Part Two

3. “Bandages on Your Mouth”

The Experience of Colonial Medicine in East and Central Africa

This chapter and the one that follows interpret vampire stories as a regional, colonial genre, the formulaic elements of which reveal an intimate history of African encounters with colonial medicine. Both chapters argue, with different but overlapping sources, that reading vampire stories as a genre—as formulaic stories told with set elements of plot and detail— courages a historical reconstruction of specific concerns and ideas over a large geographic region. These chapters present evidence in ways that most historians of oral material would not do: I am not interested in individual testimony or the contexts of recollection or collection; I do not think it matters if one speaker is a man’s third wife, another a Christian, and another a recent convert to Islam. Instead, I am interested in the elements these stories share across cultural and colonial borders. In this chapter, oral accounts are neither considered to be a spoken rendition of experience nor taken to be true. But even though they do not depict actual events, conversations, or things that really happened, they describe meanings and powers and ideas that informed how people thought and behaved. Indeed, I argue that reading evidence for its generic qualities, for the formulaic elements with which a good and thus credible story is told, reveals a level of meaning and significance that interpreting evidence as personal testimony would not do.

Genres, Voices, and Evidence

This chapter argues that oral African vampire rumors can be read alongside medical writings about triumphant drugs and vanquished superstitions to illuminate the context in which Western biomedicine was practiced. This chapter is not about the clash of beliefs or of technologies; it is about how technologies were believed to work, and how much power was invested in their application. It is about cures that were rubbed on the skin, or inhaled; it is about needles and scalpels that penetrated beneath the skin.

The sources I use overlap only somewhat. Missionary writings from early colonial Uganda, primarily published in the Church Missionary Society’s journals, and writings by doctors and officials about medical practice in East and Central Africa provide a chronological framework that is somewhat longer than that of vampire rumors in the same region. Colonial doctors positioned themselves firmly within imperial science, and their writings describe many of the tools and technologies that figure in the vampire stories.^[1] These medical writings and these oral vampire stories are not “about” the same events and experiences in any firm chronological sense. They are about the same procedures and technologies. I am not reconstructing a sequence of events and responses to them, but the vocabulary in which medical care was both negotiated and undermined. What follows is a juxtaposition of texts to get them to interrogate each other, to show how different ways of talking about colonial medicine reveals the extent of its control. This chapter, perhaps more than any other, relies on the combination of oral material and written accounts. This is not just because African anxieties about the blood taken in medical encounters are so commonplace in colonial medical writings, but because medical writing and vampire stories are so often about the same things.

The use of the oral and the written together, rather than as different visions, raises another question altogether: how to write history, especially colonial history? Some recent African history, some of it by me, has argued for the great reliability of oral evidence for twentieth-century Africa. Who after all was more qualified to describe colonialism than those who lived through it or under it? The words of the colonized simply describe their world with far greater detail and accuracy than any colonizer could. The voices of women, moreover, are all but absent from the colonial record; only with their own words could we reconstruct their lives. But few historians, and I include myself again, have actually relied exclusively on oral sources. Time and time again, we have used documentary material to flesh out, contextualize, and even explain the words of our informants to provide a more reliable, representative, accurate history. I have, for example, argued that a 1940s prostitute’s description of male violence does not so much describe male violence as boast that a clever woman could negotiate urban life. I still think I am right, based on what I know about Nairobi prostitution and that particular informant, but nevertheless, this kind of insight comes from contextualizing testimony rather than from “letting Africans speak for themselves.” ^[2] Most historians of colonial Africa have seen the oral and the written as two different sources with which to support their arguments. Where oral and written accounts agreed, it was proof positive. Where oral and written sources contradicted each other, this was not a problem to be resolved; instead, it proved that Africans and colonialists had vastly different opinions and memories. But simply by including the “African voice”—a term still used without irony—historians could claim that their work represented Africans’ views of their experiences, even when, as was so often the case, those voices were placed in a narrative derived from colonial documents and shaped by the author’s mediation.

How accurate a history, even a history of vampires, can emerge from a combination of African and colonialist voices? Doesn’t the power and authority of European words invade every aspect of speech and narration? In recent years there have been a few striking colonial histories that have mediated different voices. The roughest edges of cultural contact—with Christian Maroons, for example, or black South African women in secondary schools—have been described with great power by articulating the differences between voices.^[3] But separate voices make for separate pasts, each perhaps more self-contained and reified than may have been the case in actuality. Even the most effectively controlled colonial terrain was too contested, and too compromised, to allow for the disembedding of any clear “voice,” colonized or colonizing. Indeed, the process of disembedding obscures the way in which voices reinvented themselves and borrowed words and images from the world around them even as it changed.^[4] Ann Stoler has argued that in colonial history, the issue is not the separate voices, but the fragmentation and exclusion with which voices are generated. “We are not only piecing together fragmented stories but working from a cultural landscape in which our ‘best sources’ were dependent on a range of verbal and visual evidence that tapped different kinds of knowledge.” ^[5] This chapter argues that the differences between the voices may not require rigid segregation: the voices I cite share intense ideas about the same tools and technologies. It is my goal to “listen” to these voices as different kinds of storytelling, to get them to speak about each other to tell stories about colonialism.

This chapter is not so much about comparing oral and written sources as it is about reading both sets of sources as genres. Genre does not have an either/or status but is a strategy of writing and speaking—someone goes in and out of genre to recollect, to comment, to get a point across. In the case of colonial medicine, genre is a particularly useful concept, because it accesses all the fantasies, paraphernalia, and technologies with which medical power was presented and represented. Talk of vampire stories in fact often cued talk of drugs and needles.^[6] The description of Western biomedicine contained in vampire accusations is substantially different from that found in doctors’ and nurses’ published words on the same subject, of course. What is important is that the domains of difference are the same: on the subjects of injections, anesthesia, and hospitals, Africans and medical writers both had strong opinions, but those opinions diverged totally. To use both sets of narratives to produce two narratives, or contending visions, would ignore all the ways in which the subjects of these narratives were the same. Besides, this evidence cannot be separated into discrete units; the oral invades the written too much for that. Instead, I want to suggest that they refract, that they provide ways in which to read each other, and that the formulas and the fantasies in each are in fact representations of the nature of medical care, curative therapies, and control. In both oral and written sources, the voices I quote are not presented as contextualized testimony, but as genres, formulaic stories structured by set elements and conventions. If I were to assert the authority and authenticity of the voice in this essay, I would obscure the phrases, images, attitudes, and even memories that are formulaic, that, however true and however reconstructed, are recounted as genre.

Western Writing and Western Medicine

The historiography of colonial medicine has changed enormously in the past twenty years. After the triumphalist narrative of the progress of science gave way to that of humanitarianism hindered by budgetary constraints, colonial medical care was resoundingly condemned as an agent of imperialism: “Apologists for colonial regimes often look myopically at the medical services, proclaim their humanity, and even argue that their philosophy ran counter to that of imperialism,” Meredeth Turshen writes.^[7] Once medicine was seen as part of the imperial arsenal, there were enough official statements to demonstrate that doctors were thought to have the skills that could win the hearts and minds of subject populations.^[8] But authors writing within the medical narrative or about it have tended, as Megan Vaughan has pointed out, to make colonial medical history the history of colonial ideas.^[9] Those writing outside of the medical narrative, most notably John Iliffe in his study of East African doctors, have located the history of the medical profession firmly in the colonial situation and the finances available to colonial and postcolonial states.^[10] When these authors conceived of African resistance to the drugs and needles of colonial practice, they assumed it took place away from the clinic: “When the colonized escapes the doctor, and the integrity of his body is preserved, he considers himself the victor by a handsome margin,” wrote Fanon.^[11] Such a separation of contentious Africans from hegemony-inducing doctors was more discursive than anything else: when the doctor was scripted as a spokesman for empire, he or she was not in the examination room, the operating theater, or the laboratory.^[12] Nurses, whether white women or African men, never received the same attention: they are described neither as full-fledged imperialists nor as devoted caregivers, as if their struggles for status within the medical profession and within hospital regimes overshadowed their location in the colonial project.^[13] Yet in their writings, mission nurses present themselves as vulnerable to African ideas about health. They were placed in village dispensaries, where they were argued with as often as they were ignored. What made them different from the doctors who supervised them was that they published accounts of these conversations.

What happens to the history of colonial medicine when the doctor is seen in the examination room and the nurse observed dispensing drugs and ointments? The power and authority of European practitioners fractures in such encounters. Early colonial medication was as much a novelty as it was a benefit, and accounts of Africans demanding injections or tablets argue for a popularity of medication that was far beyond any embodied needs. A missionary wrote of “roaring, screaming” crowds “with noses gone, faces eaten by syphilis” demanding treatment from traveling injection clinics in the Belgian Congo in 1929,^[14] but the founder of the Church Missionary Society medical mission in Uganda, A. R. Cook, observed something else in the crowds that gathered whenever he visited a rural area. “Many of course were merely drawn by curiosity, and had nothing the matter with them.” They would not believe him if he told them they were well; indeed, if they were not given medicine “they would put it down to spite.…We consoled ourselves that they would be gradually educated up to the truth” and prepared a strong solution of liquid ammonia, and “let them have a good sniff.…With tears streaming down their faces, and with grateful hearts, they retired to make room for others.” Powerful vapors, Cook reckoned, were considered powerful medicines; these fumes would make Africans realize “that the white man’s medicine was a thing to be treated with respect.” ^[15]

But in early colonial Africa, at least, the white man’s medicine did not seem worthy of respect or even careful investigation. Africans brought their own epistemologies of causation and cure to European clinics. Ugandans, for example, doubted the efficacy of quinine tablets: “It is a little hard for them to believe a tiny pill can do them good, when they are accustomed to remedies by the pailful and are confident that the more fat they rub on their bodies the quicker will be the cure. So there really is some excuse for our black brothers and sisters.” ^[16] Dispensary patients routinely took three days’ supply of tablets at once, put ointments on body parts for which they were not intended, and argued with every nurse who offered a cure that made no sense to them. “My sickness is in my feet and…my wisdom tells me there is no profit in drinking medicine, but only by rubbing the mixture upon my feet can I be cured.” ^[17] Even when ointments and tablets had meaning because they were dispensed by the skilled white doctor or nurse, that meaning was almost never the same as missionaries intended. Africans drank skin lotions and refused to return the bottles in which they came, and nurses complained that the pills they dispensed were thought of “more as charms than as physics or liniments.” ^[18]

Even Western medicine’s power to label and diagnose disease had little meaning in the first years of the encounter between Africans and Western medical expertise. In Northern Rhodesia, Africans all but mocked European treatments of sleeping sickness.^[19] According to a nun in early colonial Uganda, diagnosis was “not easy. A patient will tell me ‘The spirit of my ancestor kills me,’ or another ‘The skull keeps me from sleeping,’ or ‘The aches run all round me.’ It needs much patience to sort out what is relevant.” ^[20] If doctors were less patient, they were more circumspect. Privately, A. R. Cook found African ideas about illness “exceedingly exasperating” and wrote in his diary about the kind of dialogue that went on “with irritating frequency in the consulting room”:

Doctor:

What is the matter with you?

Patient:

My name is so and so.

Doctor:

Yes, but what is your disease?

Patient:

I want medicine to drink.

Doctor:

Where do you hurt?

Patient:

I don’t want medicine to swallow, but to drink,

Doctor (sternly):

What is your illness?

Patient:

Oh it goes all over me, it cries out “Ka, ka.” Will you listen to the top of my head with your hearing machine (stethoscope), etc. etc.?^[21]

It is difficult to read these exchanges and think that Africans came to European doctors for what we call “cures.” When Africans were cured, treatment was conducted in local etiologies. Africans often came to Cook, for example, complaining of a rumbling sound in their ears. “Being now tired of explaining that this is often due to a diseased condition of the blood—for they universally put it down to insects having crawled into the ear—I now prescribe the appropriate treatment, telling them that the medicine is to kill the insects.” ^[22] When treatments were prolonged, Africans literally unpacked their content. In early colonial Uganda, a nun had to keep careful watch on patients with skin ulcers, “otherwise well-meaning villagers, who do not approve of my remedies, will pack the clean wound with river mud or worse!” ^[23] Indeed, African visits to clinics may have had little to do with the quantity and quality of African suffering that missionaries wrote about daily, but with the ways in which objects and techniques of European biomedicine had become translated into African healing practices. Ointments, stethoscope, and pills may have been objects translated and substituted into local beliefs, made powerful not by their novelty or strength but because of the difficult journeys required to obtain them.^[24]

Colonial medicine was configured as curative: Africans were to seek out doctors and drugs for specific conditions. By the 1920s, government-sponsored medical care in East and Central Africa was modeled on that of medical missions, with a central hospital for the seriously ill staffed by European doctors and nurses and satellite dispensaries run by African dressers who could treat wounds and minor ailments.^[25] Dressers’ qualifications were questioned by doctors everywhere. In Northern Rhodesia, for example, doctors demanded well-trained medical orderlies to give first aid—“The treatment of tropical sores requires both knowledge and skill, otherwise expenditure in dressings is useless”—but did not want them to perform the lumbar punctures necessary to diagnose advanced sleeping sickness. In the Belgian Congo, officials were said to give the job to “the first black who comes along,” who then could not calculate dosages.^[26] Yet the medicines dispensed in clinics was never fully under nurses’ and dressers’ control. In Kenya and Uganda, dressers were said to give whatever treatment Africans requested.^[27] Well into the 1930s, mission nurses still reported that patients walked miles to a dispensary but refused treatment for “some obvious and serious condition, if it is not the particular part of the body that he wishes to bring to our notice,” or rejected one kind of tablet because “I want the pink.” ^[28] Government doctors were no less pained: in 1934, the director of medical services complained that Africans thought “Dispensaries were like shops where a man can ask for anything he likes.” ^[29]

Demands for pink tablets or for stethoscopes on the head may not have been due to Africans’ confusion over Western medicine or their mystification of the efficacy of various procedures. Medical anthropologists have argued that Africans chose treatments, tablets, and the placement of stethoscopes, because of their own etiologies of disease. Illnesses believed to be caused by excessive cold might best be treated by pills that were hot in color, like red or pink. These reinterpretations were debates about the nature of curing itself and reflected divergent ideas about sickness, health, and healing that did not readily conform to the dichotomies between Western and African medicine, both of which changed rapidly in the twentieth century.^[30] Africans who swallowed three days’ supply of tablets at once may not have misunderstood a nurse’s instructions, but may have considered those instructions to be a misguided and inappropriate way to deal with disease and pain.

Africans also reinterpreted medical therapies because of how they were applied: much African curing took place above the skin. Healers used procedures of scratching the skin to produce blisters, let blood with cupping horns, and realigned broken bones. They cured many ailments by removing the alien matter introduced by supernatural means.^[31] By the early 1930s, most African healing and harming took place above the skin. Sorcerers spread disease by medicines smeared on a practitioner’s palm, fed to the victim, or blown with smoke from a pipe.^[32]

In such a world, the ability of Western medical techniques to penetrate the skin—with injections or scalpels—seems to have had profound and contradictory meanings for Africans. Those procedures were as feared as they were welcomed. Nevertheless, injections were said to have been fully assimilated into African therapeutics: any amount of popular and professional literature about the continent proclaims injections to be the cure of choice. Whether or not this is true, or how long this has been true, or where it has been true, is something else again. Several scholars have found a wide variety of opinions about the desirability of injections within specific areas.^[33] I have argued elsewhere that injections remained so unnatural in African healing practices that they took on topical and different meanings throughout this century.^[34] Moreover, there is some evidence that injections were preferred by clinic workers themselves.^[35] It allowed them to administer correct dosages and spared them the demands for pink pills and stethoscopes on the head.

In the 1920s, however, the popularity of injections astonished missionary and government authors. Many scholars have argued that the development of drugs (including the arsenic-derived Salvarsan, or “606,” and neo-Salvarsan) for the treatment of syphilis and yaws that made injections so desired: even an incomplete course of treatment could cure external symptoms, particularly sores.^[36] Mission doctors in the 1920s saw in Salvarsan their power to transform the African body: “Now enters the doctor and the intra-muscular injection of 606 is given. Within 48 hours the change begins,” wrote Cook. “To see a man admitted, his whole body a loathsome mass of foul sores…and to see the same man two or three weeks later, after one or two injections of ‘606’, so happily changed that his relatives hardly know him, is to behold…a modern miracle.” ^[37] In Stanleyville in the Belgian Congo, missionaries said that it was “like magic.” ^[38] Missionaries in Kenya and Tanganyika all noted a new demand for injections. Prior to Salvarsan, said one, Africans would flee hospitals rather than submit to an injection; now they willingly paid what missionaries charged for it.^[39] But as Terence Ranger points out, the long lines of Africans seeking yaws treatment from mission hospitals “resembled nothing so much as indigenous healing cults.” ^[40] Outside of mission hospitals with lucrative private practices, however, Salvarsan was too expensive to administer on a massive scale to African subjects. It required intravenous injections, which few officials and fewer doctors thought African dressers could do without constant supervision. The development of a bismuth compound, produced in Nairobi, reduced the cost of yaws treatment by over 700 percent. Bismuth salts were injected into the muscle, so that relatively unskilled medical personnel, such as African dressers, could administer the drug.^[41] Outside of mission hospitals, however, Africans problematized the course of injections far more than mission doctors did. In 1922, for example, young men in Uganda opposed the prolonged course of treatment, claiming that each injection contained weak medicine. In 1926, officials at the government hospital noted that many Africans went from clinic to clinic in the hopes of getting oral medication but received intravenous injections instead.^[42]

As a curative practice, however, injections were at once strange and familiar. Many African healing practices were no less sophisticated: a young medical missionary had observed a Caesarian section in southern Uganda in 1879, where healers also routinely restored protruding bowels, a common injury of war. Healers in Kenya and Northern Rhodesia used drugs and manual manipulation as abortifacients.^[43] In the kingdoms of southern Uganda and the northern province of Northern Rhodesia, practitioners attached to the royal family carried out the mutilations that were fairly common punishments for adultery, theft, and royal disfavor.^[44] Most, if not all, African peoples had practiced some form of variolation—vaccination by scratching the skin and introducing diseased matter—both against smallpox and against what was thought by early Western observers to be venereal syphilis but was in all likelihood endemic syphilis or yaws.^[45] In Uganda, the British were horrified to learn that children were wrapped in bark cloth smeared with syphilitic discharges. They blamed the epidemic that was said to infect 90 percent of the population on this practice.^[46] In smallpox variolation, the pox was pricked with a thorn, saved on a plantain leaf and then rubbed into the scratched area of a healthy person’s arm.^[47] This practice conferred as much immunity as any vaccine therapy did in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, early medical observers tended to ignore variolation wherever they found evidence for its efficacy.^[48] Cook’s diaries present the most dramatic case of observing African variolation and reinscribing it with all the violence scientific method required. During a smallpox epidemic in 1899, he and his wife drew lymph from two locally variolated Africans and eventually vaccinated perhaps 800 by the arm-to-arm method, noting only surprise at how few failures there were, “as indeed might have been surmised in an unprotected population. In their eagerness, they almost stormed the dispensary to get in.” ^[49] Storming the dispensary can have many meanings, however. Throughout East Africa, officials noted that the communities with the most widespread variolation were those most resistant to smallpox vaccination campaigns, without drawing any inference as to why.^[50] But they also noted that Africans chose which vaccinations and injections they wanted. A few weeks after healthy Africans demanded injections of Salvarsan in Uganda, for example, they rioted in opposition to plague vaccine.^[51] Africans resisted vaccination campaigns in Uganda in the 1930s with a specialized needle lore. In 1936, it was said that inoculations caused leprosy because the medical officer of health used the same syringe on all patients. Some people were said to scratch their arms to give the appearance of vaccination, to fool authorities. Others rubbed the vaccination with lemon juice, dust, and other substances to prevent characteristic blisters from forming. Some claimed that inoculations made their arms sore or septic.^[52] In the wartime Belgian Congo, there were barracks revolts centered around vaccination.^[53] Such stories do not undermine the ways in which Africans assimilated European healing technologies into their own wide range of curative procedures, of course.^[54] They simply restate—in the strongest possible terms—the context in which cultural and biomedical contact took place.

Besides, that contact was made fantastic by doctors themselves. When medical missionaries introduced anesthesia, they promoted it as one of the great wonders of Western science. Even in their earliest writings, anesthesia had a fantastic quality, producing an imagined African subjectivity of awe and trust whatever the evidence. “We have no difficulty getting them to take chloroform,” wrote CMS medical missionaries in 1898. When a woman was late for her operation, a nurse “found her hidden among the plantain trees praying.” ^[55] Kings who had ordered mutilations of their subjects were among the most responsive to anesthesia. When the CMS went to the royal court of Butoro, in southwestern Uganda, they spoke of the “special kind of medicine” that would “send them to sleep” without pain “while we ‘cut them up,’ as they term it.” The king “insisted” on an operation with chloroform for himself, even though he had only an abscess on his arm. Soon “it spread over the whole country that the king had been the first to venture to take this new medicine which made him go to sleep, and the patients came to us asking to be operated upon from all around the country.” ^[56] Anesthesia might be seen to straddle African and European curative therapies: it was both inhaled and promoted cutting below the skin. For this reason, perhaps, in many parts of Africa, anesthesia was accepted without the master narrative of the good medicine and the good king and the docile kingdom, despite some horrifying descriptions of how it worked. In the Belgian Congo in the 1920s, a medical missionary instructed her assistant to explain to a chief how she would remove his ulcerated cataracts: “You will smell some cold medicine until you are quite dead…then she will cut the eye out, and when all the cutting is finished, she will bring you back to life again.” This did not scare him, wrote the missionary, since he scheduled his surgery the next day.^[57] But as with injections, government doctors told a different story. In Northern Rhodesia in 1932, officials saw little improvement in the “native prejudice against surgical operations” they had struggled against for years. “It is presumed that the DC expressed disapproval of the stupidity of the persons concerned and explained how medical treatment would benefit them.” ^[58]

African Speaking and Western Medicine

Throughout East and Central Africa, vampire stories and blood accusations had intensely medical meanings. Many believed that human blood was used as medicine. Whatever its Persian roots and its use in nineteenth-century Zanzibar, the word mumiani in modern Swahili meant a kind of medicine used externally for broken bones or cramp, or melted and drunk.^[59] In Tanganyika in the 1950s, it was believed that African blood was taken to urban hospitals and there “converted into red capsules. These pills were taken on a regular basis by Europeans who…needed these potations to stay alive in Africa.” ^[60] In colonial Northern Rhodesia, it was believed that African blood was necessary to cure European diseases. The illness of any well-known European, particularly the long illness of King George V in 1929, was said to be enough to spark local panics.^[61] In 1932, banyama were said to “drain the victim’s blood, and by making an incision behind the ear, extract a certain portion of the brain. The body is left in the bush, and the blood and brain forwarded to the Medical Department to be used as medicines in hospitals and dispensaries.” ^[62] In Kenya, it was thought that men were taken by the Nairobi Fire Brigade so that their blood could be used for “the treatment of Europeans with anaemic diseases.” ^[63] On the whole, people were vague about what was done with the blood: one man heard it was taken to America, “but I don’t know what Americans did with that blood.” ^[64] Another observed: “Whites never let out the secret of what they were doing with African blood.…I think the whites were using African blood to treat other Africans.”

q:

But killing a person by sucking their blood in order to treat another person sounds strange. Why did they do that?

a:

I don’t know why the whites were doing that.^[65]

Africans knew much more about how blood was extracted. In the early 1920s, in Nairobi, wazimamoto came into women’s houses as they slept—“after all, these men looked like ordinary men”—carrying “a sort of sucking rubber tube that they would stick in your hands while you were asleep and draw the blood out of your body and leave you there, and eventually you would die.” ^[66] A few years later, in the legal African settlement of Pumwani in Nairobi, a woman said that wazimamoto “used to come in the night, they would come into your room very softly and before you knew it they put something in your arm to draw out the blood, and then they would leave you and they would take your blood to the hospital and leave you for dead.”

q:

Couldn’t you scream for help?

a:

They put bandages over your mouth, and also, these people who worked for the wazimamoto, they were skilled, so if they found you asleep they could take your blood so quietly that you would not wake up, in fact you would never wake up.^[67]

A decade later, another Nairobi woman said “wazimamoto killed people, they cut their throats…and took the blood to people in the hospital.” ^[68]

These accounts invert those cited in the previous section. Medical practitioners come to Africans, unannounced and unwelcomed, and do not heal, but silence and kill. In stark contrast to official concerns, the men were so skilled that they could take blood without waking the victim. Their technical knowledge was powerful; not only could they draw blood with something this particular woman could not name, but they could bandage her mouth to keep her from screaming. Was this a depiction of the abuse of medical technology—the use of bandages not to bind wounds but to gag—or was it a representation of chloroform, the anesthetic placed on gauze for a woman to inhale, to put her to sleep? Indeed, my allusion to “African speaking” in the title of this section is more ironic than the term’s normal use as shorthand for African sources. As the next section shows, many African concerns about the power of European therapies were about what they did to African speech.

The point of this chapter is not to establish how accurate the women quoted above might be, or what these accounts really represent. Such an exercise would strip vampire stories of the rich contradictions of their details. After all, Western biomedicine takes blood and studies and interprets it. Hospitals require blood and use a number of techniques to get it from people; people need not be conscious to have their blood taken. People die in hospitals and die because they never get to hospitals. But these statements are not the facts and fantasies with which vampire stories, even the most medical ones, are told. I would suggest that these particular Nairobi accounts, with their talk of skill and how these men looked like ordinary men, observe the transition in yaws therapy, in which African dressers, at least the most reliable ones, were sent out unsupervised to give bismuth injections. They do not fully describe it, parody it, or represent it: all of these terms simply reduce the complexity of rubber sucking tubes and the drained bodies left to die to a single procedure.

For the same reason, it is almost impossible to argue that African vampire accusations misrepresent blood transfusions because of two kinds of evidence, chronological and generic. In terms of the chronological evidence, such misrepresentation seems unlikely. Until World War II, blood transfusions were rare in the tropics—without refrigeration or paraffin-lined containers, blood could not be stored long enough for a future transfusion,^[69] and even when transfusion became widespread, there was a perpetual shortage of donors.^[70] In terms of the genre of evidence provided by bazimamoto stories, the idea of such a misrepresentation reduces the complexity of the clinic, the syringe, and “noticing” to a single medical procedure; it turns vampire stories into accounts of medical techniques, rather than stories involving medical tools and technologies. Africans did not witness strange practices and then tell fabulous stories about them. Far more goes into any story than a strange event and its oral reconstruction. When Africans saw things that were both medical and strange, they reported them as such, not as bazimamoto. During a sleeping-sickness epidemic in western Uganda in 1931, for example, one man “saw some Europeans, they came in vehicles and when they came across someone they injected him then and there. I don’t know if bazimamoto could do things like that.” ^[71]

As the following pages make clear, these stories quoted above are also about chloroform, hospitals, tools, and property. But the changes in colonial medical care and the increased use of African dressers to administer intramuscular injections outside clinics in the early 1920s figure in these stories, where the descriptions of these men’s skill and stealth is in sharp contrast to the official anxieties that African dressers were unprepared for their jobs. The tellers of bazimamoto stories saw African dressers as skilled and practiced in their work, and this parodied official anxieties—which Africans may well have shared, but for different reasons—about who had the right and the power to administer medicine.

Did stories of blood rushed to hospitals from township rooms or rural airstrips invert and subvert Western biomedicine? There is no hard and fast answer, of course, and hospitals may have been a more concrete and simplistic category than bazimamoto was. Vampire accusations generally featured medicalized bureaucracies—fire brigades, medical departments, or medical department trucks on the northeast coast of postwar Kenya that “patrolled the streets in the dead of night…and should it come upon a straggler, draws from his veins all his blood with a rubber pump, leaving his body in the gutter limp and drained.” ^[72] One Ugandan man said that people feared the Yellow Fever Department because “they were making some drugs out of blood or they were using it with something else, that was where they were taking their victims.” ^[73] Indeed, well into the 1950s in most places, it was the mobility of agents of wazimamoto that was so fearsome: they “do not walk along the paths like honest men, but wander through the bush like outlaws.” ^[74] In Kenya, children had to learn “roadcrossing” in the bush to be safe from kachinja.^[75]

But in Africa as elsewhere, hospitals were unique institutions: they claimed great expertise, they housed the living and the dead, and their employees handled the most intimate body products. The cultural meaning of these body products was different in different places, but Africans were aware of how they could be used. In central Tanganyika, for example, people complained that maternity clinics would allow strangers to handle placenta, the stuff of the most effective witchcraft.^[76] Among many peoples in the Belgian Congo, how placenta was handled, and by whom, proved a crucial determinant in attendance at maternity clinics.^[77] But such concerns and resistances have less to do with colonial medicine than with common sense about taking medicines or giving body products to strangers: in rural Africa only the very ill or the very curious ignored the obvious dangers.^[78] But hospitals could support African practices: in urban Central Africa, women used maternity hospitals to maintain seclusion better than they could in township housing.^[79]

European authors, however, relished examples of Africans fearing hospitals for reasons no more complex than white cannibals. A CMS nurse claimed that children were disciplined in Uganda by being told that white people would eat them; hence they howled while waiting in hospitals.^[80] In 1920, a missionary in the Belgian Congo terrified his house servant when he sterilized the black rubber gloves he would use in his first surgery: it looked as if he was boiling hands. All was resolved when the servant saw the missionary put on the gloves rather than eat them.^[81] In the early 1960s, a European doctor told a journalist that he had trouble getting blood donors since Africans believed that he drank the blood himself.^[82] Such accounts elided specific African anxieties about what happened to body parts in surgery, or during autopsy, anxieties that doctors took quite seriously in early colonial Africa: surgeons routinely allowed Africans to watch surgeries to demonstrate that body parts were neither taken nor eaten.^[83] Years later, when surgery took place without observers, doctors anticipated whispered accusations that they did terrible things with the body parts they removed in operations.^[84] Outside of hospitals, stories about blood-drinking were not told as racial stories: when the young T. O. Beidelman donated blood for a Maasai man in Tanganyika, a young Maasai man asked him who would drink it.^[85]

Among the men and women interviewed for this project, hospitals never entered the social imagination as sites of abduction until well into the 1950s. Only then—when the larger teaching and research hospitals had been built or were in the final stages of construction—did people begin to talk about hospitals as places of great danger. Once Mulago Hospital was completed in Kampala in 1962, people claimed that skeletons were taken from the living, not the dead: when they heard sirens, they knew that trucks were going to “catch people” for this purpose.^[86] Hospital-based extractions were not specific and embodied, but social. In Kampala, it was said that children sold their playmates to Mulago to get bicycles.^[87] At the same time that Ugandans said their blood was taken to Kenya to treat Mau Mau victims, people in Nairobi kept their children far away from King George V Hospital, where they said that white people would cut them up for blood and body parts.^[88]

As hospitals began to capture the imagination of urban Africans in the late colonial era, Africans claimed that blood was being taken from welfare departments as well.^[89] At the same time, however, officials became concerned about the blood accusations hurled at medical researchers in rural East Africa. In 1944, officials in Northern Rhodesia stopped a researcher from taking blood, skin, and stool samples, allowing him to do research only in the daytime, accompanied by a district officer and an African policeman.^[90] In 1948, the venerable doctor Hope Trant—long considered a banyama for whatever happened in her hospital in Tuduma—was accused of drinking blood by Africans while she participated in a medical survey.^[91] Medical survey teams were accused and sometimes attacked. The 1955 mediation by J. A. K. Leslie, the district commissioner near Kigoma, Tanganyika, did not establish that white people did not drink blood, but revealed the benefits of science.

A WHO survey party were in the area, and after the usual explanations to the chiefs and public, had settled in an area…to do a general health survey of the population. Unfortunately one of the assistants was seen to suck a blood sample into a pipette, and overnight there was panic among the population with the likelihood of violence, because, it was said, the Mumiani was at it again and Europeans were drinking blood. One of the nurses wore lipstick, and this was quoted to me as evidence. I had to stop the survey and remove all the staff, and I took my tent and camped in the area for a week to calm things down. It so happened that a separate lot of doctors, from Burroughs Wellcome, were in the District trying out a new worm drug, which was a great success. So for a week I carried round with me a bottle of worms “acquired” from local schoolboys, which was a strong argument in favor of medical surveys. Eventually the WHO survey was restarted a few miles away.^[92]

Smearing, Spraying, and Oral History

Put simply, wazimamoto used medical technologies to subdue and penetrate their victims: they “used needles which they could inject into the hands and suck.” ^[93] Sometimes whites used tubes, or needles connected to tubes.^[94] Such statements neither fetishized tools nor misunderstood them but made them the marker of certain kinds of embodied extraction and transformation. The needle itself had no power; what was fearsome was the use to which it was put.

Patricia Turner has argued that items of material culture are sometimes misinterpreted by both sides of a racial divide, and this misinterpretation generates rumors.^[95] I argue something quite different, that items of material culture are spoken of specifically to mark cultural differences. When white people sucked African blood—or had it sucked by their African employees—it could not be confused as the same kind of healing Africans did. Thus a Ugandan man assured my assistant and I that traditional healers “were treating sick people, and although they were sucking blood, they were sucking blood in order to relieve the pain of the sick person…the blood they were sucking was not for sale as the bazimamoto was doing.” Indeed, “some people were refusing to go to the hospitals because they feared that they might be injected without their noticing and they were always in a panic about the bazimamoto, and they thought that in this process of injections they might suck their blood.” ^[96] Another Ugandan man thought that these stories developed because “when the Europeans were here we had a lot of diseases.…They were doing research…and it was not easy to convince somebody to volunteer to have research done on them so what they did was to kidnap those people.” ^[97] In southwest Tanganyika in 1934, it was said that the government paid to have Africans “bled with instruments,” and then a cloth was put over their faces and they were killed and their blood taken. The anthropologist Godfrey Wilson was regarded with fear: “He has all the instruments.” ^[98] Vampire stories locate the tools and technologies of European medicine in ways that are different from other narrative forms.

This very difference may require that vampire stories be read as a genre: such a reading conflates the set elements of the clinic, the needle, and blood much as the speaker did. What follows is an African historian’s apostasy: in this and the next chapter I am interested in the generic, the formulaic elements that make a good vampire story, rather than in accounts of specific injections and medical conditions. This is a writing strategy, one that enables me to use these stories to map a landscape outside of lived experience. It privileges words and images over voices. I am trying to contextualize the genre of vampire stories, by discussing the material objects and therapeutic procedures that appear in narratives that cross cultural and racial boundaries to disclose ideas about colonial medicine.

And what were those ideas? Drugs, and practitioners’ knowledge of them, were powerful and disturbing, in part because of how those drugs were applied. A man in colonial Northern Rhodesia was said to be banyama, selling people to the Belgian Congo, and was driven out of his village. How did people know he did it? asked Ian Cunnison: “He was seen with a man whom he had evidently doped with a needle.” ^[99] In Uganda—and Uganda alone—the bazimamoto were said to have sprayed “some medicine directly on their victims, and afterwards they would capture them when they were nervous. It was certain they were using a medicine that no one knew about because no one knows what it was.” ^[100] These are generic fantasies and generic proof, and they reveal the power of various drugs and the power of Europeans over their application.^[101] In Uganda, such descriptions of “spraying”—fumigating—probably referred to the fumes of public health campaigns as personal attacks. Public health itself marked a shift in colonial medicine away from walk-in dispensaries to state-sponsored campaigns.^[102] When they were first introduced as a plague control measure in southern Uganda in the 1930s, fumigants were hailed as an alternative to the “rat destruction drives” of the 1920s and the sometimes overzealous burning of plague victims’ huts.^[103] But the fumigants used were often lethal: poisonous insecticides were often used on human dwellings in the 1930s, on the grounds that the smell was so strong that the occupants would leave the house.^[104] The state’s use of fumigants increased the number of homes invaded and sprayed for plague fleas, but from the data I have it is not at all clear if these descriptions of spraying marked the power of drugs themselves or the invasive nature of public health campaigns.

Bazimamoto stories are those in which Europeans get the upper hand. They were not necessarily smarter than Africans, but they had better tools, more power, and, most especially, better drugs. “There were some Europeans who would come and capture Africans.” ^[105] “Any human being except whites could fall victim; it depended on luck. Whites never fell victim because they were the masters.” ^[106] “They captured everybody, they did not discriminate against any race…but I never heard that they took Europeans.” Trying to capture Indians, said a man in Uganda, “was not easy…you could make problems for yourself.” ^[107] Men in Kenya said that wazimamoto tied their victims’ hands and feet before they took their blood, but in Uganda, “They could give their victims some drugs to make them sleep, especially the Africans.…they could do this during the night…and take their victim to their destination when he was helpless, they could use these drugs whenever they came across their victims.” ^[108] In Tanganyika, they used drugs that made people “unable to do anything. After this they hang you upside down and put big needles into the big veins to get blood.” ^[109]

The issues here are far more than medicalized modes of capture located in race, but of a gendered African susceptibility to one form of medication. Men and women told similar stories, but in those stories, they described the different ways men and women responded to European drugs and technologies. Condensing several events into one scenario, even in response to a question, helps a speaker present himself or herself as a victim,^[110] and being a victim was gendered. In western Kenya—on the other side of the lake from Kampala—men said victims “were injected in the head with a bloodsucking needle.” ^[111] A man who was captured by wazimamoto on a sisal estate in Kenya in 1924 returned to Siaya District and told his friends that he and his friends “were taken to a small room…their hands and legs were tied…outside the room they were injected in the head.” ^[112] Men in Congo recalled that batumbula had “the famous injection” that made their victims unconscious; some said it was an injection in the head.^[113] In Ugandan vampire stories, Africans were made powerless by drugs administered externally to the mouth and nose: anesthesia in general and chloroform in particular had a power and meaning far beyond its use by missionaries as “a means of winning the confidence and trust of the people.” ^[114] According to men, the bazimamoto “were capturing people and taking them someplace when they were unconscious.” These drugs, “could make their victims dull.” “They had something like a drug that made them unconscious…the victims could not know where they were coming from or where they were going.” “These victims would come and sniff at caliform, then they would become sleepy and taken without noticing, and they would not know where they were going or where they were coming from.” When someone was given “caliform…to sniff he could not escape, but only be unconsciously moving.” Men would “become stupid.” “They would bring you back when you were almost a dead person.” “They collapsed on the walk back home because all their blood was taken.” ^[115]

No one in Kenya, male or female, even those who reported their friends’ recollections of wazimamoto, thought anyone survived bloodsucking. People died at once because all their blood was taken; they were “left lifeless” and “never came back to tell tales.” ^[116] When victims were kept in pits, however, “those people whose blood was removed constantly were fed properly to make them produce more blood.” ^[117] In the colonial Belgian Congo, victims who did not escape were eaten, but first they were fed well with sugar water and sugarcane.^[118] Some men in Uganda had a different vision: “These victims were kept in a camp, and they were not paid for their blood but they were captives, forced to be there.” Blood was taken “every three months, every four months.” ^[119] Some men said women were the victims bazimamoto preferred, since they had more blood than men but would not fight their captors as men did.^[120] Indeed, in southwest Tanganyika in the mid 1930s, it was said that menstruating women would not go near the places where whites were said to take African blood.^[121] Women in Uganda did not report long captivities, but either told of being left for dead or of being driven to a place in Entebbe, the capital, where other victims were kept, “looking dormant and still.” Throughout East and Central Africa, women spoke of “bandages on your mouth” or “masks smeared with drugs” that “smelled bad.” In Uganda, as in areas of Tanganyika, “They had some rooms and some instruments like masks that they used to cover your mouth.” These instruments made men “dull, or impotent” but women in particular “could not shout…they could not talk again.” ^[122] When a woman kidnapped by batumbula in colonial Congo in the 1940s was found, “She did not speak when they asked her questions. They brought her directly to the hospital for a few injections. They said she had been hospitalized before.” ^[123] A dozen years later, Congolese claimed that Africans were killed in “the big hospitals in Stanleyville and Bunia.…Those who were kept alive were put into trances, sleeping strange sleeps, so that when they came awake they were unable to do anything except the white man’s bidding.” ^[124]

This evidence takes my discussion of anesthesia in two directions: the drug that virtually takes on a life of its own in African popular culture and the drug as medical practice.^[125] The first has to do with the qualities of chloroform—the drug that puts people to sleep—and its administration, which was perhaps the least professionalized aspect of medicine in colonial Uganda. The actual work of administering chloroform was quite simple, one of the reasons it was preferred over ether in the nineteenth century: a gauze pad was placed over a patient’s nose and drops of the drug were periodically put on the pad. In Africa’s rural hospitals, sweepers, orderlies, and European visitors were often called upon to administer the drug during routine operations.^[126] Such practices blurred otherwise well-enforced hospital hierarchies, suggesting the generalized medicalized bureaucracies people feared. The second question—why was the drug that put people to sleep so terrifying, and why was that form of the terror so gendered?—cannot be answered by asking questions solely about chloroform or its application. Such questions would shape answers that were about chloroform, not about African ideas about medical conditions or how they were caused.

What questions emerge from the formulaic quality of the evidence presented above, the smeared and sprayed drugs and the potent masks? I suggest these had profound meanings because these techniques of medicating replicated the techniques of variolation and the application of above-the-skin cures that the peoples of southern Uganda considered efficacious and powerful. The intensity of chloroform to terrify and stupefy came in part from its application. But the drugs and cures that had such power could also be modified, by reconstituting a vaccination or repacking a wound with a more familiar substance. Interpreting bazimamoto stories as individual testimony, or as memory, however fantastic, would translate these terms into individual experience and medical history; it would not allow for this reading of “smearing” or “spraying.” But why would “injections in the head” be the form of bloodsucking most feared by men in Siaya District in Kenya or parts of the Belgian Congo? Given that many of these men from Siaya had been migrant laborers in the cities of the coast,^[127] “injections in the head” may play on coastal mumiani stories in which victims are hung upside down to drain their blood or needles injected into the vein on their necks.^[128] Other interpretations suggest themselves: the diagnosis for advanced sleeping sickness involved removing lymphatic fluid (hence the Northern Rhodesian banyama removal of “brains,” for example) and local, well-defended smallpox variolation involved making incisions on the head.^[129] But not being able to guess is perhaps the most reliable answer here: the specificity with which men in both Siaya and the Belgian Congo feared “injections in the head” indicates that such injections replicated another healing practice that was considered effective and strong. This particular image in particular local vampire stories does not reveal a medical misrepresentation, but local practices.

But why the particular efficacies of silenced women and sickly men? I am hardly the first to see the gendered meanings in any new medical technique, particularly chloroform, produced beyond medical control.^[130] Yet East African women resisted this control. Before 1925, chloroform was rarely used in childbirth in Uganda.^[131] In less than a decade, its meaning to East African women was terrifying: at Nairobi’s African Maternity Hospital, women “flatly refused to inhale” chloroform at any stage in their labor or during episiotomies or the stitching that followed.^[132] Did these women—who probably had heard of “bandages on your mouth”—associate inhaling chloroform with speechlessness? The meaning of speech to East African women, and their specifically medicalized understanding of how speech could be taken from them, is not something easily understood, but it does add another dimension, at least, to the feminist literature that argues that recuperating the voices of colonized women is all but impossible.^[133] Rather than attempt to insert these accounts of silenced women into a secondary literature on women in the region (however provocative that literature might be),^[134] I want to suggest that these accounts foreground women’s own historical understanding of speaking and the ways in which it was controlled by colonial regimes; these accounts are women’s own descriptions of speech and consciousness, not of the problematized ways to recuperate them. What is important here about “caliform,” however, is what it does to the mind and to consciousness, and the different ways in which men and women articulate what the drug does. While injections remained an embodied practice that could cause leprosy (and much else), they were subcutaneous procedures: they may have been fearsome and fascinating because of what white people were able to take from those regions of the body. As a body of technique, injections may have been a reasonable cure for such a wide variety of maladies because of their association with the misfortunes and diseases of the modern era. Anesthesia—the drug that doctors boasted “put them to sleep”—became a medium of capture in and of itself in part because its application, like that of needles in the head, was based on older, effective local practices.

Conclusions

This chapter argues that a concept of “the voice” disembeds the speaker from social and embodied histories. Those histories might be recuperated from the words and images, wordplays and genres, with which individuals speak. Such a general reading provides a very specific history of the gendered meanings of biomedical procedures first introduced in colonial times. Those regions of the skin articulated in nuns’ stories of Africans repacking ulcer treatments and of Africans’ stories of Africans sniffing at chloroform were used to construct a new narrative in which ideas of curing and control were valued according to their embodied application as well as their medical results. Interpreting vampire stories across a wide cultural and geographic area for their common elements allows for a very specific history of colonial medical practices.

Notes

4. “Why Is Petrol Red?”

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

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

Vampires and Wage Labor

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

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

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

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

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

Vehicles and Vampires

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

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

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

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

Locating Bureaucracy

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

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

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

Concealing Men

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

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

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

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

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

Revealing Labor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tools of Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

Notes

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