1. Ann Beck, “The Problems of British Medical Administration in East Africa between 1900 and 1930,” Bull. Hist. Med. 36 (1962): 275–83; Steven Feierman, “Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa,” African Studies Review 28, 2–3 (1982); 73–148; Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 56; A. Chilube, “The Clash between Modern and Indigenous Medicine,” Makerere Medical Journal 9 (1965): 36; Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992), 215–34; Maryinez Lyons, “The Power to Heal: African Medical Auxiliaries in Colonial Belgian Congo and Uganda,” in Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks, eds., Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in India and Africa (London: I. B. Taurus, 1994), 202–23.

2. Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 21–28, 200; Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender, Culture and the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1997); and Belinda Bozzoli with the assistance of Mmantho Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991); but see also Margaret Strobel and Sarah Mirzah, Three Swahili Women: Life Histories from Mombasa, Kenya (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), and Jean Davison and the Women of Mutira, Voices from Mutira: Lives of Rural Gikuyu Women (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1989).

3. Shula Marks, ed., “Not Either an Experimental Doll”: The Separate Worlds of Three South African Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Richard Price, Alabi’s World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); see also David William Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo, Burying SM: The Politics of Knowledge and the Sociology of Power in Africa (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1992).

4. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History; Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts?” Representations 37 (1992): 14–19; Christopher A. Waterman, “‘Our Tradition Is a Very Modern Tradition’: Popular Music and the Construction of Pan-Yoruba Identity,” Ethnomusicology 34, 3 (1990): 367–79; Corinne A. Kratz, “‘We’ve Always Done It Like This’: ‘Tradition’ and ‘Innovation’ in Okiek Ceremonies,” Comp. Studies in Soc. and History 35, 1 (1993): 30–65.

5. Ann Laura Stoler, “‘In Cold Blood’: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives,” Representations 37 (1992): 182.

6. Elizabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 50–55. By “cueing” neither Tonkin nor I mean some Pavlovian response to our questions, but rather how certain conventions of narrative and modes of talk are occasioned by cues of style and form, a point made several years ago by Robin Law, “How Truly Traditional Is Our Traditional History? The Case of Samuel Johnson and the Recording of Yoruba Oral History,” History in Africa 11 (1984): 180–202, esp. 195–199. Cueing problematizes recent debates about the politics of interviewing; see e.g., Renato Rosaldo, “From the Door of His Tent: The Fieldworker and the Inquisitor,” in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 77–97, Marjorie Mbilinyi, “‘I’d Have Been a Man’: Politics and the Labor Process in Producing Personal Narratives,” in Personal Narratives Group, ed., Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 204–27, Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 199–225; and Charles van Onselen, “The Reconstruction of a Rural Life from Oral Testimony: Critical Notes on the Methodology in the Study of a Black South African Sharecropper,” J. Peasant Studies 20, 3 (1993): 494–514.

7. Meredeth Turshen, The Political Ecology of Disease in Tanzania (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 5; for triumphalism rampant, see Oliver Ransford, “Bid the Sickness Cease”: Disease in the History of Black Africa (London: J. Murray, 1983); on financial constraints inhibiting triumphs, see Ann Beck, A History of British Medical Administration in East Africa, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), and Michael Warboys, “Science and British Colonial Imperialism, 1895–1940” (Ph.D. diss., Sussex University, 1979), ch. 2.

8. See Lyons, “Power to Heal,” 202–3.

9. Megan Vaughan, “Healing and Curing: Issues in the Social History and Anthropology of Medicine in Africa,” Social History of Medicine 7, 2 (1994): 283–95.

10. John Iliffe, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

11. Frantz Fanon, “Medicine and Colonization,” in Studies in a Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 121–45; see also Vaughan, Curing Their Ills.

12. But see Warwick Anderson, “‘Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man Is Vile’: Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse,” Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 506–28; and my “‘They Could Make their Victims Dull:’ Genres and Genres, Fantasies and Cures in Colonial Southern Uganda,” Am. Hist. Rev. 100, 5 (1995): 1379–1402.

13. Carol Summers, “Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907–1925,” Signs: J. of Women in Culture and Society 16 (1991): 787–807; Nancy Rose Hunt, “Negotiated Colonialism: Domesticity, Hygiene and Birth Work in the Belgian Congo” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1992), passim, and “Colonial Fairy Tales and the Knife and Fork Doctrine in the Heart of Africa,” in Karen Tranberg Hansen, ed., African Encounters with Domesticity (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 143–66; Dea Birkett, “The ‘White Woman’s Burden’ in ‘The White Man’s Grave’: The Introduction of British Nurses in Colonial West Africa,” in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992), 177–88; Shula Marks, Divided Sisterhood: The South African Nursing Profession and the Making of Apartheid (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Press, 1995).

14. Quoted in Lyons, “Power to Heal,” 209.

15. Sir Albert R. Cook, Uganda Memories (1887–1940) (Kampala: Uganda Society, 1945), 93.

16. Kate Timpson, “Patients and Nurse at Mengo,” Mercy and Truth 3, 36 (December 1899): 289–90.

17. Ibid.; Diane Zeller, “The Establishment of Western Medicine in Buganda” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1972), 221ff.; 380–84.

18. Cook, Uganda Memories, 124; Kate Timpson, “Notes from a Nurse in Uganda,” Mercy and Truth 3, 34 (October 1899): 245–46; see also Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 80–82, 307–8.

19. Allan Kinghorn, “Human Trypanosomiasis in the Luangwa Valley, Northern Rhodesia,” Annals of Trop. Med. and Parasitology 19, 3 (1925): 281–300.

20. Sister M. Louis, Love Is the Answer (The Story of Mother Kevin) (Paterson, N.J.: Saint Anthony’s Guild, 1964), 61.

21. Cook, Uganda Memories, 122–23, quoting his diary from 1900.

22. Ibid., 124.

23. Louis, Love Is the Answer, 71.

24. Terence O. Ranger, “Godly Medicine: The Ambiguities of Mission Medicine in Southeast Tanzania, 1900–1945,” Social Science and Medicine 15B (1981): 265; Paul S. Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” J. Afr. History 37 (1996): 261–81; Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, 56–60. According to A. J. Evans, “The Ila V.D. Campaign,” Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 9 (1944): 39–46, for example, the Ila “happily” received treatment for syphilis in wartime Northern Rhodesia. Ila came “out of the grass shelter and announce that they are ‘on treatment,’ each such announcement being greeted by cheers and laughter from their assembled friends awaiting their turn for examination.”

25. Marc H. Dawson, “The 1920s Anti-Yaws Campaigns and Colonial Medical Policy in Kenya,” Int. J. Afr. Hist. Studies 20, 3 (1987): 423–24; Lyons, “Power to Heal,” 109–10; Summers, “Intimate Colonialism.”

26. P. H. Ward, director of medical and sanitary services, to chief secretary, Livingstone, 6 July 1932 (National Archives of Zambia [henceforth cited as NAZ], SEC2/813, Luwingu Tour Reports, 1931–32); director of medical and sanitary services, Livingstone, to chief secretary, Livingstone, 11 October 1934 (NAZ, SEC2/2/525, Tsetse Fly Control, 1932–36); Lyons, “Power to Heal,” 209–10.

27. K. Ardell, “In Teso Country,” Mission Hospital 31, 350 (1927): 62; A. T. Schofield, “Some Patients at Toro,” Mission Hospital 31, 353 (1927): 138; Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 323–26; Dawson, “1920s Anti-Yaws Campaigns,” 428.

28. Ardell, “In Teso Country”; D. A. Brewster, “A Day at the Dispensary at Ng’ora,” Mission Hospital 36, 411 (1932): 90. These demands probably did not stop in the 1930s, but African dispensers did not write about them; see Simon Semkubuge, “The Work of an African Medical Officer,” Uganda Teachers Journal 1 (1939): 99–101, and Lyons, “Power to Heal.”

29. Quoted in Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 325.

30. Clark E. Cunningham, “Thai ‘Injection Doctors’: Antibiotic Mediators,” Social Science and Medicine 4, 1 (1970): 1–24; Caroline H. Bledsoe and Monica F. Goubard, “The Reinterpretation of Western Pharmaceutical among the Mende of Sierra Leone,” Social Science and Medicine 21, 3 (1985): 275–82; J.-M. Michel, “Why Do People Like Medicines? A Perspective from Africa,” Lancet 210, 1 (1985): 210–11; Vaughan, “Healing and Curing”; Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evangelism.”

31. John Roscoe, The Baganda: An Account of Their Customs and Beliefs (London: Macmillan, 1911), 98–101; Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 112–16; N. C. Roles, “Tribal Surgery in East Africa during the Nineteenth Century, Part 2—Therapeutic Surgery,” East Afr. Med. J. 44, 1 (1967): 20–32, at 22.

32. L. P. Mair, An African People in the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge and Sons, 1934), 250.

33. “Dawa ya Sindano,” East Afr. Med. J. 28, 11 (1951): 476; Ranger, “Godly Medicine,” 264–68; Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: Sleeping Sickness and the Social History of Zaire, 1890–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 188–90; Barbara A. Bianco, “The Historical Anthropology of a Mission Hospital in Northwestern Kenya” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1992), 167–78; Megan Vaughan, “Health and Hegemony: Representation of Disease and the Creation of a Colonial Subject in Nyasaland,” in Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks, eds., Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in India and Africa (London: I. B. Taurus, 1994), 173–201.

34. Luise White, “The Needle and the State, or, The Making of Unnational Sovereignty” (paper presented to workshop on Immunization and the State, Delhi, India, 16–17 January 1997).

35. Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 308ff.

36. Ibid., 325ff.; Dawson, “1920s Anti-Yaws Campaigns,” 417–35; Ranger, “Godly Medicine,” 265; Lyons, “Power to Heal,” 212–14.

37. Cook, Uganda Memories, 52.

38. Quoted in Hunt, “Negotiated Colonialism,” 258.

39. R. A. B. Leakey, “At Work in Toro Hospital,” Mission Hospital, 33 (1929): 153; Hunt, “Negotiated Colonialism,” 258; Lyons, “Power to Heal,” 218–19; Dawson, “1920s Anti-Yaws Campaigns,” 228–29.

40. Ranger, “Godly Medicine,” 265. See also H. R. A. Philip, Tumutumu Hospital Annual Report (1924), quoted in John Wilkinson, “The Origin of Infectious Disease in East Africa, with Special Reference to the Kikuyu People,” East Afr. Med. J. 34, 10 (1957): 550. The question of the importance of where injections took place requires further investigation. In Northern Rhodesia in 1930, Africans were eager for intravenous injections that could cure sleeping sickness, but refused transport to hospitals to get them. See J. F. Gilkes, medical officer, “Report on Sleeping Sickness in the Lower End of the Luangwa Valley and Along the New and Old Great East Roads (July–August 1930)” (NAZ, SEC3/523/1, Trypanosomiasis, Sleeping Sickness in Northern Rhodesia—Luangwa Valley, 1929–30).

41. Dawson, “1920s Anti-Yaws Campaigns,” 427–28. Cook’s private practice—presumably like that of other mission doctors—was a major source of revenue for his mission’s hospital; see Minutes of Medical Committee, 23 November 1933, Church Missionary Society Archives, University Library, University of Birmingham.

42. Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 321–27.

43. J. N. P. Davies, “The Development of ‘Scientific’ Medicine in the African Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara,” Medical History 3, 1 (1959): 47–57. For abortionists in eastern Kenya, see Lynn M. Thomas, “Regulating Reproduction: Men, Women and the State in Kenya, 1920–1970” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997); in Zambia, see Bryan T. Callahan,“‘Veni, VD, Vici’? Reassessing the Ila Syphilis Epidemic, 1900–1963,” J. Southern Afr. Studies 23, 3 (1997): 421–40.

44. Roscoe, The Baganda, 12, 281, 358. Adulterers lost an eye, thieves a hand; when the king broke the foot of a tardy messenger, he often sent him to a healer to make a splint for the bone. Bemba surgeons removed lips and noses as punishments; as late as 1930, Audrey Richards saw the Bemba paramount chief’s mutilated victims (Audrey Richards Papers, LSE, book 2, 20 June 1930). See also A. L. Epstein, “Response to Social Crisis: Aspects of Oral Aggression in Central Africa,” Scenes from African Urban Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), 166–68.

45. Roscoe, The Baganda, 102–3; J. N. P. Davies, “The History of Syphilis in Uganda,” Bull. World Health Org. 15 (1956): 1041–55, and “The Development of ‘Scientific’ Medicine in the African Kingdom of Bunyoro-Kitara,” Medical History 3, 1 (1959): 47–57, at 53–54; see also Gloria Waite, “Public Health in Pre-Colonial East Central Africa,” Social Science and Medicine 24, 3 (1987): 197–208. Yaws and syphilis are both caused by trypanosomes, but Marc Dawson, “1920s Anti-Yaws Campaigns,” 417–35, has argued that the distinction between syphilis and yaws is not really the issue, since the diseases provide a cross-immunity to each other. Thus anti-yaws measures increased the incidence of syphilis by removing the immunity yaws conferred.

46. F. J. Lambkin, “An Outbreak of Syphilis in a Virgin Soil: Notes on Syphilis in the Uganda Protectorate,” in D’Arcy Power and J. Keogh Murphy, eds., A System of Syphilis (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), 2: 339–54. It is noteworthy that syphilis was blamed on indigenous medical practices, contrary to elite men’s assertions that the epidemic was the inevitable result of the emancipation of women; see Summers, “Intimate Colonialism,” 787–807, and Megan Vaughan, “Syphilis in Colonial East and Central Africa: The Social Construction of an Epidemic,” in T. Ranger and P. Slack, eds., Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 269–302.

47. Roles, “Tribal Surgery in East Africa during the Nineteenth Century,” 28–29; Davies, “Scientific Medicine,” 53; Roscoe, The Baganda, 102–3.

48. Ronald Frankenberg and Joyce Leeson, “Disease, Illness and Sickness: Social Aspects of the choice of Healer in a Lusaka Suburb,” in J. B. Loudon, ed., Social Anthropology of Medicine (London: Academic Press, 1976), 233–37; L. S. B. Leakey, The Southern Kikuyu before 1903 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 3: 889–91. I am grateful to Charles Ambler for this reference.

49. Cook, Uganda Memories, 52.

50. Eugenia W. Herbert, “Smallpox Inoculation in Africa,” J. Afr. Hist. 16, 4 (1975): 539–59; Marc H. Dawson, “Socioeconomic Change and Disease: Smallpox in Colonial Kenya, 1880–1920,” in Steven Feierman and John Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 90–103; Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine.”

51. In 1929 a European sanitation officer lost a hand, and letters were sent to the kingdom’s parliament threatening to kill the king’s ministers in a struggle over plague inoculations in Buganda (letter from Archdeacon G. S. Daniell, acting secretary, Church Missionary Society, to H. D. Hooper, CMS secretary, London, 23 July 1929, Church Missionary Society Archives, University Library, University of Birmingham).

52. Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 325, 339, 347n; see also Vaughan, “Health and Hegemony,” for complaints about inactive vaccines, 185–86. Elsewhere in colonial Africa, vaccines were reinterpreted; see I. R. Phimister, “The ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and Its Impact on the Southern Rhodesian Mining Industry,” Central Afr. J. of Medicine 19, 7 (1973): 147.

53. Bruce Fetter, “The Lualabourg Revolt at Elisabethville,” Afr. Hist. Stud. 2, 2 (1969): 273; J.-L. Vellut, “Le Katanga industriel en 1944: Malaises et anxiétés dans la société coloniale,” in Le Congo belge durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale [= Bijdragen over Belgisch-Congo tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog] (Brussels: Académie royale des sciences d’outre-mer, 1983), 493–556.

54. This question has been debated in John Janzen and William Akinstall, The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978); Steven Feierman, “Change in African Therapeutic Systems,” Social Science and Medicine 13B (1979): 277–84; Gwyn Prins, “But What Was the Disease? The Present State of Health and Healing in African Studies,” Past and Present 124 (1989): 150–79; Jean Comaroff, “Bodily Reform as Historical Practice: The Semantics of Resistance in Modern South Africa,” Int. J. of Psychology 20 (1985): 541–67; Mark Auslander, “‘Open the Wombs!’ The Symbolic Politics of Modern Ngoni Witchfinding,” in Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 167–92; Megan Vaughan, “Healing and Curing: Issues in the Social History and Anthropology of Medicine in Africa,” Social History of Medicine 7, 2 (1994): 283–95.

55. Katherine Timpson and A. R. Cook, “Mengo Hospital,” Mercy and Truth 2, 13 (January 1898): 12.

56. Dr. A. Bond, “A Record of Medical Work at Toro,” Mercy and Truth 11, 129 (September 1907): 274. Over the next few years, the king of Toro was keen to watch operations; see Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, 58.

57. Janet Miller, Jungles Preferred (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), 95.

58. J. Moffatt Thomas, secretary for native affairs, Livingstone, to chief secretary, Livingstone, 4 April 1932 (NAZ, SEC2/785, Kasama Tour Reports, 1931–32).

59. “Asiyesadiki” (“Nonbeliever”), “Mumiani,” Mambo Leo, August 1923, 4–5; E. C. Baker, “Mumiani,” Tanganyika Notes and Records 21 (1946): 108–9.

60. W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthrophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 12.

61. W. V. Brelsford, “The ‘Banyama’ Myth,” NADA 9, 4 (1967): 49.

62. D. Willis, provincial commissioner, Kasama, “Report on Banyama,” 24 March 1931 (NAZ, ZA1/9/62/21).

63. H. K. Wachanga, The Swords of Kirinyaga: The Fight for Land and Freedom, ed. Robert Whittier (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1975), 9.

64. Ofwete Muriar.

65. Anyango Mahondo, Sigoma, West Alego, Siaya District, 15 August 1986.

66. Amina Hali, Pumwani, 4 August 1976. Hali explained where women might be safe by naming three African settlements that only coexisted between late 1921 and 1926.

67. Kayaya Thababu, Pumwani, Nairobi, 7 January 1977.

68. Tabitha Waweru, Mathare, Nairobi, 13 July 1976.

69. Henry M. Feinblatt, Transfusion of Blood (New York: Macmillan, 1926), 1–11; Alexander S. Wiener, Blood Groups and Blood Transfusion (Baltimore: Stratton Medical Books, 1939), 41–47, 62–66; Joseph R. Bove et al., Practical Blood Transfusion (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 4–7; Robert M. Greendyke, Introduction to Blood Banking (Garden City, N.Y.: Medical Examination Publishing Co., 1980), 2.

70. Luise White, “Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology and Labor in East and Central Africa,” Representations 43 (1993): 27–50, 31–32; “Serious Lack of Blood Donors,” Uganda Argus, 1 January 1959, 3.

71. Abdullah Sonsomola.

72. Elspeth Huxley, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: A Journey through East Africa (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), 23.

73. Peter Kirigwa, Katwe, 14 August 1990; Samuel Mubiru, Lubya, Uganda, 28 August 1990.

74. Quoted in Willis, “Report on Banyama” (cited n. 62 above).

75. D. A. Masolo, personal communication, 22 April 1997; author’s field notes, 22 August 1986.

76. T. O. Beidelman, “Witchcraft in Ukaguru,” in John Middleton and E. H. Winter, eds., Witchcraft and Sorcery in East Africa (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 57–98.

77. Hunt, “Negotiated Colonialism,” 273ff.

78. See Bianco, “Historical Anthropology,” 165–75, for specific examples. In places where burying the dead was a specifically Christian development, hospitals may have involved people in more dealings with dead bodies than they wanted. People may have avoided hospitals, not because people died in them, but because they were requested to dispose of the bodies of those who died there.

79. Boris Gussman, Out in the Mid-Day Sun (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), 89.

80. Timpson, “Patients and Nurse,” 289–90.

81. Hunt, “Negotiated Colonialism,” 223.

82. Alastair Scobie, Murder for Magic: Witchcraft in Africa (London: Cassell, 1965), 117.

83. Cook, Uganda Memories, 50–51; D. A. Bond, “A Record of Work at Toro,” Mercy and Truth 10, 100 (1907): 103–11; R. S. T. Goodchild, “News from Kabale,” Mission Hospital 40, 461 (1936): 137–40; Audrey Richards diaries, 20–23 June 1930, Audrey I. Richards papers, LSE; Hunt, “Negotiated Colonialism,” 261–72.

84. Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 333, 116. The meaning of cutting up seems to have become increasingly menacing throughout this century. In 1900, Cook had great difficulty getting Africans to agree to postmortem examinations. Although he explained the benefits such examinations would bestow on other sick Africans, most people refused. “Slowly prejudice broke down, and one parent gave consent at once, saying, when I wished to investigate the cause of death of his son: ‘Kale, ye nyama bunyama’ (Why not, it is only meat)” (Cook, Uganda Memories, 52). No less an authority on accidental death than Idi Amin explained that one of his recently divorced wives had been found dismembered and stuffed into a gunnysack as “a result of a bungled surgical operation” (Denis Hills, Rebel People [London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978], 31n).

85. T. O. Beidelman, letter to author, 28 November 1994.

86. Francis Kigozi, Kasubi, 17 August 1990; Nechambuza Nsumba, Katwe, 20 August 1990; author’s field notes, 15, 18 August 1990; Mulago Hospital was under construction for over a decade.

87. Julia Nalongo Nakibuuka, Lubya, 21 August 1990.

88. Peter Kirigwa, Katwe, 24 August 1990; Ahmed Kiziri, Katwe, 20 August 1990; D. A. Masolo, personal communication, 24 April 1997.

89. In Mombasa, Kenya, in 1947, and Broken Hill, Northern Rhodesia, in 1957, there were boycotts of welfare departments because they were said to be places from which Africans were abducted and their blood taken. See George [Brown] to Elspeth Huxley, 20 June 1948 (Elspeth Huxley Papers, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS Afr. s. 782/2/2); Welfare Department, Broken Hill Development Corporation, January–February 1957. I am grateful to Carter Roeber for notes on this file.

90. G. Howe, provincial commissioner, Northern Province, Kasama, to chief secretary, Lusaka, 27 March 1944 (NAZ, SEC2/4/29, Native Affairs: Banyama); “Survey of Helminthic Diseases” (NAZ, SEC1/1072; I am grateful to Bryan Callahan for notes on this file ).

91. On Hope Trant’s reputation in Northern Rhodesia, see Gervas Clay, district commissioner, Isoka District, “Memorandum Concerning ‘banyama’ and ‘mafyeka’ with Special Reference to Provincial Commissioner, Kasama’s Confidential File on Banyama and to Incidents in the Isoka District during the Latter Part of 1943,” 24 January 1944 (NAZ, SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama). Trant’s own account of the accusations in Kigoma was that Africans had misunderstood a bottle of red wine on her dinner table; see Hope Trant, Not Merrion Square: Anecdotes of a Woman’s Medical Career in Africa (Toronto: Thornhill Press, 1971), 127–33; a malariologist who visited her while she participated in the survey noted the caution with which she handled body products because of mumiani accusations; see Alec Smith, Insect Man: The Fight against Malaria (London: Radcliffe Press, 1993), 31.

92. J. A. K. Leslie, letter to author, 13 March 1990. A nurse wearing lipstick and taking blood in a pipette started mumiani accusations in the Pare Mountains in Tanganyika in 1957 (John Huddleston, interview with author, Kampala, 18 August 1990).

93. Joseph Nsubuga; Isaak Bulega.

94. Ofwete Muriar, Uchonga Village, Alego, Siaya District, 11 August 1986; Pius Ouma Ogutu, Uhuyi Village, Alego, Siaya District, 19 August 1986.

95. Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 15, but see also Gladys-Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 178–202.

96. Joseph Nsubuga.

97. George W. Ggingo, Kasubi, Kampala, 15 August 1990.

98. From Godfrey Wilson’s notebooks, 1935, University of Cape Town, Manuscript and Archives Department, generously given me by James Ellison.

99. Ian Cunnison, field notes, September 1950. I am grateful to Professor Cunnison for making these available to me.

100. Gregory Sseluwagi, Lubya, 28 August 1990.

101. This is a deliberate allusion to the “standardized nightmare” of witch beliefs, which Africanists have also failed to historicize; see Monica Wilson, “Witch Beliefs and Social Structure,” Am. J. of Sociology 41, 4 (1951): 307–13.

102. Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 189–220; Vaughan, “Health and Hegemony,” 185–96.

103. Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, 40–43; Cook, Uganda Memories, 310; Zeller, “Establishment of Western Medicine,” 339–40. But by the 1930s, the incidence of plague in southern Uganda had increased. Sporting rat-catching campaigns had reduced the population of the indigenous, disease-resistant rat and created a niche for new disease-bearing rats introduced from the East African coast by the railway (Vaughan, Curing Their Ills, 40). Not all diagnoses of plague were accurate, however: by the 1940s, government doctors noted a long-standing confusion of lobar pneumonia with pneumonic plague in southern Uganda (R. S. F. Hennessey papers, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS Afr. s 1872 [25]).

104. Walter Ebling, Subtropical Entomology (San Francisco: Western Agriculture Publishing House, 1950), 5–6.

105. Ssimbwa Jjuko, Luwaze, 20 August 1990.

106. Zebede Oyoyo, Goma, Yimbo, Siaya District, 13 August 1986.

107. Abdullah Sonsomola; Yonasani Kaggwa. In Ankole in the 1950s, it was said that Sikhs captured Africans and took their blood (author’s field notes, 20 August 1990).

108. Alexander Opaka, Ndegero Uranga, Alego, Siaya District, 11 August 1986; Ofwete Muriar; Zebede Oyoyo; Gregory Sseluwagi; Yonasani Kaggwa, Katwe, 27 August 1990; Christopher Kawoya, Kasubi, 17 August 1990.

109. Lloyd William Swantz, “The Role of the Medicine Man among the Zaramo of Dar es Salaam” (Ph.D. diss., University of Dar es Salaam, 1972), 336–37. Hanging Africans upside down seems to be a version of mumiani specific to the Tanganyikan coast; a Mr. Merrill’s letter to the Tanganyikan authorities of October 1933 reported that “the victims were hung upside down over a large metal pot and the head was perforated with an iron instrument and the blood dripped into a pot.” See Peter Pels, “Mumiani: The White Vampire. A Neo-Diffusionist Analysis of Rumour,” Ethnofoor 5, 1–2 (1995): 165–87.

110. Amy Shuman, “‘Get Outa My Face’: Entitlement and Authoritative Discourse,” in Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine, Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 135–60.

111. Ofwete Muriar; see also Zebede Oyoyo, 23 August 1986.

112. Ofwete Muriar.

113. Moukadi Louis, Katuba III, Lubumbashi, 20 January 1991; Joseph Kabila Kiomba Alona, Lubumbashi, 28 March 1991. I am grateful to Bogumil Jewsiewicki for the use of these interviews.

114. Mrs. Ashton Bond, “Medical Work in Toro,” Mercy and Truth 16, 189 (1912): 308.

115. Ssimbwa Jjuko; Joseph Nsubuga; Abdullah Sonsomola; Yonasani Kaggwa.

116. Alexander Opaka; Ofwete Muriar; Nyakida Omolo, Kabura, West Alego, Siaya District, 19 August 1986; Domtita Achola, Uchonga Ukudi, Alego, Siaya District, 11 August 1986.

117. Anyango Mahondo; see also George Ggingo.

118. Joseph Kabila Kiomba Alone, Lubumbashi, 28 March 1991.

119. Joseph Nsubuga; Francis Kigozi; Yonasani Kaggwa; George Ggingo, Kasubi, 15 August 1990.

120. Yonasani Kaggwa; Ssimbwa Jjuko; Anyango Mahondo.

121. From Godfrey Wilson’s notebooks, 1935, University of Cape Town, Manuscript and Archives Department, again loaned me by James Ellison.

122. Bibiana Nalwanga, Bwase, 24 August 1990; Julia Nakibuuka Nalongo, Lubya, 21 August 1990; Magarita Kalule, Masanafu, 20 August 1990.

123. Kasongo Ngoiy, Cité Gécamines, Lubumbashi, 9 January 1991. I am grateful to Bogumil Jewsiewicki for letting me see this interview.

124. Colin Turnbull, The Lonely African (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962), 226–27.

125. Starting in the 1980s at the latest, there were commonplace East African urban legends in which thieves either sprayed or injected a drug into a home so that they could steal all the contents while the occupants slept. People have told me that a syringe found in the recovered possessions was “proof” that these stores were true. Author’s field notes, passim. See also Donald M. Johnson, “The ‘Phantom Anesthetist’ of Mattoon: A Field Study in Mass Hysteria,” J. of Abnormal and Social Psychology 40 (1945): 175–86.

126. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 26–29; A. J. Boase, “Reminiscences of Surgery in Uganda,” East Afr. Med. J. 31 (1954): 202; see also Smith, Insect Man, 30.

127. See K. K. Janmohammed, “African Labourers in Mombasa, c. 1895–1940,” Hadith 5 (1972): 156–79; Frederick Cooper, On the African Waterfront: Work and Disorder in Urban Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987).

128. Arens, Man-Eating Myth, 9; Swantz, “Role of the Medicine Man,” 335–37; J. A. K. Leslie, letter to author.

129. Dawson, “Smallpox,” 101–2.

130. Poovey, Uneven Developments, 50; see White, “Bodily Fluids,” 425–31.

131. See Summers, “Intimate Colonialism,” and Cook, Uganda Memories, 340.

132. M. Ross, matron, Lady Grigg Welfare League, African Maternity Hospital, Pumwani, to secretary, National Birthday Trust Fund, 3 October 1933 (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine Archives, S/A National Birthday Trust, F6/6, box 41). I am grateful to Lynn Thomas for these notes.

133. See esp. Gayatri Chakrobarty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; for discussions of Victorian women silenced by the introduction of chloroform, see Poovey, Uneven Developments, 24–50, 164–98; for a critique, see Luise White, “Silence and Subjectivity (A Position Paper),” in Susan Hardy Aiken et al., eds., Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 243–51.

134. Royal women could use profanity in public, for example, while commoner women had to be demure; see Nakanyike Musisi, “Women, ‘Elite Polygyny,’ and Buganda State Formation,” Signs 16, 4 (1991): 759. It seems unlikely that Western medical practices introduced a concept of the mouth as separate from the body in southern Uganda, as happened elsewhere; see Sarah Nettleson, “Protecting a Vulnerable Margin: Towards an Analysis of How the Mouth Came to Be Separated from the Body,” Sociology of Health and Illness 10, 2 (1988): 156–69; Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evangelism.” In Uganda, jawbones were the sacred relic of Ganda kings, although this had become contested terrain by the late nineteenth century. The role played by royal jawbones and skulls may have undergone radical transformation in the charged royal politics and regency of the colonial era; see Roscoe, The Baganda, 110–14, and Benjamin Ray, Myth, Ritual and Kingship in Buganda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 114–23. Elsewhere in the region, commoners’ mouths were sites of subcutaneous distress; see Brad Weiss, “Plastic Teeth Extraction: The Iconography of Haya Gastro-Sexual Affliction,” American Ethnologist 19, 3 (1992): 538–52. Luo men and women did have their front teeth extracted, however.