Notes
1. Elspeth Huxley Papers, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS Afr. s. 782, box 2/2, Kenya (1). From the level of detail in the letter both about this and issues in colonial policy and his references to Huxley’s visit with him in 1947, my guess is that the writer was George Brown, then acting provincial commissioner of Coast Province. Other accounts of this riot are “‘Human Vampire’ Story Incites Mombasa Mob’s Fire Station Attack,” East African Standard, 27 June 1947, 3; Elspeth Huxley, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: A Journey through East Africa (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 23n.; Kenya Colony and Protectorate, Report on Native Affairs, 1939–47 (London: HMSO, 1948), 83.
2. H. K. Wachanga, The Swords of Kirinyaga: The Fight for Land and Freedom (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1975), 9.
3. Anyango Mahondo, Sigoma, west Alego, 15 August 1986. All interviews cited for 1986 were conducted by myself and Odhiambo Opiyo.
4. Charles L. Briggs and Richard Bauman, “Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, 2 (December 1992): 131–72.
5. See Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 41–44.
6. Ibid., 1–33. See also Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
7. David William Cohen, “The Undefining of Oral Tradition,” Ethnohistory 36, 1 (1989): 9–18; Karin Barber, I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women, and the Past in a Yoruba Town (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Past: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Isabel Hofmeyr, “We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told”: Oral Historical Narratives in a South African Chiefdom (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994), and “‘Wailing for Purity’: Oral Studies in Southern African Studies,” African Studies 52, 4 (1995): 16–31.
8. David Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 22–43, argues that Count Dracula was created by the Irish Protestant Bram Stoker to show how the terrible, superstitious trappings of European Catholicism—represented in the novel by decaying castles, crosses, and terrified peasants—had harmed Irish Celts, and that Dracula can be read as a statement about the urgency of home rule for Ireland. For other commentaries that make the endangered culture the imperial power itself, see John Allen Stevenson, “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula,” PMLA 103, 2 (1988): 139–49, and Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies 33, 4 (1990): 621–45. Several folklorists have missed the point and claimed that vampires represent aristocratic charm and sophistication, combined with eternal life; see especially Noreen Dresser, American Vampires: Fans, Victims and Practitioners (New York: Norton, 1989).
9. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1.
10. Edward Steere, A Handbook of the Swahili Language, as Spoken at Zanzibar (1870; 3d ed., London: SPCK, 1884), 349.
11. David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 220–22.
12. Rev. Dr. L. Krapf, A Dictionary of the Swahili Language (London: Trubner, 1882), 166–67.
13. Amina Hali, Pumwani, Kenya, 4 August 1976; Anyango Mahondo.
14. Charles Sacleux, Dictionnaire Swahili-Français (Paris: Institut d’ethnologie, 1941), 625.
15. Inter-Territorial Language Committee for the East African Dependencies, Standard Swahili-English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), 56–57; T. O. Beidelman, personal communication, 8 September 1997.
16. A. C. Madan, English-Swahili Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), 371.
17. E. Hoch, Bemba Pocket Dictionary: Bemba-English and English-Bemba (Abercorn: White Fathers Press, 1960), 54, 72, 107. In the mid 1930s, Africans in central Tanganyika spoke of “Bwana Nyama,” the head of the game department, who went alone into the bush to look for blood, but the term banyama does not seem to have taken hold in Swahili (Fr. H. de Vries, Morogoro, “Superstition in Africa,” Holy Ghost Messenger 32 [1936]: 67–69). I am grateful to Peter Pels for these notes.
18. Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 50. Sometimes batumbula were called mitumbula, using the prefix normally given to plants, trees, and spirits and humans involved in the spirit world (Johannes Fabian, letter to author, 22 September 1992). See also Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and id., ed. and trans., History from Below: The Vocabulary of Elisabethville by André Yav: Texts, Translations, and Interpretive Essay (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), 1–3.
19. Auguste de Clercq, Dictionnaire Tshiluba-Français (1936; rev. ed., Leopoldville: Impr. de la Société missionaire de St. Paul, 1960), 290; Frère Gabriel, Dictionnaire Tshiluba-Français (Brussels: Librairie Albert de Witt, n.d. [1948]), 121.
20. Krapf, Dictionary, 384; Inter-Territorial Language Committee, Standard Dictionary, 478; Sacleux, Dictionnaire, 954; Steven Feierman, personal communication, 27 April 1998.
21. Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in Rueben A. Bower, ed., On Translation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 232–39. The Swahili for airplane is a compound word, for example: ndege ulaya, European bird.
22. Yonasani Kaggwa, Katwe, 27 August 1990. “Eating” and cannibalism have a wide range of meanings in East African Bantu languages that do not translate easily into English: “eating” has all the metaphorical power of “hunger” and the expressive power of “consumption.” When the Kabaka, or king, of Buganda was enthroned, it was said that he had “eaten Buganda” (Benjamin Ray, Myth, Ritual and Kingship in Buganda [Oxford, 1991], 114).
23. See John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Customs and Beliefs (London: Macmillan, 1911), 19, 268, 293; Luise White, “Blood Brotherhood Revisited: Kinship, Relationship, and the Body in East and Central Africa,” Africa 64, 3 (1994): 359–72. The retainers of the deceased Kabaka were killed by strangulation or a blow to the head (Ray, Myth, Ritual and Kingship, 160–82).
24. Luc de Heusch, The Drunken King, or, The Origin of the State, trans. Roy Willis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 168–73; T. O. Beidelman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 32–35; Hugo H. Hinfelaar, “Religious Change among Bemba-Speaking Women in Zambia” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1989), 8; Christopher C. Taylor, Milk, Honey, and Money: Changing Concepts in Rwandan Healing (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 9–14, 136, 209–10; White, “Blood Brotherhood.”
25. Barber, I Could Speak, 21.
26. Rik Ceyssens, “Mutumbula: Mythe de l’opprimé,” Cultures et développement 7 (1975): 483–536.
27. Wyatt MacGaffey, “The West in Congolese Experience,” in Philip Curtin, ed., Africa and the West: Intellectual Responses to European Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 49–74; Ceyssens, “Mutumbula”; 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): 201–15: 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), 176.
28. Luise White, “The Traffic in Heads: Bodies, Borders, and the Articulation of Regional Histories,” J. Southern Afr. Studies 23, 2 (1997): 325–38.
29. Paulo Kavuma, Crisis in Buganda, 1953–55 (London: Rex Collings, 1979), 9; see also David Apter, The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 226; Lloyd A. Fallers, Law without Precedent: Legal Ideas in Action in the Courts of Colonial Busoga (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 83.
30. Lloyd William Swantz, “The Role of the Medicine Man among the Zaramo of Dar es Salaam” (Ph.D. diss., University of Dar es Salaam, 1972), 336.
31. Ofwete Muriar, Uchonja Village, Alego, Siaya District, 11 August 1986.
32. Joseph Nsubuga, Kisasi, Uganda, 22 August 1990.
33. Nechambuza Nsumba, Katwe, Uganda, 20 August 1990; Ssekajje Kasirye, Kisenyi, Uganda, 24 August 1990; Peter Kirigwa, Katwe, Uganda, 24 August 1990; Musoke Kapliamu, Katwe, Uganda, 24 August 1990; Swantz, “Role of the Medicine Man,” 338.
34. Darrell Bates, The Mango and the Palm (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962), 52.
35. Peter Pels, “Mumiani: The White Vampire. A Neo-Diffusionist Analysis of Rumour,” Ethnofoor 5, 1–2 (1992): 166–67; the essay by Arnold has been reprinted in David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). “Swahili” and “Sudanese” are almost never accurate ethnic terms, particularly in early colonial military history. Parsees are Zoroastrians; the term, which is what they call themselves in India, is from Farsi, their language.
36. Christopher Harwich, Red Dust: Memories of the Uganda Police, 1935–1955 (London: V. Stuart, 1961), 10–15. I am grateful to Michael Tuck for this reference.
37. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937).
38. Monica Hunter Wilson, “Witch Beliefs and Social Structure,” American J. of Sociology 41, 4 (1951): 307–13.
39. M. G. Marwick, “The Social Context of Cewa Witch Beliefs,” Africa 22, 2 (1952): 120–35; Max Gluckman, “Moral Crises: Magical and Secular Solutions,” in id., ed., The Allocation of Responsibility (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 1–47.
40. Godfrey Lienhardt, “Some Notions of Witchcraft among the Dinka,” Africa 21, 4 (1951): 303–18; Beidelman, Moral Imagination in Kaguru Modes of Thought.
41. Ivan Karp, “Beer Drinking and Social Experience in an African Society: An Essay in Formal Sociology,” in id. and Charles S. Bird, eds., Explorations in African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 83–118; T. O. Beidelman, The Cool Knife: Imagery of Gender, Sexuality, and Moral Imagination in Kaguru Initiation Ritual (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 83, 224–25.
42. Marwick, “Cewa Witch Beliefs.”
43. S. F. Nadel, “Witchcraft in Four African Societies: An Essay in Comparison,” American Anthropologist 54, 1 (1952): 18–29.
44. Sally Falk Moore, “Selection for Failure in a Small Social Field: Ritual Concord and Fraternal Strike among the Chagga, Kilimanjaro, 1968–1969,” in id. and Barbara Meyerhoff, eds., Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 109–43.
45. Edwin Ardener, “Witchcraft, Economics and the Continuity of Belief,” in Mary Douglas, ed., Witchcraft Confessions and Accusations(London: Tavistock, 1970): 141–60.
46. John Middleton, Lugbara Religion: Ritual and Authority among an East African People (1960; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 246.
47. Randall M. Packard, “Social Change and the History of Misfortune among the Bashu of Zaire,” in Ivan Karp and Charles S. Bird, eds., Explorations in African Systems of Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 237–66.
48. Kate Creehan, The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 207–8; Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 156–57.
49. I do not mean to suggest that Africans only experienced invasive and extractive relationships after World War I; indeed, vampire stories may well play off as yet unrecovered imaginings about earlier extractive states.
50. R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), passim, 21–22; the answer the judges sought was that Jews needed Christian blood for circumcision. Under torture, Jews claimed to have only heard of ritual murder from Christians; see R. Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 37.
51. Carlo Ginzburg, Nightbattles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), passim, and “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 160.
52. Caroline W. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Meaning of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
53. David Sabean, Power in the Blood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994).
54. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, 206.
55. 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,” 24 January 1944 (National Archives of Zambia [henceforth cited as NAZ], SWC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama). Gervas Clay, interview, Taunton, Somerset, 26 August 1991.
56. Mrs. Betty Clay, reading from her diary for 13 December 1943, interview with author, Taunton, Somerset, 26 August 1991.
57. Clay, “Memorandum Concerning ‘banyama’ and ‘mafyeka.’”
58. Betty Clay; Gervas Clay, “Memorandum Concerning ‘banyama’ and ‘mafyeka.’”
59. R. S. Jeffreys to Fallows, Provincial Office, Kasama, 15 April 1944 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama; emphasis in original). Bemba Christians reported, however, that strangulation, ukutweka, was the way “seriously ill” chiefs had been killed in the past. Fearing this fate, chiefs were relieved when missionaries condemned the practice. Stephen Bwalya, “Custom and Habits of the Bemba” (typescript, Mpika, 1936, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS Afr. 3.1214).
60. Geoffrey Howe, provincial commissioner, Northern Province, Kasama, “Confidential Memo to All DCs,” 24 April 1944 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama).
61. Elizabeth Colson, who first began research in Southern Province in 1946, recalls being asked to report on banyama when she first arrived, but she did not hear the term banyama used by anyone except officials until a decade later (personal communication 7, 8 August 1997).
62. G. Howe, provincial commissioner, Northern Province, to chief secretary, Lusaka, 27 March 1944 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama). H. F. Cartmel-Robinson, acting chief secretary, to provincial commissioner, Western Province, 20 May 1944; G. Howe to district commissioner, Kawambwa, 15 June 1944, “Survey of Helminthic Diseases” (NAZ, SEC1/1/1072). The doctor was eventually allowed to collect samples accompanied by a police escort. I am grateful to Bryan Callahan for the notes on this file.
63. Legco Debates, Hansard, 31 August 1945, cols. 248–49, 245–55 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama).
64. G. Howe to R. Hudson, district commissioner, Kawambwa, 30 April 1945 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama).
65. Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death:Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 5.
66. Gábor Klaniczay, “The Decline of Witches and the Rise of Vampires under the Eighteenth-Century Hapsburg Monarchies,” in id., The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, trans. Susan Singerman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 168–88. Prosecution of witches in contemporary Africa, by contrast, strengthens ideas about witchcraft as the state and particularly the judiciary joins popular debates about witchcraft in all their ambiguity; see Geschiere, Modernity of Witchcraft, 169–97.
67. Glover, Vampires and Liberals, 136–52.
68. Judith R. Walkowtiz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Colin Holmes, “The Ritual Murder Accusation in Britain,” in Alan Dundes, ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) 110–13; Glover, Vampires and Liberals, 35–55.
69. Jan Vansina hints at this in “Les mouvements religieux Kuba (Kasai) à l’époque coloniale,” Etudes d’histoire africaine 2 (1971): 155–87; on the poison ordeal, see Martin Channock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
70. Zaina Kachui, Pumwani, Nairobi, Kenya, 14 June 1976.
71. Yonasani Kaggwa, Katwe, Kampala, Uganda, 27 August 1990.
72. George W. Ggingo, Kasubi, Uganda, 15 August 1990.
73. I have made a similar case for North American UFO abduction narratives, which, I argue, debate race, reproduction, abortion, and the role of women in childcare. It is not that there are no other places where these issues can be talked about in contemporary American society, but that they are considered so important that they are spoken of at many sites. See Luise White, “Alien Nation: Race in Space,” Transition 63 (1994).
74. Gregory Sseluwagi, Lubya, Uganda, 28 August 1990.
75. Ibid.
76. Anthony Odhiambo, Uranga, Siaya District, Kenya, 11 August 1986. According to some old men in Siaya District, the undisciplined speech of the Swahili speakers protected them from vampires, who could not risk capturing people in Mombasa “because people there were very wild” (Zebede Oyoyo, Yimbo, 13 August 1986).
77. Domtita Achola, Uchonga Ukudi, Alego, Siaya District, Kenya, 11 August 1986.
78. Fabian, Remembering the Present, 49; the word Tshibumba used for gossip is abari, which can mean news or report (ibid., 299).
79. Julia Nakibuuka Nalongo, Lubya, Uganda, 21 August 1990.
80. Nichodamus Okumu Ogutu, Uhuyi, Siaya District, Kenya, 20 August 1986.
81. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths: An Essay in Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 79–93.
82. Samuel Mubiru, Lubya, Uganda, 28 August 1990.
83. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 61, but see the appendices to this; Carlo Ginzburg, “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in id., Clues, 156–64, and “Checking the Evidence: The Judge and the Historian,” in James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 290–303; Susan U. Philips, “Evidentiary Standards for American Trials: Just the Facts,” in Judith T. Irvine and Jane H. Hill, eds., Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 248–59.
84. I said as much in The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 20–28. Only by “leading” informants and arguing with them does the historian learn about information important enough for informants to defend.
85. Nyakida Omolo. Kabura, Siaya District, Kenya, 19 August 1986.
86. This point has been made most clearly by Ben G. Blount, “Agreeing to Disagree on Genealogy: A Luo Sociology of Knowledge,” in Mary Sanchez and Ben G. Blount, eds., Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Use (New York: Academic Press, 1975), 117–35, but has never made a lasting impact in African history or oral history, despite David William Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo, Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape (London: James Currey, 1989).
87. Thomas O. Beidelman, “Myth, Legend and Oral History: A Kaguru Traditional Text,” Anthropos 65, 5–6 (1970): 74–97.
88. Huxley, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 23n; “‘Human Vampire’ Story Incites Mombasa Mob’s Fire Station Attack,” East African Standard, 27 June 1947, 3; “Three Years for Attempt to Sell Man,” Uganda Argus, 16 February 1959, 5; “‘Firemen Do Not Buy People,’” Tanganyika Standard, 16 February 1959, 3. Bua’s defense was that he had taken his friend to the fire station to get him a job, and there had been offered cash for him. While he was waiting for the money, he was arrested.
89. The Standard, 10 January 1972. The article was by S. Lolila.
90. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 773–97.
91. See Laura Lee Downs, “If ‘Woman’ is Just an Empty Category, Then Why am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night? Identity Politics Meets the Postmodern Subject,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, 2 (1993): 414–37; Thomas C. Holt, “Experience and the Politics of Intellectual Inquiry,” and Joan Scott, “A Rejoinder to Thomas Holt,” in James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian, eds., Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice and Persuasion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 388–96, 397–400, and Kathleen Canning, “Feminist History after the Linguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience,” in Barbara Laslett et al., eds., History and Theory: Feminist Research, Debates, Contestations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 416–52. Well outside these debates, other scholars have noted that first-person accounts are often metaphors rather than descriptions; see Gyandendra Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today,” Representations 37 (1992): 27–55, and Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
92. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30.
93. Alexander Opaka, Mwajuma Alexander, and Helena Ogada, Ndegro Uranga Village, Siaya District, 11 August 1986.
94. Indeed, Matt K. Matsuda argues that it is the evaluation of the details included in testimony—the details that locate a story in time and space—that is at the heart of the modern method of deciding whether an oral account is true or false. By the start of the twentieth century, testimonies were judged by their credibility, whether or not they sounded true to an interlocutor. Veracity became a matter of testimony, of memory and storytelling, and not a matter of the speaker’s intention. Matt K. Matsuda, The Memory of the Modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 101–20.
95. Anyango Mahondo, Sigoma, Siaya District, 15 August 1986.
96. This seemed to have been accomplished by the number of people in the area he had threatened to have arrested at one time or another (author’s field notes, 16 August 1986).
97. Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 34–41.
98. Charles L. Briggs, Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37–38; Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 50–55.
99. Zebede Oyoyo, Yimbo, Kenya, 13 August 1986.
100. Zebede Oyoyo, Yimbo, Kenya, 23 August 1986.
101. “Adiyisadiki” (“Believer”), letter to the editor, Mambo Leo, November 1923, 13–14. I am grateful to Patrick Malloy for this reference and to Laura Fair and Peter Seitel for help with the translation.
102. Zebede Oyoyo, 13 August 1986.
103. Justin Willis, “Two Lives of Mpamizo: Understanding Dissonance in Oral History,” History in Africa 23 (1996): 319–32.
104. W. B. Banage, W. N. Byarugaba, and J. D. Goodman, “The ‘Embalasassa’ (Riopa fernandi): A Story of Real and Mythical Zoology,” Uganda Journal 36 (1972): 67–72.
105. Bibiana Nalwanga, Bwaise, Uganda, 24 August 1990; see also Joseph Nsubuga, Kisasi, Uganda, 22 August 1990; Samuel Mubiru, Lubya, Uganda, 28 August 1990.
106. Daniel Sekiraata, Katwe, Uganda, 22 August 1990.
107. Ahmed Kiziri, Katwe, Uganda, 20 August 1990.
108. Gregory Sseluwagi; Samuel Mubiru; Joseph Nsubuga; Ahmed Kiziri.
109. I use this example because chronology is precisely where the most sustained and reasonable attacks have been made on oral historiography: see, e.g., David Henige, The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); but see also Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 175–85.
110. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 56, 58.
111. David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (London: James Currey, 1985), xv–xvii; Musambachime, “Impact of Rumor.”
112. Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 230.
113. Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 134.
114. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 233–58.
115. Nathan Watchel, Gods and Vampires: Return to Chipaya, trans. Carol Volk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 72–89, 93–102.
116. See Ann Laura Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations 37 (1992): 140–89.
117. Channock, Law and Social Order; T. O. Beidelman, Colonial Evangelism: A Socio-Historical Study of an East African Mission at the Grassroots (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vol. 1: Christianity, Colonialism and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and vol. 2, The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Randall Packard, White Plague, Black Labor: Tuberculosis and the Political Economy of Heath and Disease in South Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: Sleeping Sickness and the Social History of Zaire, 1890–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Paul S. Landau, The Realm of the World: Language, Gender and Christianity in a South African Kingdom (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1995); Pier M. Larson, “‘Capacities and Modes of Thought’: Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity,” Am. Hist. Rev. 102, 4 (1997): 969–1002; Stephan F. Miescher, “Of Documents and Litigants: Disputes of Inheritance in Abetifi—a Colonial Town in Ghana,” J. of Legal Pluralism 39 (1997): 81–119; Nancy Roe Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).
118. There are two exceptionally clear summaries of this shift, Frederick Cooper, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” Am. Hist. Rev. 99, 5 (1994): 1516–45, and Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Cooper and Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56.
119. On African ethnicity, see John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 314–38; Charles H. Ambler, Kenyan Communities in the Age of Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo, Siaya, 25–35; the articles in Leroy Vail, ed., The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty, and Civic Virtue in Kikuyu Political Thought,” in John Lonsdale and Bruce Berman, Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa (London: James Currey, 1992), 315–504; William Bravman, Making Ethnic Ways: Communities and Their Transformations in Taita, Kenya, 1800–1950 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998). On white society and how that category was defined in relationship to African ones, see Dane Kennedy, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, 1 (1989): 134–61; Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town: Group Identity and Social Practice, 1875–1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John L. Comaroff, “Images of Empire, Contests of Conscience: Models of Colonial Domination in South Africa,” and Lora Widenthal, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” both in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 163–97, 263–83; Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family: Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997).
120. Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), and On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Louise Lennihan, “Rights in Men and Rights in Land: Slavery, Labor, and Smallholder Agriculture in Northern Nigeria,” Slavery and Abolition 3, 2 (1982): 111–39; Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions: Employers, Government and the Jute Workers of Calcutta, 1890–1940,” Subaltern Studies (Delhi) 2 (1983): 259–310.
121. Marjorie Mbilinyi, “Runaway Wives in Colonial Tanganyika: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage in Rungwe District 1919–1961,” Int. J. of the Sociology of Law 16 (1988): 1–29; P. L. Bonner, “Family, Crime and Political Consciousness on the East Rand, 1939–1955” J. Southern Afr. Studies 14, 3 (1988): 393–420; White, Comforts of Home, 65–72, 126–46, 212–17, 221–28; Timothy Scarnecchia, “Poor Women and Nationalist Politics: Alliances and Fissures in the Formation of a Nationalist Movement in Salisbury, Rhodesia 1950–56,” J. Afr. Hist. 37, 3 (1996): 283–310.
122. 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); Keletso E. Atkins, “The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money”: The Cultural Origins of the African Work Ethic in Natal, 1845–1900 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1993); Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1994); David B. Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa’s Basuto Migrants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Laura Fair, “Identity, Difference and Dance: Female Initiation in Zanzibar, 1890–1930,” Frontiers 17, 3 (1996): 146–72, and “Kickin’ It: Leisure, Politics and Football in Zanzibar, 1900s–1950s,” Africa 67, 2 (1997).
123. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” Subaltern Studies (Oxford) 2 (1983): 1–42; Taussig, Shamanism, 2–134; Frederick Cooper, “Mau Mau and the Discourses of Decolonization,” J. Afr. History 29, 2 (1988): 313–20, and Decolonization and African Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Lan, Guns and Rain; Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). For gendered critiques, see Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,” Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 119–56, and Luise White, “Separating the Men from the Boys: The Construction of Sexuality, Gender, and Terrorism in Central Kenya 1939–59,” Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies 25, 1 (1990): 1–25; Lynn M. Thomas, “ Ngaitana (I will circumcise myself): The Gender and Generational Politics of the 1956 Ban on Clitoridectomy in Meru, Kenya,” Gender and History 8, 3 (1997): 338–63, and “Imperial Concerns and ‘Women’s Affairs’: State Efforts to Regulate Clitoridectomy and Eradicate Abortion in Meru, Kenya c. 1910–1950,” J. Afr. Hist. 39, 1 (1998): 121–46.
124. Randall M. Packard, “The ‘Healthy Reserve’ and the ‘Dressed Native’: Discourses on Black Health and the Language of Legitimation in South Africa,” American Ethnologist 16, 4 (1989): 686–703; Ann Laura Stoler, “Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia,” in Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 51–101; Nancy Rose Hunt, “Noise over Camouflaged Polygyny: Colonial Marriage Taxation and a Woman-Naming Crisis in Belgian Africa,” J. Afr. Hist. 32, 3 (1991): 471–95; Martin, Leisure; Emmanuel Akyeampong, Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1880 to Recent Times (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996). Africans were, of course, keenly aware of the nuances of dress; see Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women, and Laura Fair, “Dressing Up: Clothing, Class and Gender in Post-Abolition Zanzibar,” J. Afr. History 39, 1 (1998): 63–94.
125. Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (1961), trans. H. M. Wright (Chicago: Aldine, 1965), and Oral Tradition as History; Henige, Chronology of Oral Tradition; the articles in Joseph C. Miller, ed., The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History (Hampden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1980); Heusch, Drunken King; V. Y. Mudimbe, Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality and Politics in Central Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 86–138.
126. See Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 12–13; White, Comforts of Home, 21–28.
127. C. A. Hamilton, “Ideology and Oral Tradition: Listening to the Voices ‘from Below,’” History in Africa 14 (1987): 67–71.
128. Claire C. Robertson, “In Pursuit of Life Histories: The Problem of Bias,” Frontiers 7, 2 (1983): 63–69; Susan N. G. Geiger, “Women’s Life Histories: Content and Method,” Signs: J. of Women in Culture and Society 11, 2 (1986): 334–51, and “What’s So Feminist about Women’s Oral History?” Journal of Women’s History 2, 1 (1990): 169–82; Marjorie Mbilinyi, “‘I’d Have Been a Man’: Politics and the Labor Process in Producing Personal Narratives,” and Marjorie Shostak, “‘What the Wind Won’t Take Away’: The Genesis of Nisa—the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, ” in Personal Narratives Group, ed., Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 204–27, 228–40.
129. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), and the articles in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). In African history, the disaffection with the ethnographic object was as much a product of the researches of nationalist historiography as it was of debates in anthropology; see Steven Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 13–17.
130. Nowhere is this clearer than in the reviews of Belinda Bozzoli with the assistance of Mmantho Nkotsoe, Women of Phoeking: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991); see esp. Elizabeth Eldridge’s review in African Economic History 21 (1993): 191–95, but see also Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, 18–21; Sidney W. Mintz, “The Sensation of Moving, While Standing Still,” American Ethnologist 16, 4 (1989): 786–96, and J. B. Peires, “Suicide or Genocide? Xhosa Perceptions of the Nongqawuse Catastrophe,” Radical History Review 46, 7 (1990): 47–57.
131. See Mary Smith, Baba of Karo: A Woman of the Muslim Hausa (1954; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Marjorie Shostak, Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Jean Davison with the Women of Mutira, Voices from Mutira: Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1989); Margaret Strobel and Sarah Mirzah, Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), and the U.S.-produced Swahili edition, Wanawake watatu wa Kiswahili: hadithi za maisha kutoka Mombasa, Kenya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Bozzoli, Women of Phokeng; Kirk Hoppe, “Whose Life Is It Anyway? The Issue of Representation in Life Narratives,” Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies 26, 3 (1993): 623–36; Heidi Gengenbach, “Historical Truth and Life Narratives,” Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies 27, 3 (1994): 619–27; Susan Gieger, TANU Women: Gender, Culture and Politics in Tanganyika, 1955–65 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997); Corinne A. Kratz, “Conversations and Lives” (forthcoming). The Swahili version of Three Swahili Women was published in the United States because no Kenyan publisher was interested; see Geiger, “What’s So Feminist about Women’s Oral History?”, 182n. The life histories of women tend to proclaim their authenticity; see Domitila Barrios de Chungara and Moema Viezzer, Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines, trans. Victoria Ortiz (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), while those of men are often summarized by scholars, without apology; see Hoyt Alverson, Mind in the Heart of Darkness: Value and Self-Identity among the Tswana of Southern Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Tim Keegan, Facing the Storm: Portraits of Black Lives in Rural South Africa (London: Zed Books, 1988), and Paul Lubeck, “Petroleum and Proletarianization: The Life History of a Muslim Nigerian Worker,” African Economic History 18 (1989): 99–112; Bill Nasson, “The War of Abraham Essau: Martyrdom, Myth and Folk Memory in Calvania, South Africa,” African Affairs 87 (1988): 239–65. But men’s life histories seem to have had the space—and quite possibly the authority of a male voice—to problematize this kind of writing; see Charles van Onselen, The Seed Is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine, A South African Sharecropper, 1894–1985 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), and Stephan Miescher, “Becoming a Man in Kwawu: Law, Personhood, and the Construction of Masculinities in Colonial Ghana, 1875–1957” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1997).
132. Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Disturbances on the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia, Report and Evidence (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1935), 2.
133. Gyan Prakesh, “Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, 2 (1990): 383-408.
134. Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 60.
135. See Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals, 245-64; Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods: Cattle and Commodities in a South African Context,” American Ethnologist 17, 2 (1990): 195-216; Sharon Hutchinson, “The Cattle of Money and the Cattle of Girls among the Nuer, 1930-83,” American Ethnologist, 19, 2 (1992) 294-316.
136. Peter Fraenkel, Wayaleshi (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1959), 200.
137. Bates, Mango and the Palm, 48.
138. Michael Macoun, letter to author, 18 May 1990.
139. Europeanists writing on oral history have come to this insight much more easily than Africanists; see the work of Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), and The Battle of Valle Guilia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
140. Vail and White, Power and the Praise Poem, 1-39; Hofmeyr, “‘Wailing for Purity.’”