1. I take this point from a somewhat different study of Catholicism in Central Africa, Terence O. Ranger, “Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe,” Past and Present 117 (1987): 159–90.

2. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 269–76.

3. Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 82, 86; John Higginson, A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise, and the African Mineworker, 1907–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 80.

4. Headrick, Tentacles of Progress, 270; Charles Perrings, Black Mineworkers in Central Africa: Industrial Strategies and the Evolution of the African Proletariat in the Copperbelt, 1911–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1979), 47; James Ferguson, “Mobile Workers, Modernist Narratives: A Critique of the Historiography of Transition on the Zambian Copperbelt [Part One],” J. Southern Afr. Studies 16, 3 (September 1990): 395; Arthur Copman Papers, National Archives of Zambia (henceforth cited as NAZ), HM6/CO3/4/2.

5. E. H. Jalland, provincial commissioner, Abercorn, comments on tour report 3/1936; R. L. Parr, district officer, Abercorn, tour report 4/1936; A. F. B. Glennie, district commissioner, Abercorn, tour report 1/1937 (NAZ, SEC2/819, Tour Reports: Abercorn, 1932–36).

6. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rapports annuels, no. 25 (Algiers: Maison-Carrée, 1929–30), 206, quoting the monsignor of Chilubula Mission. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 22 February 1929, 18 April 1931; and for sisal plantations in Tanganyika, Diaire de Kayambi, 13 June 1922.

7. Ferguson, “Mobile Workers,” 397.

8. Audrey I. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An Economic Study of the Bemba Tribe (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), 23. Men often tried to shirk their marital obligations, saying they were “resting after their work in the mines” or “about to take other jobs ‘soon,’” thus placing a heavy strain on the resources of the matrifocal group (172). Thus migrant labor and participation therein was a social strategy both for household accumulation and household domestic struggles. See also Henrietta L. Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994), 47–49.

9. Ferguson, “Mobile Workers,” 402–3; see also A. L. Epstein, Politics in an Urban African Community (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 5–15.

10. Lewis H. Gann, A History of Northern Rhodesia: Early Days to 1953 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 254, quoted in Ferguson, “Mobile Workers,” 398. This was the description of wage labor that officials seemed to like most: “[T]hose who go further afield are for the most part…those whom the ‘glitter’ of life in the large industrial areas attracts, and those who have tasted the luxuries of life…and have developed a taste for such things” (E. Bolton, district commissioner, Mpika, tour report 2/1938, NAZ, SEC2/836, Mpika Tour Reports, 1933–38).

11. Michael Burawoy, The Colour of Class on the Copper Mines: From African Advancement to Zambianization (Lusaka: Institute for African Studies, 1972), 13.

12. Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 52–54, 75–79; Eustace Njbovu, Luangwa, Zambia, 22 July 1990.

13. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, 304. This may have been because mound gardens were “considered unglamorous and hard work”; see Moore and Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees, 41, and Jane I. Guyer, “Female Farming in Anthropology and African History,” in Micaela di Leonardo, Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 257–77.

14. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 14 July 1927; Diaire de Kapatu, 31 March 19

15. Moore and Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees, 46–60, 104–12.

16. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, 176; for an unpacking of this statement, see Moore and Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees, 50–60.

17. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 18 June 1924, 6 September 1926; Diaire de Kapatu, 9 June 1925; Diaire de Ipusukilo, 14 January 1928, 30 April 1935; Diaire de St. Mary’s, 7 March 1938; Diaire de Mulilansolo, 11 May 1942; see also Karen Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 3–13, 129–34.

18. D. Willis, provincial commissioner, Kasama District, “Report on Banyama,” 24 March 1931 (NAZ, ZA1/9/62/2/1); see also Gann, History of Northern Rhodesia, 1964, 321; Mwelwa C. Musambachime, “The Impact of Rumor: The Case of the Banyama (Vampire-Men) in Northern Rhodesia, 1930–1964,” Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies 21, 2 (1988): 205–9. Willis had the confidence of the White Fathers more than any official who came after him, and he and his French wife were regular visitors at Chilubula; see Diaire de Chilubula, passim.

19. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 18 March 1932.

20. In many vampire accusations, the technologies of Western biomedicine, especially injections and bandages, were used to subdue victims. See K. D. Leaver, “The ‘Transformation of Men to Meat’ Story,” Native Affairs Department Information Sheet No. 20 (Salisbury, November 1960 [National Archives of Zimbabwe, No. 36413]); George Shepperson, Myth and Reality in Malawi (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 7–8; W. V. Brelsford, “The ‘Banyama’ Myth,” NADA 9, 4 (1967): 54–55; Rik Ceyssens, “Mutumbula: Mythe de l’opprimé,” Cultures et développement 7 (1975): 483–536; Musambachime, “Impact of Rumor,” 207; and esp. chapter 3 above.

21. Gervas Clay, Taunton, Somerset, England, 26 August 1991.

22. Musambachime, “Impact of Rumor,” 208, 211.

23. Mwelwa C. Musambachime, personal communication, 29 January 1992; Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 131–34.

24. V. W. Brelsford, tour report 1, 1939 (NAZ, SEC2/751: Chinsali District Tour Reports, 1939–40).

25. Brelsford, “‘Banyama’ Myth,” 54–55. The mission at Kasenga had been Benedictine—like Dom Grégoire—in the 1940s, but by the time Brelsford wrote his article, the mission had been taken over by the Salesians. The reinscription of both Dom Grégoire and several local missions as White Fathers probably reflects their reputation in Northern Rhodesia. Ian Cunnison, personal communication, 4 February 1992.

26. Brelsford, “‘Banyama’ Myth,” 54–55.

27. Ian Cunnison, field notes from Luapula, March 1949.

28. Brelsford, “‘Banyama’ Myth,” 49–60.

29. Leaver, “‘Men to Meat.’”

30. Andrew Roberts, A History of the Bemba: Political Growth and Change in North-eastern Zambia before 1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 259–69; Brian Garvey, “The Development of the White Fathers’ Mission among the Bemba-Speaking Peoples, 1891–1964” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1974), 149–53; Michael O’Shea, Missionaries and Miners: A History of the Beginnings of the Catholic Church in Zambia with Particular Reference to the Copperbelt (Ndola: Mission Press, 1984), 20–25.

31. Garvey, “Development of the White Fathers’ Mission,” 153; Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 129–34; Arie N. Ipenburg, Lubwa: The Presbyterian Mission and the Eastern Bemba (Lusaka: Teresianum Press, 1984), 26–28.

32. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rapports annuels, no. 19 (1923–24), 189, 206; “Development of the White Fathers’ Mission,” 149ff.

33. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Ilondola, 15 January 1934; Diaire de Kapatu, 7, 12, 18 January 1938; Diaire de Chilubula, 8 June 1931; Hugo H. Hinfelaar, “Religious Change among Bemba-Speaking Women in Zambia” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1989), 111–12.

34. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chifobwe-Ipusukilo, 11 December 1926.

35. P. W. M. Jelf, district officer, Tour Report, Fort Roseberry, June–July 1932 (NAZ, SEC2/888). Mee was with Thom Stores, a manager of which figured in vampire accusations in Northern Province in the mid 1940s. Geoffrey Howe, provincial commissioner, Northern Province to chief secretary, Lusaka, 29 January 1944 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama); Hugh Macmillan, personal communication, 21 August 1991.

36. J. Moffatt Thomas, secretary for native affairs, 18 August 1932, Tour Reports, Fort Roseberry, June–July 1932 (NAZ, SEC2/888).

37. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chifobwe-Ipusukilo, 9 August 1932.

38. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 27 December 1931.

39. Ibid., 22 February 1936.

40. Ibid., 27 July 1937, 15 May 1939.

41. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Kapatu, 31 March 1933.

42. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Ilondola, 27 April 1948.

43. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Cibofwe-Ipusukilo, 15–19 April 1931.

44. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 23 February 1927; 14 July 1927; 22 July 1927; 1 May 1928; 16 November 1933; Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, 145. “Only an absolutely destitute person or an imbecile would reckon to subsist in this way as a regular thing,” Richards writes, but she notes that ukupula had become very common in the early 1930s as one of the survival strategies available to “deserted wives…during the bad times of the year,” and a footnote on the same page clarifies the use of the term: “ Ukupula is loosely applied to all forms of scrounging, but technically speaking means labour in return for food only” (Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, 145 and n). The White Fathers’ Bemba-English Dictionary broadly accepts this translation, defining kapula as meaning a person who earns a living helping others (Cape Town: Longmans, Green for Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland Joint Publications Bureau, 1954), 246.

45. Garvey, “Development of the White Fathers’ Mission,” 155, 157–58. This comparison might have been lost on Africans themselves, since in 1934 there were not many jobs on the Copperbelt; see Moore and Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees, 48–49, 168–70.

46. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Mulilansolo, 21 June 1940.

47. Ibid., 24 December 1943.

48. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de St. Mary’s, Fort Jameson, 7 March 1938.

49. Ibid., 2 January 1940.

50. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rapports annuels, no. 39 (1948–49), 39, 212–13.

51. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de St. Mary’s, Fort Jameson, 25 February 1958, 28 April 1958.

52. Hayden White, “Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 86–87, and “Interpretation in History,” in ibid., esp. 51–58; see also Peter Lienhardt, “The Interpretation of Rumour,” in J. H. Beattie and R. G. Lienhardt, eds., Studies in Social Anthropology: Essays in Memory of E. E. Evans-Pritchard by his Former Oxford Colleagues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 105–31.

53. See Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). For all my criticisms of Ginzburg’s use of clues in chapter 2, I am indebted to him on this point and, indeed, in much of this chapter.

54. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Kapatu (Saint-Leon de Kaliminwa), 29 March 1929.

55. Thomas Fox-Pitt, “Cannibalism and Christianity” (1953), Thomas Fox-Pitt Papers, School of Oriental and African Studies, London MS 6/5, Correspondence, 1952–53. Fox-Pitt came to Northern Rhodesia in 1923 and served as a district officer first in Ndola on the Copperbelt, then at Mpika, and, after World War II, in Kitwe. There he encouraged the emerging trade union movement and taught English two evenings a week in an African night school. He was quickly transferred, first to Barotseland in 1948 and then to Fort Jameson in Eastern Province in 1949, but again championed the cause of African labor. In 1951, he was put on the retired list, and he returned to England in 1952, where he became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society and was closely involved with the nationalist movements of Central Africa. In 1960, he began working for the London Committee of Kenneth Kaunda's United National Independence Party. He returned to Zambia at independence and was awarded the Order of Freedom medal; for the next two years, he served in Zambia's Ministry of Local Government. He retired to England in the late 1960s and died in 1989. Colonel Bray in Nadine Gordimer's novel The Guest of Honor is loosely modeled on Fox-Pitt.

56. Brelsford, “‘Banyama’ Myth,” 49; D. Willis, provincial commissioner, Kasama District, 24 March 1931 (NAZ, ZA1/9/62/2/1); Musambachime, “Impact of Rumor,” 205–7; Wim M. J. van Binsbergen, Religious Change in Zambia (London: Kegan Paul, 1981), 349n.

57. Gervas Clay, district commissioner, Isoka, “Memorandum Concerning ‘banyama’ and ‘mafyeka’ with Special Reference to the Provincial Commissioner, Kasama’s Confidential File on Banyama and to Incidents in the Isoka District during the Latter Part of 1943” (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama, 24 January 1944); R. S. Jeffries to secretary for native affairs, 24 April 1944; LegCo Debates, Hansard, 31 August 1945, cols. 221–22, 248–49, 254–55, in NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama. These ideas were based on genuine customs of human sacrifice—to honor departed royalty, not to feed commoners—and a 1920s Bemba bogeyman, Ne Koroma, and some well-placed anti-royalist feeling among educated Bemba; see Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rapports annuels, no. 24 (1924–25), 293–94; Stephen Bwalya, “Customs and Habits of the Bemba” (typescript, Mpika, 1936, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS Afr. s. 1214); and Clay’s memorandum cited above.

58. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century,” Women’s Studies 11 (1984): 179–214.

59. Gillian Feeley-Harnik, The Lord’s Table: Eucharist and Passover in Early Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 66–67.

60. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, 456.

61. There is a literature that suggests that “the person of Jesus Christ” is difficult for Africans to incorporate in their belief systems, partly because of his association with a colonial past, and partly because his power is both divine and ancestral; see Mathew Schoffeleers, “Folk Christology in Africa: The Dialectics of the Nganga Paradigm,” Journal of Religion in Africa 19, 2 (1988): 157–83.

62. Where transubstantiation was taken seriously, blood accusations frequently involved the host. European accusations of Jewish ritual murder often included the theft of the host, which was said to turn into a bleeding baby Jesus once outside a church; see R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 10–12, 50–51, 54–56, 128, 131, 222. Other accusations of ritual murder in Christian times conflated blood and bread: early Christians in Rome were accused of hiding the infants they were about to eat in dough, and a thousand years later, it was said that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to make matzoh; see Bill Ellis, “De Legendis Urbis: Modern Legends in Ancient Rome,” J. of American Folklore 96, 380 (1983): 200–208, and Alan Dundes, “The Ritual Murder or Blood Libel Legend: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective Inversion,” in id., ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 337.

63. “Note pour Monsieur Toussaint, Département MOI, Elisabethville, 15 février 1943,” Archives du personnel, Gécamines, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, loaned me by T. K. Biaya.

64. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 31–112.

65. See Moore and Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees, 33–50.

66. Thomas Fox-Pitt, district commissioner, Mpika, to provincial commissioner, Northern Province, Kasama, 6 March 1939, “Re: Banyama Rumors” (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama).

67. For diverse examples, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” Renaissance Quarterly 39, 3 (1986): 399–439; Paul Farmer, “Bad Blood, Spoiled Milk: Bodily Fluids as Moral Barometers in Rural Haiti,” American Ethnologist 15, 1 (1988): 62–83; and Caroline H. Bledsoe, “Side-Stepping the Postpartum Sex Taboo: Mende Cultural Perceptions of Tinned Milk in Sierra Leone” (MS).

68. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, 69.

69. Audrey I. Richards, “A Modern Movement of Witchfinders.” Africa 8, 4 (1935): 449. Indeed, children could not suckle from women who had not gone through initiation (Audrey Richards Diaries, 6 March 1931, Audrey Richards Papers, London School of Economics Library, London).

70. Geoffrey Howe, provincial commissioner, Northern Province, Kasama, to chief secretary, Lusaka, 29 January 1944; Cantrel-Robinson, chief secretary, LegCo Debates 31 August 1945, Hansard, cols. 221–22 (NAZ, SEC2/429 Native Affairs: Banyama); Gervas Clay, interview with the author, Taunton, Somerset, England, 26 August 1991.

71. A. L. Epstein, “Unconscious Factors in the Response to Social Crisis: A Case Study from Central Africa,” Psychoanalytic Study of Society 8 (1979): 3–39; see also Alphonse Gintzburger, “Accommodation to Poverty: The Case of Malagasy Peasant Communities,” Cahiers d’ÉEtudes africaines 92, 23–4 (1983): 419–42. Locating active, “irrational” beliefs in hunger or tainted food supplies is not unique to African studies, however; see Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, trans. Joan White (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), and Mary Kilbourne Matossian, Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics, and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

72. See Joan Copjec, “Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety,” October 58 (1991): 25–43.

73. A. L. Epstein, “Response to Social Crisis: Aspects of Oral Aggression in Central Africa,” in Scenes from African Urban Life: Collected Copperbelt Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 158–207.

74. Hinfelaar, “Religious Change,” 90.

75. Musambachime, “Impact of Rumour,” 208; see also Epstein, “Response to Social Crisis,” 167–69.

76. Fox-Pitt, “Cannibalism and Christianity” (cited n. 55 above). A government-owned newspaper sold to Africans described mupila as “white balls of drugs” used by Africans to capture Africans by paralyzing them, causing them to lose their memories, and making their clothes fall off; see P. K. Kanosa, “Banyama— Copper Belt Myth Terrifies the Foolish,” Mutende [Lusaka] 38 (1936) (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama).

77. Brelsford, “‘Banyama’ Myth,” 49.

78. Hinfelaar, “Religious Change,” 8.

79. Audrey I. Richards, “Mother-Right among the Central Bantu,” in E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ed., Essays Presented to C. G. Seligman (1934; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970). 276; Hinfelaar, “Religious Change,” 322.

80. Audrey I. Richards, Chisungu: A Girl’s Initiation Ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), 34; Hinfelaar, “Religious Change,” 32.

81. Luc de Heusch, The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State, trans. Roy Willis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 168–70; Victor Turner, “Color Classification in Ndembu Ritual: A Problem of Primitive Classification,” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Rituals (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 59–92.

88. Turner, “Color Classification in Ndembu Ritual,” 59–92; Richards, Chisungu, 81.

89. NAZ, SEC2/1297, Northern Province Annual Report, Native Affairs, 1937.

82. In much of British colonial Africa, including Northern Rhodesia, Africans were forbidden to consume “European-type” bottled beers and wine; see Charles Ambler, “Alcohol, Racial Segregation and Popular Politics in Northern Rhodesia,” J. African History 31, 2 (1990): 295–313, and Michael O. West, “‘Equal Rights for All Civilized Men’: Elite Africans and the Quest for ‘European’ Liquor in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1924–1961,” Int. Rev. of Social History 37, 3 (1992): 376–97.

83. Feeley-Harnik, The Lord’s Table, 155–56.

84. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, 77–81; Ambler, “Alcohol,” 295–305; West, “‘Equal Rights.’”

85. Richards, “Modern Movement of Witchfinders,” 449; Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 29 June 1934; Diaire de Kayambi, 5 June 1934.

86. E. E. Hutchins, district officer, Morogoro, “Report on ‘Mumiani’ or ‘Chinjachinja,’” (Tanzania National Archives, film no. MF 15, Morogoro District, vol. 1, part A, sheets 25–26, August 1931, but inserted into file marked 1938). Hutchins believed that European surveyors drinking bottled red wine were one reason the rumor spread through Morogoro. I am grateful to Thaddeus Sunseri for taking notes on this file for me.

87. Hope Trant, Not Merrion Square: Anecdotes of a Woman’s Medical Career in Africa (Toronto: Thornhill Press, 1970), 127–44. I am grateful to Megan Vaughan for this reference.

90. Ipenburg, Lubwa, 5–7; Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 114–23, 163–74, 179–85.

91. Sean Morrow, “‘On the Side of the Robbed’: R. J. B. Moore, Missionary on the Copperbelt, 1933–1941,” J. of Religion in Africa 19, 3 (1989): 249–50.

92. The Golden Age, quoted in Henry S. Meebelo, Reaction to Colonialism: A Prelude to the Politics of Independence in Northern Zambia, 1893–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), 175; Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rapports annuels, no. 30 (1934–35), 328; ibid., no. 39 (1938–39), 257; Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Kapatu, 12 June 1940, 7 October 1940.

93. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet, 220.

94. Ibid., 153.

95. Ibid., 218–20.

96. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Kayambi, 23 January 1927.

97. Olivia Harris, “The Earth and the State: The Sources and the Meanings of Money in North Potosi, Bolivia,” in J. Parry and M. Bloch, eds., Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 233–34; Keith Breckenridge, “‘Money with Dignity’: Migrants, Minelords, and the Cultural Politics of the South African Gold Standard Crisis, 1920–33,” J. African History 36 (1995): 271–304.

98. See Keith Hart, “Heads or Tails? Two Sides of the Coin,” Man, n.s., 21 (1986): 367–86.

99. H. A. Watmore, Tour Report 3/1932 (NAZ, SEC2/835, Tour Reports, Mpika, 1931–33); Breckenridge, “‘Money with Dignity.’”

100. J. W. Sharratt-Horne, district commissioner, tour report, 6/1932 (NAZ, SEC2/767, Isoka Tour Reports, 1932–33). White ants do eat paper money; see Sharon Hutchinson, “The Cattle of Money and the Cattle of Girls among the Nuer, 1930–83,” American Ethnologist, 19, 2 (1992): 294–316.

101. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 10, 14, and 24 February 1932.

102. Musambachime, “Impact of Rumour,” 204; Annual Report on Native Affairs, Chinsali, 1935 (NAZ, SEC2/1298, Annual Report on Native Affairs, Chinsali, 1935–37).

103. Stephen Gudeman, Economics as Culture (London: Routledge, 1986), 100–101.

104. I have taken the chronology of banyama scares from Clay, “Memorandum” (cited n. 57 above).

105. Most of the Europeans accused of being banyama are not mentioned in the written record. The most notorious one was Arthur Davison, a labor recruiter based at Ndola. Musambachime, “Impact of Rumor,” 206; S. R. Denny, “Up and Down the Great North Road” (typescript, 1970, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS Afr. r. 113).

106. Geoffrey Howe, provincial commissioner, Northern Province, Kasama, to chief secretary, Lusaka, 29 January 1944 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama).

107. Clay, “Memorandum” (cited n. 57 above); John Barnes, Fort Jameson, to J. Clyde Mitchell, 10 October 1948, J. Clyde Mitchell Papers, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS Afr. s. 1998/4/1; John V. Taylor amd Dorothea A. Lehmann, Christians of the Copperbelt: The Growth of the Church in Northern Rhodesia (London: SCM Press, 1961), 114–16; Jane L. Parpart, “Sexuality and Power on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1926–54,” in Norman R. Bennett, ed., Discovering the African Past: Essays in Honor of Daniel F. McCall (Boston: African Studies Center, Boston University, 1987), 57–64. I am grateful to Megan Vaughan for suggesting this line of inquiry to me.

108. Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, Rome, Diaire de Chilubula, 10 February 1932, 24 June 1932.

109. Bishop of Northern Rhodesia, member for native interests, LegCo Debates, 31 August 1945, Hansard, cols. 221–22 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama).

110. G. Howe, provincial commissioner, Northern Province, to chief secretary, Lusaka, 29 January 1944; A. T. Williams, for provincial commissioner, Northern Province, Kasama, to registrar of High Court, Livingstone, confidential, 30 April 1944 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama).

111. Denny, “Up and Down the Great North Road”; Dick Hobson, Showtime: The Agricultural and Commercial Society of Zambia (Lusaka: Agricultural and Commercial Society of Zambia, 1979), 42; Richard Hobson, personal communication, 7 July 1991.

112. Geoffrey Mee, son of L. G. Mee, manager of Thom Stores in Fort Roseberry, 1940–54,, interviewed by Hugh Macmillan, Lusaka, 10 August 1991.

113. Rat tails themselves were a medical metaphor even in such unsophisticated hands as Glieman’s: anti-rat and anti-plague campaigns in East and Central Africa rewarded Africans who brought rat tails to their chiefs, but most of the rat hunting in Central Africa was done by young boys or, less commonly, women; see Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 40–43.

114. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods: Cattle and Commodities in a South African Context,” American Ethnologist 17, 2 (1990): 209.

115. Hutchinson, “Cattle of Money,” 302–3.

116. V. Y. Mudimbe, personal communication, 10 January 1992; “Banyama—Copper Belt Myth Terrifies the Foolish” (cited n. 76 above); “Five Years for African Who Threatened to Kill Broadcasters,” Central African Post [Lusaka], 27 January 1953, 1; W. V. Brelsford, Generations of Men: The European Pioneers of Northern Rhodesia (Salisbury: Stuart, Manning for the Northern Rhodesia Society, 1966), 140–41; Musambachime, “Impact of Rumor,” 206–7. Similarly, according to Anthony Oliver-Smith, “The Pishtaco: Institutionalized Fear in the Peruvian Highlands,” J. American Folklore 82, 326 (1969): 363–68. Peruvian mestizos reported “with much hilarity” that they would kill a pig or a dog and leave its entrails beside blood-drenched clothing to convince Indians that the fat-extracting phantom mestizo of the Highlands was nearby and would punish them for not working harder.

117. See, e.g., Patricia A. Turner, “Church’s Fried Chicken and the Klan: A Rhetorical Analysis of Rumor in the Black Community,” Western Folklore 46, 4 (1987): 294–306; Gary Alan Fine, Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legends (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Jean-Noël Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations, and Images (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 50–51.

118. District officer, Abercorn, 16 June 1934, quoted in Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 87.