk’s office for having been found with six people in his house, and he was arrested.…I saw him with my own eyes.^[69]

Katwe residents who were born in the early 1930s knew the story as well. But two younger men, born in 1931 and 1932 respectively, did not know much about Kasolo, except “people used to fear him very much…he was pretending to be a sick person, that he could not do anything…because he didn’t want to pay the graduated tax.” ^[70] Ssekajje Kasirye, born in 1934, who commuted daily in 1953 between his home in Entebbe and his job in Katwe, was skeptical about the rumors:

He was an intelligent fellow indeed, who was dealing in buying…and selling old spare parts…but there was a rumor that he used to sell people but whenever we went to buy things we never saw anybody sold, but he would just brag that people said I am selling people, but no one was missing, so it was just empty talk. [When Kasolo was arrested] I wasn’t old enough so I didn’t understand it.…I was working in Katwe here, and during that time that newspaper [Uganda Eyogera] existed, and I was old enough to read it, but I didn’t understand it.^[71]

Not resident in Katwe, it is possible that this man missed the local idioms of drugs, and pits, and legs—idioms so well known that no one in Katwe believed they had to elaborate on them. Or it may be, as the man himself suggests, that he was too young to understand the references as older residents might have done. Ahmed Kiziri, who was born in 1935 and lived in Katwe throughout the 1950s, did understand, however: “I have seen one of their victims.…she was one of the five women, she was still alive when they were found at Kasolo’s house but they were looking like stupid people, and that man, Kasolo, he was the one who did it!” ^[72]

Drawing on ideas about the sale of bodies that coincided with the completion of New Mulago Hospital in 1962 and ideas about the cottage industry of transporting corpses to rural areas for customary burial,^[73] younger residents of Katwe, such as Daniel Sekiraata, who was born in 1940, revised the story of Kasolo’s deeds and arrest:

He was taking some dead bodies to Zaire, which was called Congo then. Once he was caught with some dead bodies, and they were four dead bodies, and he used to dress them very like a live person! And he could put them in his car and he was pretending they were people on safari, and he gave them some newspapers to read and he did this several times, but I don’t know what he was doing with them or what he got for transporting them.^[74]

Beatrice Mukasa, about the same age as Sekiraata, but a more recent immigrant to Katwe, had only heard that Kasolo “used to capture people and drop them in a certain pit.” ^[75] But Gregory Sseluwagi, also born around 1940, who lived outside Kampala had heard about Kasolo in very different ways:

Kasolo, Kasolo,…when they had sent some children for something, and sometimes we would understand through those who had survived capture. This would happen especially when you had paid a visit to one of the well-known bazimamoto, because they had some pits in their houses and therefore somebody who had survived capture could tell you the story. They could tell you to be careful, and you were warned not to walk at night, and to take care by Kasolo’s homestead and others who were doing the same work.^[76]

Stories and Strategies

The case of Kasolo—as it was reported in the newspaper and as it was recalled—reveals how the formulaic elements—legs, cars, pits, food, and stupefying drugs—constitute the local construction of a genre that straddled and continues to straddle oral and written sources. And why not? The story of Kasolo was “the talk of the town” and unlike the talk of the king and the governor, it was uncensored by both officials and notions of hierarchy and propriety. Indeed, it was headline news when royal politics were not. Were royal politics simply absent from the trial, which in fact described Kasolo’s legs and food and silent women to make vivid the world of bazimamoto never mentioned in the press? If victims believed they had been fed “body-building food” to make them produce more blood, can we read Kasolo’s complaint that his jailers failed to feed him as the abductor’s story? And did ordinary readers of Uganda Eyogera read this complaint and think of the food fed the victims in Kasolo’s house?

Such an interpretation explains this chapter but not the trial. The trial may in fact require a more local reading—an understanding of the lower ranks of kingdom politics at a moment of intense crisis. It may be a story about royal politics told with vampire beliefs. Without such local knowledge—and without a knowledge of what appeared and did not appear in other Luganda newspapers—I can only point to directions future researchers, better prepared for such tasks than I am, might wish to use vernacular newspapers to pursue. There is no question that bureaucratic politics in Buganda had been ferocious for some time. The populist and anti-Mutesa II lobby seems to have had many supporters after the reforms of 1949. Factions in and around Mengo must have listened carefully—attentive as always for the hidden meanings—to the news that seeped out of the king’s meetings with the governor to see how they might fare in an independent Buganda or a fully colonized one. It is possible that at any other time, a policeman would have been less willing to respond to a Katwe crowd and search Kasolo’s house. But much of the vehemence and the rage in the trial was between officials. At Kasolo’s trial, Stanley Kisitu, parish chief of Katwe, was attacked by the judge for not having searched for Kasolo in his house.

judge:

Since you were told that Kasolo was not there, did you search his bedroom to see if he was there?

kisitu:

No, I stopped in the sitting room and after the search, I collected all the women who had been found in Kasolo’s house. . . .

judge:

From the evidence you have been giving this court, it seems like you have been telling lies. A person of your nature is usually put before the law. Therefore I request the court prosecutor to open a case against you. Indeed, it would be impossible for a parish chief who was sent with a search warrant for searching a home to come back and say it was impossible. This is a real lie.^[77]

It is quite possible to read this exchange and imagine that the purpose of the arrest and trial was, in some ways, to get rid of Kisitu rather than Kasolo. His role in the arrest was in fact unclear. By his own account “In September…I was invited by Sergeant Sebirumbi to go to the Kibuye Police Station. On my arrival Sebirumbi blew a whistle and some policemen turned up. These policemen together with their leader were ordered to go to Kasolo’s house in my presence. The group included women and men who were not from the police.” ^[78] It seems altogether possible, even without knowing the specific fissures and personalities of Buganda bureaucratic politics in Kampala’s suburbs in the early 1950s, that one of the reasons Kasolo’s case came to trial had to do with the politics around Kisitu. Just as the angry crowed attempted to control Kasolo in ways that gossip no longer could, the judge and some police sought to control Kisitu in ways that gossip no longer could, and in ways that might facilitate a few of the many possible futures suggested by the crisis censored in the nation’s newspapers.

Conclusions

Vampire stories do double duty in this chapter. Ordinary everyday talk about bazimamoto and its agents was a way for men and women in colonial Kampala to talk about egregious accumulation, the trials of urban marriage, Islam, political violence, and their own difficulties with being loyal subjects of their king, the Kabaka. Talk about Kasolo the bazimamoto’s agent engaged with questions of consciousness, chloroform, inhaled drugs, and paralysis that were commonly used to talk about Western biomedicine with vampire stories. But newspaper accounts that alluded to vampire stories, with their detailed descriptions of trials of “well-known stupefiers,” provided a forum through which vampires stories were used to comment on the royal politics silenced in the English-language press, while the courts and the press used vampire accusations as a way to discipline local royal officials.

Notes