Part Three

5. “A Special Danger”

Gender, Property, and Blood in Nairobi, 1919–1939

This chapter is about local meanings, local usages, and local concerns. The vampire stories told in the legal African locations of Nairobi were not very different from those told elsewhere in East Africa, but they had a markedly different time frame, and, I argue, markedly different meanings. The vampire stories and the gossip about who worked for wazimamoto did more than identify unpopular accumulators or explain how bad people became rich. This chapter argues that local versions of rumor and gossip provided some of the images, metaphors, and vocabularies that created new cosmologies, new moral constructs in which new rights and obligations were invented, made concrete, and passed on. Women maintained their fragile hold on durable property rights by all the strategies colonial societies made available; they described these rights as perhaps more distinct and solid than they actually were: as this chapter shows, some of the most vocal advocates of women’s property rights were women who had never owned homes themselves. But at the same time, propertied and unpropertied women told stories about skilled wazimamoto who crept silently about women’s rooms with tubes and bandages in the night, and with stories about individual women who sold their sisters and their friends to the wazimamoto. For some women, wazimamoto stories were a way to describe the vulnerability of propertied women, the “special danger” faced by those women who lived alone. Most vampire stories were about extraction and agency; they showed the grim and mercenary motives of the colonial state, but in Nairobi these stories added another layer of agency and work to wazimamoto—women who worked for the firemen, capturing victims for them. They described a world in which relations of blood were easily expropriated and just as easily kept at bay.

Urbanization in Kenya

Perhaps the most significant way in which urban Kenya differed from rural Kenya even at the turn of the century was that women could own huts in the former but not in the latter. The degree of that ownership was often compromised by a variety of factors, such as the undermining of women’s Koranic inheritance in early colonial Mombasa by an amicable combination of their relatives and the colonial state, but wherever women’s property ownership was allowed to occur, women clung to it by whatever means were at their disposal.^[1] Women’s property ownership under colonialism was markedly different from what they had had before: in the “house property complex” of South and North-east Africa, the land a women farmed was distributed to her sons and she had custodial rights over the livestock destined for them as well.^[2] But as early as 1899 in eastern Kenya, when no legal system actually governed the area, twenty-five Maasai “loose women” built huts and were taxed on them by the Imperial British East Africa Company.^[3] A few years later in Nairobi, women built huts, divided them into rooms, and lived in one and let the others at high rents. Within a few years, women were speculating in the city’s burgeoning property market.^[4]

The question this chapter addresses is not how women achieved this, but how women talked about it, and how they constructed a world of fears and fantasies that imagined the possibility of women’s property ownership. Indeed, this is the only chapter in which all the vampire stories are taken from oral interviews. Stories about blood, about who had it and who wanted it, and how it was obtained and purchased, were stories about concrete relationships; the fluidity and intimacy of blood meant that fluid relationships could be made solid when expressed in its vocabulary.

Historically, women had a variety of strategies for controlling and directing the flow of resources— woman-to-woman marriage, the allocation of use rights from their matrimonial parcels of land, or using house property cattle for bridewealth to marry another woman.^[5] Our knowledge of these strategies is severely limited because researchers have rarely inquired about them; no one seemed to wonder how sixty-year-old childless women managed their wealth. But colonial urban life offered the legal mechanisms—and the legal space—by which these strategies could become durable. Colonial courts, land offices, and arbitrary systems of land tenure provided rights that were not under the control of fathers and husbands and brothers. “At home, what could I do? Grow crops for my husband and father. In Nairobi, I can earn my own money, for myself,” said Kayaya Thababu, who went there in the mid 1920s.^[6] Within the constraints of urban land tenure, women constructed rights for themselves and their heirs far beyond what they had been able to do previously.

But urban women’s property rights, delicate as they were, did not come about in a political vacuum. By the mid 1920s, half of Nairobi’s African property owners were women, almost all said to be prostitutes who had bought or built their houses with earnings from such work. Although the colonial state recognized the value of landlords who were also prostitutes—they had every reason to keep the peace, and their acquisitiveness kept labor circulating faster than pass laws did—officials were ambivalent about the social life that had emerged outside of colonial control, and the sense of community and stability it imparted to urban Africans in a city designed for European residence. The solution, worked out in committees between 1912 and 1915, was to allow Europeans freehold throughout the city and Africans usufruct in one small and poorly drained portion of it. In the official African location, Pumwani, finally established in 1921, plots could be transmitted to heirs but not bought and sold. The creation of one legal settlement made the two remaining African settlements illegal and had the effect of making housing in both places functionally usufruct, as few people were willing to buy houses that could be demolished at a moment’s notice. The threat of removal in Kileleshwa (demolished in 1926) and Pangani (demolished in 1939) meant that few Africans would be willing to buy houses there. The state’s ambivalence did not stop at usufruct, however: between 1912 and 1939, it made several attempts at landlordism, housing railway and municipal employees on their own estates, which rapidly became slums. Finally, the state borrowed the money to build an extension to Pumwani in 1939.^[7]

The registration of land titles, even for usufruct housing in a city, offered new opportunities for women. Generally, in rural East Africa, husbands could negotiate their control over land whether or not they themselves farmed on it.^[8] To give the Kikuyu example, men gave their wives gardens, from which their wives were obliged to feed them; children could take crops from their mothers’ gardens without permission, but not from their fathers’; men controlled the disposal of their own crops but not their wives’ surplus production. Fathers might give daughters a plot of land upon marriage, but they had to relinquish it to their brothers on demand. At marriage a man acquired for his wife a portion of his mother’s cultivated land. Men’s prestige—what John Lonsdale has called “civic virtue”—was based on how generous they were with land. Women essentially had usufruct rights to all the land they farmed, which they could extend to other women.^[9]

Usufruct was thus nothing new to East African women. What became new, after 1921, was women’s ability to control usufruct rights through registration. Colonial legislation allowed for the ungendered registration of land. In rural East Africa, land registration was to become a specific political response to adult men’s vulnerabilities in land rights; it usually followed intense land speculation.^[10] But the very fact of registration gave to local practices and strategies the power to name, and to mobilize, diverse social relations: in Nairobi in 1921, it allowed for durable rights of female inheritance and filiation.

How did women articulate their newfound control? They recounted the paperwork matter-of-factly, but they reported an anthropology of imaginary relations among themselves, townsmen, and firemen with passion and detail. Women told stories about how blood—sometimes their own, sometimes men’s—was redirected. Women in Nairobi described a natural history of new urban property rights with their own versions of stories about capture, penetration, and extraction—stories in which the men of the Nairobi Fire Brigade, black men employed by white men, captured people and removed their blood.

Stories about the wazimamoto began in Nairobi at the end of World War I. Most people said the practice ceased by the end of World War II. On the whole, men told stories about being captured, or almost captured, when they were out alone, and women told stories about the particular vulnerability they faced when they lived alone. These stories survived thirty and forty years after the events they described; indeed, in the late 1970s, these stories were told with excitement, enthusiasm, and care. Other rumors were not that important, and they did not last. A cursory reading of police informers’ reports from the 1930s and 1940s reveals some of the rumors no one remembered in the mid 1970s and 1980s: from 1939, that blankets were treated with a mysterious substance that would render men impotent, or that European doctors had perfected injections that would produce “bottled babies” without women.^[11] Informers’ reports never mention wazimamoto, perhaps because informers did not believe these stories were rumors or loose talk. But vampire stories had their own histories in Nairobi, and died out there even as they were being told and retold in other parts of the country. Most of people said that the wazimamoto stopped taking blood in 1939, when Pangani, the oldest African settlement in Nairobi “was broken.” A few said it continued into the early 1940s and died out by 1942 or 1943.^[12] Women who came to Nairobi during World War II heard that the wazimamoto sucked African blood; “but later I learned that they just put out fires,” Sara Waigo said. This chapter asks what was specific about Nairobi that generated such stories bound with such temporality and how women’s versions of these stories might disclose their conceptualization of urban space and its security and possession. For many years, oral historians have worried about the difficulty of establishing chronology from oral sources.^[13] In part, I hope this chapter will interrogate that concern: does a distinct chronology alert researchers to local events and their sequence, or does it disclose local ideas and ideologies in precise ways?

When and where were women safe from vampires? Amina Hali, born in what was to become Nairobi in the 1890s, spoke of the time between 1921 and 1926, when the three settlements she names coexisted:

Things were alright here in Pumwani but Pangani and Kileleshwa were dangerous places for a woman to live alone because she was in danger of being attacked by men from the wazimamoto.…they would come to Pangani and Kileleshwa in the afternoon and they would go with a woman, and pay her, and this way they would find out which woman lived alone and which ones did not, and they would come back at night and do their work.…these people carried sort of a rubber sucking tube that they would stick into your hands while you were asleep and draw the blood out of your body and leave you there, and eventually you would die.^[14]

Not every woman who lived in the legal location of Pumwani thought it safe, however. Kayaya Thababu came to Pumwani in 1926. She described the skills and strategies of wazimamoto and how defenseless women were:

q:

Did you ever hear stories about wazimamoto?

a:

Yes, they used to come in the night, they were a special danger to women who stayed alone, they would come into the room very softly and before you knew it they put something on 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 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.

q:

Did this ever happen to you or one of your neighbors?

a:

No but I heard about it a lot.

q:

When?

a:

Before the coming of the Italians [i.e., before 1940].

q:

Were you frightened of them? How did you make sure they didn’t come to your room at night?

a:

I was very frightened and there was no way to be sure they would not come, but when the fighting of the Italians ended they stopped coming for blood. But if you had a boyfriend staying with you at night you were safe, because they were afraid of waking two people.^[15]

Other women simply negotiated with the wazimamoto: “They came when I was all alone and I told them there were people outside I lived with. I could not have told them I lived alone, otherwise they would have taken my blood and left me to die,” said Kibibi Ali.^[16]

Nevertheless, living alone, especially in the legal location, gave some women some specific advantages. By the 1930s, many childless prostitutes—women who had lived alone—designated heirs to houses they had purchased or built in Pumwani. Usufruct gave to urban mud huts the same qualities as land: access to ownership could be secured through an intimate relationship. But even in Nairobi, women’s property rights were more problematic than men’s. According to a Muslim woman, Tamima binti Saidi, “It has always been difficult for women to inherit property, even in Pumwani the district commissioner had to be called in when a woman left everything to her daughter, even if she had no sons.” ^[17] Nevertheless, women in Nairobi utilized unwieldy state intervention to control their properties. For example, if a childless woman did not formally designate an heir “on the paper that allowed her to own the building,” then the Nairobi Municipal Council would “take over the building” when she died, becoming the owner and letting the rooms.^[18] Yet many women did just that, bluntly rejecting kinship ties: it was by careful deliberation that they guaranteed that their property would not go to the families into which they had been born. Childless women most often designated as their heirs young women they had sheltered in town or brought from their rural homes. They were almost never blood kin, and to the best of my knowledge, the designated heirs were never males.^[19] These relationships, between women of different generations, had specified rights and obligations and conferred specified duties and privileges. According to Tabitha Waweru, born in Pumwani in 1925:

Some women were really rich, and when they became old, because they didn’t have any family living around Nairobi, that old woman could chose another woman and tell everyone “This is my heir.” She would have to love you, really, to do that for you, but it happened a lot. To become an old woman’s heir, you would have to cook for her, clean for her, wash her clothes for her, everything. Then one day this old woman will take the young woman to the DC’s office and say, “This is my daughter, I want her to get my property when I die”…and the DC would write it down; that’s how a lot of women got plots in Pumwani. A lot of women in Pumwani did this, they befriended old women, and they got property this way.^[20]

Such filiations were as binding as ties of birth. But the various strategies by which such filiations were achieved were as dangerous as they were empowering. In the same interview Tabitha Waweru said that the wazimamoto employed prostitutes to find victims: “They didn’t just take blood from men; sometimes a prostitute would invite another woman to spend the night, and then the wazimamoto would come for her, for her friend.” ^[21]

How could a young woman know why an older woman befriended her? Would she be made an heir, or would she be sold to wazimamoto? The fact that both kinds of stories coexisted was not a contradiction; it was what was crucially important about them—both sorts of stories, frequently heard, depicted the complications of being female, alone, and propertyless in colonial Nairobi and the contradictory nature of any relationship that could bestow property within the law in the city. Indeed, these stories also reflected the contradiction by which filiation worked: in rural, patrilineal East Africa, mother-child ties could only be strengthened within the bonds of marriage, not outside them.^[22] In Nairobi, mother-child ties were invented and inscribed without matrimony and very often without biological ties. Virtually all of these householders came from patrilineal societies; they were creating new relationships in a hard parody of uterine rights without marriages but with the equivocal support of the colonial state. Stories about the wazimamoto, with their formulaic Nairobi themes of tubes to extract blood, the invasion of space, and betrayal may have been more than cautionary tales of the perils of urban life. These stories may have provided a biological rationale for property inheritance that was not based on birth but superseded kinship ties. Stories about blood and the colonial state’s role in its removal may have made usufruct and the designation of heirs natural and legitimate.

Blood and Bone in East Africa

The blood of rubber sucking tubes, the blood drawn from the arm of sleeping women was perhaps a more specific bodily fluid than many East African peoples recognized, at least in the 1920s. As many chapters in this book argue, blood—the red fluid that flows through the body—was one of many fluids that Africans had, reproduced with, and shed in biological systems in which their circulation through the body was not a given. East African blood was the stuff of matrilineal inheritance; it was not specifically female, but it was thought of in opposition to semen, which was the stuff of male inheritance. The terminology is tricky, as semen itself was sometimes talked about as a kind of blood specific to men. But theories of gender and gestation explained how babies were made; they do not provide an exact gendered identity of fluids: among the patrilineal Teso, blood and bone are opposites; fathers contribute form to the fetus. But among the patrilineal Zande, a child is formed from its mother’s blood, as are children among the matrilineal Kaguru.^[23] This is not to say that East African peoples make the same associations between blood and maternal inheritance; instead, it may be more accurate to say that some systems of kinship foreground this idea, while it is in the background of other systems of kinship. But systems of kinship were not the only systems of blood ties. Mixing male blood with another man’s blood could create intimate relationships among men: blood brotherhood signified intimacy both where blood was a metaphor for kinship and where it was not.^[24] In Bunyoro, it was said that men achieved with blood pacts what women achieved through marriage; an Ankole ceremony announced: “Your blood brother cuts your nails.” ^[25] Nineteenth-century blood brotherhood ceremonies in East Africa collapsed boundaries between races and represented instant milk kinship. An 1894 ceremony between a European hunter and a Meru elder pantomimed that they had been nursed by one mother; in Bunyoro, the name for the ceremony of blood brotherhood was literally “drinking at the same place.” ^[26]

In nineteenth-century Kenya, exchanges of blood facilitated land sales. Litigants before the Kenya Land Commission testified that when Dorobo sold land to Kikuyu in the nineteenth century, the principals frequently became blood brothers. When they did not, the number of goats, rams, and steel tools exchanged increased substantially. Moreover, “when a man becomes the blood brother of another, and is given a piece of land, that means that he is liable to protect him against anyone wanting to rob his land or his properties.” ^[27] Blood exchange thus secured property transfers that were not inherited and gave the participants a degree of responsibility and continued involvement that outright sale did not have. The penetration of body boundaries enforced land boundaries.

Blood brotherhood was men’s business; what women—who shed another kind of blood regularly—thought of the institution has not been of much concern to a century of foreign participants and observers. But in many parts of East Africa, the power of women’s blood, in menstruation and childbirth, was fearsome, while the impact of men’s blood was considerably tamer—it made business transactions more personal and made men intimates. If blood brotherhood did indeed wane in the colonial era—and the evidence for this is anything but conclusive—it was not for lack of business transactions. Men reported entering into blood brotherhood to secure commodities, safe passage, and the like. The ceremonies may have lost their bodily specificity and imagery, but they were no less binding. Indeed, blood brotherhood became the domain of healers and contractual relationships.^[28]

The biological assumptions on which blood brotherhood rested, the metaphors and beliefs that made it a rational way for men to conduct their business, were based on ideas that explained the relationships and biologies people saw every day. When Africans began to initiate other relationships of body, inheritance, and place, new metaphors and beliefs emerged. Put somewhat differently, the ways in which Africans described their ability to manage blood and control its flow—and the tense biology of relationships and possessions that blood represents—shifted in the colonial era.

Pits and Place in Pumwani

When Pumwani was, after much fanfare, established in 1921 as the only legal place Africans could live in Nairobi, plots were allotted to those Africans who could build huts on them within two months. Such a policy favored those who had owned property in the older settlements; they were allowed to own shops; others were not. All new householders paid an annual plot-holding fee. The earliest wazimamoto stories I have collected come either from the villages that were not demolished to populate Pumwani or from the streets of the city best known to workingmen. Before 1925, River Road—the street that linked central Nairobi to the African areas—was said to be the most dangerous place for men, “especially the job seekers.” ^[29]

Well into the 1930s, forest separated the nascent white suburbs from the central city, in which specific areas zoned for Indian residential and commercial use were established in the early 1920s only after Africans had been driven out of them. Men knew the spatial arrangements of the city and why they were in place: “These stories started in Nairobi when racial segregation was also there.” ^[30] Indeed, the legal status of land formed the background to 1920s wazimamoto stories from Nairobi: Kileleshwa, built on crown land—which legally belonged to the king, not the colony—and was demolished to make an arboretum in 1926, was one of the places where women were most vulnerable, while others said that victims’ bodies were buried in Kibera, a settlement of Nubian soldiers also on crown land. According to Timotheo Omondo, kibera was a Luo word for people who were “silenced in a sad manner”; the Nubian community were “not required to express their opinions” about who might be buried in there.^[31]

But Nairobi in the early 1920s was also a city with a severe labor shortage. Men looking for work were free to traverse the city: “In the olden days there was no helping someone find a job. People used to go anywhere to ask for jobs.” ^[32] Despite the pass laws introduced in 1919, working men claimed they feared only agents of the wazimamoto who would lead them “to somewhere nobody knew,” where the wazimamoto would suck their blood.^[33] The idea of specific places that were beyond African control, or sometimes beyond African knowledge, figured prominently in men’s vampire stories from the 1920s: a “town toilet” in River Road was notorious for wazimamoto abductions and known to migrants throughout the region. A man who worked in Nairobi was said to have seen a small room next to the toilet to which captives were taken.^[34] A man in Dar es Salaam gave its exact location: on River Road near the Bohora Mosque, behind where the “Zima Moto” stayed, was a toilet men could only use with permission, but where a man from Kavirondo disappeared; even his brother could not find him.^[35] Others said captured Africans were “driven to a secret place” where their blood was sucked with rubber tubes.^[36] No woman my research assistants or I spoke to knew of such places; women in Pumwani only began to fear public toilets in the late 1930s. After 1937 or 1938, the toilets women feared were a generalized site of vulnerability, without location or specificity or even very detailed description: “The wazimomoto would come at night and climb over the wall and pounce on you if you were alone,” Hadija bint Nasolo said.

q:

What wall?

a:

The wall of the toilets, the wall of your room, any wall. If they found you alone they would draw your blood and leave you dying, even if you screamed there was nothing that could save you once they started to draw your blood.…Once when I and two friends entered a latrine, I was the first to finish…and came out first, alone. Just five yards away was the wazimomoto car with some men standing beside it, and when they saw me they started calling me and I started screaming…my friends came out at once and the wazimomoto men went away.^[37]

Prostitutes did not speak of the wazimamoto lurking in “places that looked empty” until the early 1940s.^[38] Before the late 1930s, however, women’s wazimamoto stories described the mastery of space and time and the ambiguity of personal relationships.

In the 1920s and 1930s, women in Pumwani and Pangani lived with an anxious geography of hours and habits. Only Timotheo Omondo reported that he had been accosted by the wazimamoto “at roughly nine o’clock at night.” Not only did he recall the imprecision of his memory, but he described a near-capture, not his knowledge of how to outwit the firemen. Careful women could learn to avoid dangerous situations, which were animated at specific hours. Women who were prostitutes claimed that it was dangerous to go out after 6:30 at night, 8 at night, or 10 at night. They claimed that certain shops—owned in both Pangani and Pumwani by plot-holders until the mid 1930s—were dangerous. In Pangani, where a milk merchant was said to work for the wazimamoto “we would never send children to the shops after 6:30 at night.” ^[39] But in Pumwani in the 1920s, “from 8 o’clock in the evening nobody could go out for fear of meeting them.” ^[40] By the late 1930s, according to Miriam Musale, “In Nairobi the government used to tell people not to go out after 10 o’clock at night and if you didn’t listen it meant you didn’t care if you lived or died.” ^[41]

What are all these references to time about? Precise attention to time discipline does not usually characterize colonial African social life; indeed, without clocks how did Africans in an urban location tell time at night? Were these women simply observing that the wazimamoto operated in a world defined by the specifics of employment—a world of hierarchy, uniforms, and hours? Nairobi’s firemen may have straddled the boundaries between formal and informal work, however: on the one hand, firemen were put to the most routine work, polishing equipment and standing watch. On the other, they responded—at least in theory—to emergencies and put out fires, work that was different—and at a different time—each time they did it.

Nevertheless, exact timekeeping was a characteristic of urban wage labor, and the formalized ways in which men’s days were subdivided and controlled would have influenced how women organized the domestic tasks that reproduced wage labor. But many men resisted the precision of labor discipline and did not show up for work at the hour specified by their employers. Most women interviewed in Pumwani described men’s employment as a general condition of the male life cycle, not of hours, at least until the early 1940s: men “used to work, except for the young boys who couldn’t find work.” ^[42] When women had been formally employed, primarily during World War II, they were paid by the task, not by the hour.^[43] It is possible that these references to hours may have represented colonial curfews—10 P.M. in Pumwani—but it is unlikely: while most prostitutes acknowledged the dangers of arrest, none mentioned the curfew, which seems to have existed only on paper. The only curfews that were enforced were those of wartime, which applied to men as well as to women.^[44] It is altogether possible that the specificity of hours was an aspect of these women’s recent lives that they simply fed back into their memories, or that these women may have been illustrating the “islands of timekeeping” that distinguished Nairobi from rural East Africa and subjected it to new rules and imagined events.^[45] In that case it would be important to ask why they associated precise hours with wazimamoto and not with other activities, such as cooking or their own prostitution? It is possible that many of these women simply used specific hours as a way to make sure that an otherwise naive researcher understood their point, that the wazimamoto operated after dark. They were using the specificity of time to describe urban life. But then, why did some women identify the dangerous hour as 6:30 and others as 8 or 10, and why did others describe wazimamoto activities in terms of minutes?

These references to time in Pumwani wazimamoto stories may not simply be about time discipline and the place of wage labor therein; they may allude to menstruation, or at least women’s blood. Many thought that the wazimamoto preferred women victims: “Women had the most blood. They give birth many times, each time losing a lot of blood, but still they are strong,” said Anyango Mahondo.^[46] What is constant in these accounts is an hour, not any specific hour, indicating that periodicity was important: the wazimamoto was predictable. These women may not have been describing the time discipline of firemen, but that the firemen wanted women’s time-disciplined blood in particular. For most women in early colonial East Africa, menstruation had been an asocial experience. Many women claimed to have been surprised by menarche.^[47] Adult women maintained some version of seclusion during menstruation: “During your periods you were not allowed out of the house for three days.” ^[48] “You took care to see that a man could never see anything; we took care ourselves.” ^[49] When childless women owned property and chose their heirs, menstruation may have lost some of its mystical significance, and it became subject to the same mundane laws that had come to govern everything else in Nairobi. “When prostitutes were menstruating…they would take the money they had saved from selling their bodies and buy this cotton.…At that time they would only sit and the money which they had saved would keep on feeding them until their period ended,” Margaret Githeka said.^[50] Vampire stories that claim knowledge of timekeeping may assert that women could keep their blood safe from expropriation if they stayed indoors at specific hours of the night. If some spaces were beyond Africans’ knowledge, time did not have to be unmanageable as well.

Spaces, however, were unpredictable and appeared in unlikely places. Pits were commonplace in East African vampire stories. In Uganda, even an educated modernizer like E. M. K. Mulira knew about Mika, for example:

He had a big house and in one room was a big pit and on the pit there was a mat and on the mat there was a chair. He would take his friends and say, ‘You’re my special friend and I want to show you this wonderful thing I have, go into that room and sit on the chair, I’ll be right there.’ The man would go sit on the chair and fall straight into the pit, and then the bazimamoto would come and take his friend.^[51]

Women knew about the shopkeeper in western Kenya who had a pit behind his premises.^[52] Men knew about a farmer who trapped victims in pits until the wazimamoto could come and get them.^[53] Anyango Mahondo described the pits beneath the Kampala Police Station, where captured Africans were kept “just like dairy cattle.” The pits had been domesticated to hide their dreadful purpose: “To hide the whole thing from everyone the entrances were covered with a carpet…even those working within the police station could not notice them. All they could see were only small but separate houses.…Inside the pits, lights were always on whether it was daytime or night.” The Nairobi Fire Station and the Dar es Salaam Fire Station were said have pits: “Whoever was inside the pits was never allowed to see the sun shine.” ^[54] Between the 1930s and 1960s, white prospectors, surveyors, and geologists—men who dug pits—were accused of being agents of wazimamoto; most were feared and some were attacked.^[55] In 1920s Nairobi, pits were a social phenomenon. One part of Pumwani was known as Mashimoni, meaning “many in the pits” from shimo, the Swahili term for pits, hole, or quarry. It was said Mashimoni got its name because so many of the men who went there in the 1920s were never seen again. In a 1976 interview, Zaina Kachui, who arrived in Pumwani in 1930, explained why:

I heard that a long time ago the wazimamoto was in Mashimoni, even those people who were staying there bought plots with the blood of somebody. I heard that in those days they used to dig the floors very deep in the house and they covered the floor with a carpet. Where it was deepest, in the center of the floor, they’d put a chair and the victim would fall and be killed. Most of the women living there were prostitutes and this is how they made extra money, from the wazimamoto. So when a man came for sex, the woman would say, “Karibu, karibu,” and the man would go to the chair, and then he would fall into the hole in the floor, then at night the wazimamoto would come and take that man away. When they fell down they couldn’t get up again.…The wazimamoto were white people, but the people who worked to kill people, these were African, but wazimamoto employed the prostitutes who lived in Mashimoni because it was easy for these women to find blood for the wazimamoto because there were so many men going to Mashimoni for sex. They did this for the money, they needed the money, and they could do this kind of work.

Even if this was a story she told with equal conviction in the 1930s, it is unlikely that she told it to discourage men from frequenting Mashimoni: Kachui made it clear she was repeating hearsay. Besides “after a while men stopped going to Mashimoni because the wazimamoto worked there,” and by 1931 or 1932, Mashimoni had been eclipsed by the new “market for prostitutes” of Danguroni.^[56] It seems more likely that this story reveals more about strategies of blood and filiation than it does about prostitutes’ strategies. The carpet—called by the most commonplace word for a woven mat (mkeka, for sleeping or prayer) represents the extent of a woman’s control over space, its possession, and how space is hidden, and privatized. Indeed, the woman who digs a deep hole in a small rented room and covers it with a man-made fiber is literally undermining the limits of rented accommodation; she is subverting her legal relationship to property as she alters it to appropriate men’s blood. The chair on the carpet covering the pit remains suspended, but when the man falls into the hole “he cannot get up again”: women have mastered these spaces and men have not. Indeed, women could do something with this space that men could not do.

Women could dig pits. The holes in prostitutes’ rooms articulate not only the women’s awesome control over their own residences but the fact that the differences between urban men and urban women—or working men and working women—were such that they could not be contained or depicted on one level. The construction of a literal spatial hierarchy articulated new relationships. Such a construction is even more significant for anyone concerned with blood, which flows downward: in many parts of East Africa, from the western Rift Valley to the plains of Tanzania, women were forbidden to climb on a house or step over a man, for if men were beneath women’s genitals, blood could fall on them.^[57] What can it mean in another context, where space and intimacy are managed differently, for a woman to stand above a trapped and doomed man? In East and Central Africa, menstrual blood was thought to pollute the homestead.^[58] When women control their own homes—at the very least, to the extent of excavating them—how then can a home be protected and be made safe for those who are female? What ideas about blood have to change for women and property to be safe in homesteads owned by women? Stories about pits in Mashimoni, where women “bought plots with the blood of somebody,” assert that a woman can be above a man, that menstrual blood does not pollute homesteads, but in fact gives women unique and specific ways to possess real property.

This is more than an account of the alteration of space, however; it depicts the alteration of space for a specific purpose—to drain men’s blood. The context is sexual; indeed, it is the availability of sexual relations for money that brings men to Mashimoni. These particular pits reverse the connotations of sexuality; they make men penetrable and unable to acquire property; pits indicate that in Pumwani inheritance could be separated from biological reproduction. In Mashimoni, property did not pass from males or to males; men passed through property and into the structural oblivion of pits. If blood—male and female—refers to maternal inheritance, then motherhood was redefined in Mashimoni: there, property did not pass through women to men, and women did not protect men’s property. Women used their property to dispossess men.

The pits in small Pumwani rooms, like the pits in colonial buildings and stations, did not exist. It is therefore important to note how differently they are described by men and women. Women described pits as places and sites; men’s descriptions of pits tended to have an extraordinary level of detail and commentary. The pits beneath the Kampala Police Station were so intricate because “whites are very bad people. They are so cunning and clever.” The subterranean pipes and taps were known only to Nairobi’s firemen: “Whites were very clever. They used to cover the pipes and taps with some form of iron sheets.” ^[59] The covered pits—covered with mats, huts, whatever—were subterranean systems that could be entirely closed off from the world above. This in turn suggested what was below the surface, suggestions animated by local connotations of what knowledge was hidden and suppressed.^[60]

Time, property, and social reproduction were reversed in these pits. The many references to how the pits were illuminated suggest more than the deprivations faced by the victims of wazimamoto; in these accounts, working men described places where the ability to reckon time was taken from them.^[61] Pits commoditized men; they became “just like dairy cattle.” In each of these examples, the site of underground production was made familiar by making it horrific, intricate, and timeless. Throughout the 1920s, “the place nobody knew” was no less fearsome, but it was made familiar by these repeated descriptions. The clever whites may have been able to hide fantastic spaces, but Africans—particularly those in secure occupations—could find out about them and talk about them.

In central Kenya, however, pits were not merely symbolic spaces, they were boundaries: they marked the limits of acquired property, and they made it private, or they separated one family’s territory from another’s. The social and physical imaginings pits animated came in part from their historical meaning in land transactions. According to Dorobo elders, the same men who sealed land transfers with blood brotherhood in the nineteenth century, “the general way of marking out a boundary was to show the purchaser our game pits and tell him which ones he could not pass.” ^[62] To the north of Dorobo country, Kikuyu marked boundaries with streams and valleys. Where the landscape had no distinguishing features, the landscape could be altered or body products used to mark boundaries: people planted trees, heaped stones, or buried human hair. As late as the mid 1950s, boundary-making was men’s work.^[63] When Africans told stories about clever white men digging pits in public places or African women digging pits in their rented rooms, they were not only describing the expropriation of land by Europeans and women, but their expropriation of African men’s rights to limit that expropriation. If rights over land can only be maintained with a distinct vocabulary of technical sophistication, as H. W. Okoth-Ogendo argues,^[64] then pits and blood would seem to have become part of a specialized East African vocabulary in which rights to land were debated and defined. Without pits, women luring men or women to their rooms were simply working for wazimamoto, not asserting rights over land and its transmission.^[65]

Discarding Blood

Many prostitutes, including property owners, did not tell stories in which men were the victims of the wazimamoto; they told stories in which women were. Just as single women’s property in Pumwani was transmitted to adopted daughters, sisters, and sisters’ children, single women told stories in which young girl visitors, friends, and sisters were sold to the wazimamoto by prostitutes. Just as I know of no case where a prostitute designated a man as the heir of her house, I know of no case where a woman was said to have sold brothers, brothers’ sons, or male friends to the fire brigade. Many prostitutes did sell their customers, of course, but that was part of their work: according to Tabitha Waweru, sometimes a prostitute “would see a man, invite him in, feed him, sleep with him, and when he’s asleep the wazimamoto would come and take him.” Women sold women with as many courtesies, but they described the process and its emotional content with considerably greater detail.

Why were women both agents and victims? Why did women’s stories make female friendship, even female kinship, not only terrifying, but lethal? In a place where women befriended each other and passed property to each other, and sometimes to sisters or sisters’ children, why did women tell stories in which women sold their women friends, their sisters, and their sisters’ children to the wazimamoto? The question implies that Pumwani prostitutes should identify either with the agents or the victims, that they should tell stories that were much less ambiguous than their urban social and property relations were. Storytellers reshape hearsay into what is familiar; popular stories reflect the contradictory nature of relationships and the possibilities that constitute those relationships.^[66] Sisters’ daughters and close friends—all potential heirs in interwar Nairobi—were powerful relationships in Pumwani. Relations with male friends, brothers, and to a lesser extent sisters’ sons, did not convey the same power, the same kind of inheritance, or the same degree of social reproduction. It is entirely possible that these stories survived because the tellers and the listeners acknowledged the ambiguities of kinship and friendship. Women in Pumwani in the 1970s articulated the strains and contradictions of those relationships with each retelling of these stories.

These contradictions were lived, and they were remembered with a specificity of names and durations and rewards. Hannah Mwikali, who came to Pumwani in the mid 1920s, identified one Mama Amida, “the first woman to build a brick house in Majengo,” who “sold her sister’s daughter to the wazimamoto for money although later they came for her too.” ^[67] According to Mwana Himani bint Ramadhani, who came to Nairobi in 1930, prostitutes sold each other:

When I first came to Nairobi…I used to fear to go visit my friend, a woman like me, because the wazimamoto would hire a black woman and when her friend came to visit she would find out if she was married or not, or if her family came to visit her, and then she would tell the wazimamoto when her friend would be coming again, and then, during that visit, maybe after ten minutes, thirty minutes, the wazimamoto would come and kill you.^[68]

Muthoni wa Karanja, who lived in an illegal settlement, but who visited Pumwani regularly between 1935 and 1939, said “there was a fat woman named Halima and this woman sold her sister to these people but she was lucky enough to escape…before they finally captured her. They used to sell people for 50/- a person; no wonder these women could afford to build houses in Pumwani.” She claimed that the firemen themselves were very selective about their victims: “At 10 o’clock at night the wazimamoto came and looked for victims. They would throw rocks at doors until someone opened and then they would take whoever opened the door, unless it was a child, because children do not have much blood, not as much as an adult.” ^[69]

This specificity of detail is more than a devastating critique of the plotholders some of these women despised. These accusations are hurled at women who seemed to commoditize not only sexual relations but kinship relations and, almost as frequently, those of friendship. As such, however, these accusations are also descriptions, however violent and bloody, of the construction of families and the hierarchy of relationships and obligations that families represented. Firemen would not take a child, for example, because that child was evidence that its mother did not live alone. A woman would be called Mama Amida because she was someone’s mother; she would not leave her stone house to her sisters’ daughter.

The abandonment of kin and friends, the failure to animate the new relationships that Nairobi offered, became the focus of women’s disgust and disappointment. Years later, women conflated the disregard for blood ties with the disregard for the proper handling of menstrual blood. According to Zaina Kachui, who so forcefully described the pits in Mashimoni, “In the old days you wouldn’t let anyone see your blood, even if you had a boyfriend living in your room, he could not be allowed to see your blood, or bloody clothes. In these days you see bloody rags everywhere, in the streets and in the toilets; it’s the way I used to see dead babies in the toilets all the time.”

It was not only prostitutes who commoditized kin and discarded children and siblings. Between 1936 and 1939, the colonial state, after much hesitation, demolished Pangani and replaced it with an estate of its own devising: it offered former Pangani landlords lifetime leases on cement-block four- and six-room houses. The conditions of these lifetime leases allowed landlords to select tenants and charge rents competitive with those in Pumwani, but they could not pass on their property when they died, when their houses would revert to the City Council. The Pangani householders’ decision to accept the state’s offer was painful—the estate was called Shauri Moyo, literally “matter of the heart,” before it opened—but 90 percent of Pangani’s woman landlords accepted it, thus ending usufruct in one settlement and leaving landlords in Pumwani decidedly wary.^[70] It is altogether possible that more women landlords would have gone to Shauri Moyo, but women who owned property as designated heirs were not eligible for relocation there.^[71] Although some women landlords in Shauri Moyo tried to pass their houses on to their daughters or their designated heirs, their wills were rejected by the state, while popular history in Pumwani had it that the “rich women of Pangani” built houses in Shauri Moyo for themselves.^[72] This local revisionist history of African housing in Nairobi held that Pangani’s women landlords voluntarily abandoned usufruct, thus abandoning not only their children but sisters, sisters’ daughters, and a whole network of friends and potential friends whose entitlement to property and access to land was all but curtailed in Nairobi after 1939.

Many women in Nairobi said that the wazimamoto stopped capturing people when Pangani was finally demolished. This may have been a convenient marker, but other events, such as talk of war with the Italians over the border, or the fire that destroyed the colonial secretariat buildings in town,^[73] might also have been what was memorable about 1939 for prostitutes. It would seem that as the new, social meaning of Nairobi usufruct was effectively dislodged in 1939, stories about the wazimamoto removing the blood from women who stayed alone began to die out.

Conclusions

Stories about the removal of precious bodily fluids by some agency of the colonial state provided vivid examples of rapacious imperial extractions, should any have been needed in colonial Nairobi. But this chapter argues that when told, these stories did not describe Europeans’ unchecked power but Europeans’ weakness and dependence on the cooperation of African prostitutes. It is possible that the colonial state, with its “rubber sucking tubes” and its electric lights in pits, was the background for these stories, not the subject matter. The disdain with which the “clever whites” were condemned was part of the construction of an urban social world, but beyond the contempt and dislike were subtle and nuanced imaginings that described new orderings of household, gender, and property relations. Through the construction of a fantastic vision of European violence, Africans reported changes in their social life, their concepts of pollution and vulnerability, and their land tenure.

Notes

6. “Roast Mutton Captivity”

Labor, Trade, and Catholic Missions in Colonial Northern Rhodesia

This chapter and the one that follows are based exclusively on written evidence. Rather than suggesting that written accounts of oral phenomena lose a great deal in transcription and translation, I argue that the very messiness of documentary evidence allows for an analysis of bundled ideas, of the contradictions and confusions of colonial thinking, and the economies, justifications, and policies that thinking created. Unlike chapters 5 and 8, in which oral evidence provides a sequence of who knew what about whom, and where they knew it, in these chapters there are no layers to unravel, no final insights that stripping away images and ideas can promise. Indeed, the written evidence used here is dense and disorganized—priests’ accounts of African ideas about coins and their value follow reports of a strike by catechists, for example. For all the chronological clarity of written sources, the very density of these accounts suggests relationships that, taken together, show what rumors meant on the ground in the colonial Northern Rhodesia.

Gossip and Authority

When I was a girl I was taught not to gossip by a school game: we would sit in a circle and someone would whisper a phrase into the ear of the person sitting next to her. By the time the phrase was returned to the first speaker, it was totally deformed—hilarious proof that hearsay distorted facts. I had already published a book based extensively on oral interviews when I realized how insidious this game was, that it rested on two extremely authoritarian principles: that information should be transmitted passively, and that no one has the right to alter or amend received statements.

Real life and real gossip and rumormongering are substantially different, however. The purpose of gossiping, rumormongering, and even talking is not to deliver information but to discuss it. Stories transmitted without regard for official versions, stories that are amended and corrected and altered with every retelling, are indeed rumors, but they are also a means by which people debate the issues and concerns embodied in those stories. In a historiography based on such stories, then, there is no one true or accurate version. It is precisely the fact of many variants that is crucial to our understanding the meaning of these stories. Each one, taken on its own, may be interesting and suitable for analysis, but taken together, they form a debate, public discussions and arguments about the issues with which ordinary people are concerned. And, more important, these stories were taken together: they were neither told in isolation nor recounted without contradiction or correction. There was no single established version; there was no single accurate account. Instead, these stories were told, exchanged, criticized, refined, and laughed at—they were part of public knowledge, a way to argue and complain and worry. Taken together, the stories I shall discuss articulated why Africans should have been concerned about the motives and activities of certain groups, whether firemen, tsetse-fly pickets, game scouts, or Catholic priests.

This chapter explores why one congregation of Catholic missionaries was accused of drinking Africans’ blood. It is not a conventional historical narrative. Not only will it lack a beginning, middle, and an end, it will not attempt to tell a coherent story. If vampire accusations have multiple meanings, one chapter in this book should have multiple endings. What follows are three sets of evidence—some historiography, the accusations, and the economics of the missions—and four separate interpretations of the accusations. My goal is not to explain these particular vampire accusations, but to contextualize them, and show how they might be interpreted to form a debate about the priests’ ritual and daily practices. My concerns are not about popular culture as most twentieth-century African historians understand it—music, oral literature, and street wisdoms of various sorts—but about popular debates about ideas: the meaning of sacrifice, food, and blood, and tensions over work and its remuneration.^[1] These questions were engendered in the most formal of settings—in schools, during Communion, and in the workplace—but they were debated in a popular form, rumor and gossip.

Evidence: Zambian Historiography

This chapter is part of a revision, or at least erosion, of the conventional wisdoms of the history of Zambia that has been going on for a decade. The Northern Province of Zambia (colonial Northern Rhodesia) was historically the catchment area for the mines of Katanga in the then Belgian Congo, the Zambian Copperbelt, and the Lupa Goldfields in southeast Tanganyika. It has been considered a classic labor reserve: rural poverty sent men to the mines, from which they returned when they had earned some money. Copper had been smelted from malachite in the region long before European rule, but new industrial technologies made the copper sulfides found far below the surface accessible. The first mine in Katanga opened in 1906;^[2] well into the 1920s, a large proportion of the migrant labor force was from Northern Province.^[3] In colonial Northern Rhodesia, there were mines owned by European prospectors as early as 1902, but the development of the Copperbelt there did not begin until 1922 and did not take off until 1927, when there were about 9,000 men employed there. By late 1930, however, there were almost 32,000 Africans working on the Copperbelt.^[4] Starting in the 1920s, labor from Northern Province was recruited for both mining and plantation work in Tanganyika; because sisal wages were higher and more reliable, workers tended to stay three years on the sisal plantations of Tanga but an average of six months in the Lupa Goldfields.^[5]

Africans’ rural experience was represented by Europeans as one of intense demands for African labor. The diaries of the White Fathers (the Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique) are filled with references to visits by labor recruiters from the Lupa Goldfields, from Copperbelt mines, and from the Union Minière d’Haute Katanga, asserting the inexorable attraction of wage labor: “Recruiters come by car from Ndola and with their promises entice them, hiring a number of workers, whom they transport without charge to the mine. How can the blacks, like big children, resist this?” ^[6] Men did stay away from the countryside. Even during the Depression—when the number of workers on the Copperbelt dropped from 31,941 to 19,313 by late 1931 and to 6,667 by the end of 1932—many men did not return home, although some went to look for work in Katanga or South Africa.^[7] Audrey Richards claims that 40 to 60 percent of Northern Province men were absent from their villages in the early 1930s, although these men were not all working; many were looking for work.^[8] James Ferguson, following A. L. Epstein, has challenged the picture of male migrants temporarily working in towns but without urban ties, and has argued that between the 1930s and the 1950s, workers’ movements between urban jobs, and between jobs at a single mine, were at least as commonplace as were workers’ periodic returns to the countryside.^[9] Those men who stayed on the Copperbelt during the Depression looked for work and articulated their need for employment in terms of status and community, not just livelihoods. In 1933, the leader of a Bemba workers’ association went to the capital to protest unemployment and low wages: “People like me can’t go home,” he said. “We have settled in the towns, adopted Europeans’ ways, and no longer know village life.” ^[10] It was not only European ways that made the Copperbelt attractive to Africans; Africans could be hired as skilled labor there as well. By 1935, a white South African trade unionist worried that Copperbelt Africans were already breaching “the sacrosanct line” between unskilled and skilled mine labor.^[11] Wage labor seems to have had some advantages for colonial Northern Rhodesians; there was the possibility of advancement, and when there was no work, men could go to Lusaka or Southern Rhodesia and work as domestics.^[12]

The peoples of Northern Province, primarily Bemba, practice a slash-and-burn agriculture called citemene. According to Audrey Richards’s painstaking research in the early 1930s, the sexual division of labor of men cutting down trees and clearing land and women planting and harvesting crops and preparing food was disrupted by the demand for male labor on the Copperbelt and in Katanga, and this created “the hungry months” of February, March, and April: there were not enough men to clear fields sufficient for their families’ needs. But Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan have argued that citemene was not the main food-producing system among the Bemba; hoed mound gardens were, although tending them was “considered hard and unromantic work by the Bemba.” ^[13] Indeed, the White Fathers raised tribute for boarding school students based on the number of mound gardens a village had.^[14] According to Vaughan and Moore, seasonal food shortages were due, not to the size of women’s citemene gardens, but to the combination of women’s domestic and agricultural tasks at certain times of the year. Women would have faced this seasonal burden whether men were present or not.^[15] In the village of Kasaka in 1933, for example, Richards found a ratio of 19 men to 23 women, in her opinion enough men to clear adequate citemene gardens. Food supply was not an issue in Kasaka; women’s work was: Richards’s daily records show that when women’s agricultural labor was particularly heavy, they neglected some time-consuming domestic tasks, such as gathering and cooking, so that “the natives’ diet may be inadequate in certain seasons of the year because the housewife is too busy to provide proper meals.” ^[16] It would seem that absent men shaped their families’ needs and expectations and ideas about work and money, not their food supply. But the extent of a sexual division of labor in which men migrated and women farmed became the lens through which officials and academics saw Bemba society.

This chapter explores African ideas about the meaning of work, money, food, and to a lesser extent, religion, through vampire accusations. In doing so, I use European sources almost exclusively—the diaries of Catholic missions and district officers’ reports. These texts were not produced in identical circumstances, however. The priests produced two kinds of documentation, the Annual Reports of their order, published by the Mother House in Algeria and the daily diary of each mission station. The Annual Reports are straightforward, if somewhat anguished, records of African affairs—labor recruitment or religious revivals—while the diaries provide a remarkable chronicle of the daily life of the mission. Like many diaries, these record everyday events, and they do not always elaborate on what was well known to the priests themselves. The diarists were more concerned about official support for Protestant missionaries than they were, for example, about the anti-Catholicism of Watchtower after 1920, of which the priests were fairly tolerant.^[17] I do not claim to ferret African voices out of these texts, however. I simply use European sources about vampiric priests to reveal African ideas about blood and the issues for which blood was a potent metaphor in the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia.

Evidence: Vampire Accusations

Between the mid 1920s and the mid 1950s, charges that Africans working for Europeans captured other Africans for their blood were commonplace in Northern Rhodesia’s Northern Province. In almost all the accusations, these African vampires went by the generic name banyama. But in almost every outbreak of these accusations that came to the attention of colonial officials, one order of Catholic priests—the Société des Missionnaires d’Afrique, known in Africa and among themselves as the White Fathers, because of their robes— were identified as some of the Europeans behind the banyama.

Between 1928 and 1931, there were periodic panics over banyama in the Kasama District of Northern Province. In some areas it is said, probably with great exaggeration, that no African would go out alone. It was frequently said that the provincial commissioner had met with the Chitimukulu, paramount of the Bemba, to pay him to allow banyama into his country. The White Fathers claimed that “the natives believe that there are two Banyama at Chilubula [their station in Kasama District] whose names are unknown, and that anyone from the mission is accordingly treated with suspicion.” White Fathers both at Chilubula and Ipusukilo, in Luwingu, advocated “strong repressive measures.” ^[18] In 1932, the monsignor of Chilubula received a handwritten letter in poor English—the White Fathers were a French-speaking order, whose priests spoke Bemba well—which “made gross insults not to be repeated” and called the monsignor “a prince of demons, a serpent, and a sorcerer.” Apparently the work of an African Protestant, it demanded that the White Fathers return to Europe, where God would punish them. It was signed “your good roast mutton captivity, imprisonment, and bandages.” ^[19] Although it is difficult to surmise very much from the recipient’s summary of such a letter, the transformation of captured Africans into animals or, sometimes, cooked meat is a common feature of Central African vampire stories, and bandages figure prominently in vampire accusations in East and Central Africa.^[20]

Although White Fathers were named as banyama during almost every outbreak of these rumors,^[21] very little entered the written record, other than that fat priests—like fat administrators—or those with long beards were particularly suspect.^[22] By the 1920s and 1930s, Watchtower openly accused Catholics of cannibalism, saying, “bakatolika balaya abantu” ( “Catholics eat people”), but it is not clear whether this reflected or encouraged local opinions.^[23] More specific accusations against White Fathers appear in a 1967 article by Vernon Brelsford, the former district commissioner of Chinsali, than there were in his official reports. When he first encountered these rumors in Chinsali in 1939, Brelsford was, if anything, discreet, writing only about Africans’ relative unwillingness to talk about them in any detail.^[24] Two decades later, after independence, however, Brelsford recounted anecdotes about the Belgian priest Dom Grégoire Coussement, the most notable banyama in the Luapula Valley. Dom Grégoire was said to be a White Father but was placed by Brelsford at the Dominican mission at Chibondo.^[25] Accusations against Dom Grégoire abounded. It was said that a man with two wives, presumably wanting to convert, offered the older one to Dom Grégoire to give to the banyama to be killed, but Dom Grégoire demanded the younger one, and that he “and his minions” kidnapped Africans and imprisoned them in the belfry of his church until he had time to drive them to Elisabethville in his closed van.^[26] In the late 1940s, it was said that Dom Grégoire worked for the Belgian government and crossed the Luapula into colonial Northern Rhodesia to capture people there.^[27] In 1958, in Northern Rhodesia’s Eastern Province, banyama victims were chosen in advance and “marked in some occult fashion by the White Fathers concerned with the Sign of the Cross which was not visible either to the intended victim or to his fellows but only to the Europeans and their African henchmen.” After enough people were marked, the “victims of the Cross” were collected, taken away, and killed.^[28] In 1960, just across the Zambezi River, farm workers believed that on a certain day a whistle would blow and those people who had a cross marked on their clothing would, “acting under an irresistible impulse,” rush to a lorry parked in the nearby veld, which would take them somewhere to be drained of their blood or to be turned into pork or beef.^[29]

Evidence: Missions and Extractions

There were White Fathers in Northern Rhodesia thirty years before there were banyama accusations. Missions were founded at Mambwe in 1895, Kayambi in 1896, and Chilubula in 1902. The founder of these stations, Père Dupont, had a fearsome local reputation as a sorcerer who shot lions and healed the sick, but he was not very different from other missionaries who established themselves in Africa at the turn of the century.^[30] Once the missions were established, however, the White Fathers relied on African catechists to proselytize the countryside—not because the territory of their vicariate was so vast, according to the White Fathers’ historians, but because the competition from the London Missionary Society and Livingstonia Mission was so intense, according to historians of Protestant missions and independent churches.^[31] As a result, White Fathers’ missions typically had a few priests for spiritual work—three in Chilubula in the 1920s, but only one at smaller stations like Kapatu or Chilonga—and at least as many “coadjuteurs,” religious brothers who worked to supplement the material well-being of the mission either by supervising construction or making furniture. A very few worked closely with private enterprises.^[32] Most of the stations had been founded before 1915; Mulilansolo and Ilondola were founded in the 1930s with the patronage of a French countess. Aside from Chilubula, none of the missions were terribly well-off. (Chilubula was by all accounts the best-provisioned place in Northern Rhodesia: it had wheat fields, herds of pigs, and a talent for charcuterie.) Other stations never managed to grow all their own food, even with student labor, and they frequently had to trade with the countryside. Their schools never had strong government support, and never attracted many students, since, as a French-speaking order, their instruction in English was sometimes poor.^[33]

Indeed, White Fathers were accused, not only of vampirism, but of violating the conventions of retail trade. On the Luapula, at least, the White Fathers operated barter stores that did not take money and sometimes exchanged goods for farm labor. At Ipusukilo, one priest rhapsodized about their new barter store

built of bricks…open all day long, and the Africans are ready to use it. In it one finds stationery, basic materials, and a wide variety of clothes, for which those who do not have money exchange foodstuffs or work. There are many reasons for the store’s appeal: beads, stamps, paper, envelopes—the things one buys in a store. I have no money. Contribute flour or firewood. I have neither. You are a lazy person, cultivate: on your farm, you will find everything with which to purchase all that you desire. The manager is prevented by an infirmity from hard work, but if you work here and nowhere else, these goods will be given to you.^[34]

In July 1932, L. G. Mee, a trader, complained to the boma that the White Fathers at Lubwe and Ipusukilo had for some time been selling calico to Africans as well as paying wages in calico.^[35] The secretary for native affairs replied that the priests had already been warned about this.^[36] The White Fathers at Ipusukilo had been trading cloth for salt, which they then exchanged for grain locally. In August 1932, the boma informed them that trading in salt and cloth was illegal without a general trader’s licence, which they could purchase for 50/- for six months— “an absurd regulation,” the priests complained.^[37]

At Chilubula and other missions, the economics of boarding schools had long disrupted the priests’ relations with the countryside. Money for boarding school students’ clothes had to be raised from tributes from the countryside. But “some parents did not understand that their children in catechism classes must work free on mission farms; recalcitrant students make work impossible.” These students were dismissed “to seek their fortunes elsewhere.” ^[38] In 1936, boarding school students had to work for the mission for three weeks.^[39] In 1939, catechists and students returned to Chilubula without the expected tribute for their upkeep; parents claimed that there were now so many students attending school that it was impossible to subsidize them all. Père Reuter—who had only returned to Chilubula in 1937 after years of supervising the diggers at the Lupa Goldfields in Tanganyika—made a speech to the students. “You have neither paid nor done work,” he said. “If each of you works six days a month, we shall have enough revenue for fifty-four students. Please remember that there are many children in the villages between 10 and 12 years of age who no longer study here. Why?” ^[40] At Kapatu, eight students ran away because they were asked to work five days a month to pay their school fees.^[41] At Ilondola, in 1948, classes were suspended because there was no food for the students. Nevertheless, students were asked to stay at the mission and work for three weeks, “a good occasion to see their spiritual and moral progress.” ^[42]

Catechists’ wages also caused dissent. In 1906, in Chilubula, catechists demanded that their pay be increased from one shilling a week to one shilling for three days’ work; a few catechists were dismissed, but they did receive a slight increase. In 1931, a group of catechists at Ipusukilo threatened not to hold classes unless their wages were increased; they received a stern lecture, and a few were dismissed.^[43] Catechists demanded a tribute of flour in the villages they visited—which they frequently did not receive. During the Depression, catechists were known as kupula, meaning “those who beg for food,” according to the priests, but according to Richards, a derisive term applied to the casual labor that Bemba offered to wealthier households during harvest times, work that was generally spoken of with great contempt.^[44] By 1934, catechists earned two shillings a week, the same as unskilled agricultural laborers earned and far less than the 22/- paid surface workers on the Copperbelt. When not working, catechists lived at the mission and grew their own food.^[45] In 1940, the White Fathers Mission at Mulilansolo did not have enough money to pay catechists regularly for their tours, which, the father superior lamented, “caused them to do the work of God very quickly.” ^[46] In 1943, catechists returned from their tour and returned their books, demanding an increase in salary, “A real revolt!” ^[47]

In 1938, a European in Fort Jameson, in Eastern Province, complained to the boma that the White Fathers at St. Mary’s refused to allow their converts to work for him. The White Fathers insisted that these accusations were false. They claimed that this man ( “a Jew”) had “debauched” the women who worked on his farm, and in protest they had prevented Catholics from working there. Nevertheless, the district commissioner called all the local chiefs to the boma and said, “Be on your guard against this mission, you are not their slaves, missionaries should have no say in this matter.” ^[48] Two years later, the priests at St. Mary’s complained that wartime economies had caused them to enlist reluctant porters. “We do not have enough money for paying porters, so we request that our Christians carry our luggage. Some are strong and good at heart about this, but others need a little prayer and even then will say they are sick just at the moment of departure.” ^[49] In 1948, the father superior of St. Mary’s complained that there seemed no end to wartime and even postwar economies: “The salary of unskilled workers is more than three times that of our catechists…they are leaving us, the best ones especially, and it is this continual change in personnel that makes our mission seem secular.” ^[50] In 1958, the priests were unable to pay their catechists at all, because most of the money for wages had been stolen from a priest’s house.^[51]

Details: Blood and the Eucharist

How do we link these disparate sets of evidence together? I don’t think it is possible, or even worthwhile. If I argue that vampire accusations mean one thing and not another, it would imply that all the ambiguities meant by blood and priests and the tangled associations of crosses and cars were incidental to these stories. If symbols and metaphors and meanings are indeed complex, layered, and polysemic, how do we write about them? As a rule, historians “prove” things. We argue that one line of reasoning, backed up by evidence, is correct in part by our arrangement of details and data, but also by showing how other lines of reasoning are flawed. If I were to do this now, I might prove that these accusations were indeed about the White Fathers’ labor practices and not about the Mass, blood, or retail trade. This would make for a tight and well-reasoned essay, but it would deform the substance of these accusations. Finding the single “correct” reason for vampire accusations against White Fathers would privilege certain details over others in a way that I have no evidence that the rumormongers actually did. It would, in Hayden White’s ungainly term, “detraumatize” some elements of these stories, and the emplotment of the resulting chapter would have been governed by my narrative strategy, not one grounded in these accusations themselves.^[52]

But how do we arrange evidence according to specifications other than our own? As historians, we want to tell stories that have some accuracy, even when they are about things that never happened. We want—or at least I want—to reflect actual events and processes, not just to emplot. The issue is not merely one of interpretation, but of how interpretation might best be done. In the absence of actual, detailed accusations against specific priests or missions, we have no shape or structure of stories to examine. Instead, we must look at details, at ideas about blood, and ingestion, as well as the objects and the images that figure in rumors about blood-drinking priests. We need to scrutinize mission activities closely as well, and look at how daily mission life was conceived, conducted, and paid for. But finding such details, whether about blood or rates of pay, requires that we read missionary and colonialist documents to uncover African categories. This is contradictory; these are not African sources. But these are documents about something Africans believed in and Europeans did not. They are the comments of missionaries and officials on other people’s images, ideas, and notions about bodily fluids. Such readings require that I read European sources exactly as I read oral materials: not for their “truths” but for their details, large and small.^[53]

My interpretation therefore begins with a large detail, the Mass, which is not mentioned in banyama accusations. After all, Catholic priests do announce that they drink blood regularly, and they frequently tried to impress that idea on their African converts. “The idea that the Cross is associated with the Eucharist is henceforth stamped clearly in the eyes of the believers. The Father Superior has made a fresco in the church with examples of the proper faith: the luminous cross now dominates the altar where each day we consume the eucharistic sacrifice,” the White Fathers at Kapatu noted with delight at Easter 1929.^[54]

Thomas Fox-Pitt, formerly district commissioner in Ndola and Mpika, but later secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society in London, argued in his 1953 essay, “Cannibalism and Christianity,” which the Manchester Guardian refused to publish, that African misunderstandings of European actions led to the vampire accusations against missionaries in Central Africa. It was not the Mass in and of itself that gave rise to certain fears, but the social context in which the Mass took place. From the start, Fox-Pitt wrote, missionaries claimed that accepting their faith would protect Africans from witchcraft. To fearful Africans, “It did not seem unreasonable that the eating of the body and the drinking of the blood of the all powerful man-God should be an antidote to the less powerful magic of the witch who had eaten the flesh of an ordinary person.” He noted that the popular witch-finding movement of the mid 1930s, mucape, used a red liquid “like wine” to identify and kill sorcerers who had not surrendered their amulets; it was an inversion of the Mass. But

[p]arallel with this idea ran the dreadful suspicion that the Europeans who would eat the flesh and drink the blood of their revered leader would feel no compunction about eating Africans if they thought it would benefit them.

As long as the mission churches were open to both Africans and Europeans this suspicion had little to support it for all could see that the Europeans were drinking wine and eating bread like themselves but when the Europeans in the towns began to gather in separate churches and exclude Africans from their services the suspicion grew that the ceremonies performed were different and far more menacing.

It was about at the time of the imposition of the first colour bar churches that Africans began among themselves to accuse Europeans of being “banyama,” the meat men, who capture Africans and eat them or drink their blood.^[55]

Did Protestant administrators overestimate the power of the Eucharist, or did they conceptualize banyama as an African discourse about food? Despite the fact that there were medical elements in most banyama accusations—in 1929, blood was said to be needed to cure King George V’s illness, for example, and in 1931, blood was to be forwarded to the Medical Department^[56]—in their official and in later academic interpretations, these stories became food stories. Officials blamed banyama on African ideas about the Mass, or on the migrant labor system that left women farmers alone and vulnerable. Even a hastily concocted indigenous origin for the rumors from the mid 1940s was based on the food supply: an aged settler informed officials that whenever the rains were late, Bemba chiefs kidnapped and sacrificed innocent Africans to ensure a bumper harvest.^[57] Read individually, these explanations for banyama are all credible, but, as I shall show, taken together they are part of a larger colonial discourse about the food supply in Northern Rhodesia.

In Christian countries the importance of the Eucharist was the miracle of transubstantiation. The eating of Christ had a magical significance that the eating of ordinary people—or ordinary food—lacked.^[58] Viewed in its own context, the Eucharist was as horrifying as it was divine: even some of the disciples left Jesus over the prospect of eating his flesh—especially in a way that mocked Passover—but the bread of the Eucharist was not like other bread.^[59]

The view from Northern Rhodesia may have lacked many of these connotations. That Catholic priests ate flesh and drank blood may have seemed an unpleasant but plausible boast, and especially since only priests drank the wine, it put them in a new category altogether. Bemba sorcerers, in contrast, began their otherwise mundane careers with an outrage, usually father-daughter incest or intra-clan infanticide.^[60] If we understand banyama accusations as popular debates about Catholicism, then the issue here is the literal interpretation of the Mass; transubstantiation does not seem to have taken hold in the popular imagination of the Bemba in the 1930s.^[61] The problem for residents of Northern Province was that Catholic priests ate flesh and drank blood, not that bread and wine sometimes became flesh and blood.^[62] Indeed, across the border in colonial Katanga, Africans accused white mine compound managers of eating women and the occasional man. People were eaten instead of bread; they were not transformed into bread.^[63]

But even with a culturally specific notion of the Eucharist for Northern Rhodesia, we should take Caroline Bynum’s point about medieval women and food seriously: that where food is regularly in short supply and where feeding is an exclusively female domain, the Eucharist takes on a special meaning, the specific form of which is control over food, not people.^[64] This is of course not wholly applicable to Central Africa, but the relationship between deforestation, food, and women’s work was a colonial obsession in Northern Rhodesia by the mid 1930s,^[65] and administrators tended to contextualize African ideas in those terms. Thus, when Fox-Pitt first encountered rumors about banyama he saw them not as a political issue, but as evidence of the perils of the widespread male migrancy that left women alone, defenseless, and overworked. Chiefs told him that

women everywhere are very nervous about working alone in their gardens far from villages and often run back to the villages in panic because they have seen someone near them in the bush. I have no doubt that this “banyama” story that has been going round the country for the last few years is due to the large number of lonely and unprotected women now in the country. It will go on…as long as the social system of the villages is upset as it has been for the past 15 or 20 years.^[66]

But if the flesh of the Eucharist was food, what was the blood? The most commonplace preindustrial assumption in which blood became food was that breast milk was blood transformed by biological and social processes.^[67] But the relationship of blood to breast milk, and the qualities of breast milk itself, were not at all clear in Northern Rhodesia. In Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia, Richards states emphatically that the Bemba did not consider breast milk food; it was a source of comfort: infants were force-fed gruel from the age of three or four weeks to nourish them.^[68] Her earlier work, however, suggests that the Bemba understood that breast milk nourished. One of the apocryphal visions of mucape was a “mythical woman with one breast in front and one behind. The good she would suckle in front, while the wicked would find themselves following willynilly behind.” ^[69]

If the blood of the Eucharist was food, then the interpretation of banyama becomes another argument—and another popular statement—about the Bemba food supply. Many interpretations of banyama phenomena have rested, not on hunger or food in and of themselves, but in the season of planting and rains, hunger and harvest. Some officials in the 1940s who experienced banyama as a political threat tried to show that banyama was simply a modern-day cover for the human sacrifices that supposedly took place whenever the rains were late.^[70] A. L. Epstein’s 1979 psychoanalytic interpretation of banyama replicates some of the colonial discourse about the agricultural cycle in Bemba country. The trauma of weaning was intensified by the seasonal cycle of hunger and plenty in Northern Rhodesia, and this caused “the oral aggression” of beliefs about colonialists who sucked their victims’ blood.^[71] In this analysis, blood and breast milk need not be the same substance; the anxiety results from the ways that sucking has become culturally charged.^[72] In 1992, Epstein elaborated his analysis of banyama, locating it in Bemba concepts of the body and wholeness.^[73] Interpreted in this way, banyama accusations against White Fathers may have reflected what Hugo Hinfelaar, himself a White Father, has seen as Bemba beliefs that priests monopolized concepts of the body and of blood.^[74] Accusations against priests may have parodied invasive Catholic dogma—fat priests and fat administrators, men actively engaged in changing what Africans did to their bodies, were particularly suspect.^[75] Such accusations also represented elaborate ideas about bodies, both African and European. Indeed, Fox-Pitt placed the origin of banyama rumors in events of 1930, when Africans believed that white men entered the compounds of the Copperbelt and captured Africans by striking each one with “a stick of rubber—mupila—which paralysed him”; Africans were then thrown into a lorry and driven off. “It was thought by authorities that this scare originated from the visits of a feeble minded European youth to the compounds where he frightened African women by sticking them with a blind worm.” ^[76] The conflation, by administrators or Africans, of body parts and bodily failures—paralysis, feeble-mindedness, genitals and sight—suggests that banyama not be located in beliefs about food but in beliefs about the body and the fluids and functions of which it is comprised.

Was blood a drink in Bemba communities in the 1930s? If so, what kind of drink? According to Brelsford, it was medicinal; Africans believed that their blood and internal organs were needed to cure European diseases. The illness of any well-known European was reason enough for a banyama panic.^[77] According to Hinfelaar, the Bemba word umulopa means not only blood but all the fluids that transfer life: vaginal secretions, semen, and blood.^[78] In the Bemba theory of procreation, only women passed blood on to their children; men’s blood was not inherited by their children.^[79] This theory was beginning to be questioned in the early 1930s when men returned from the Copperbelt demanding bridewealth marriages and rights over children, but the impact of these new ideas on ideas about blood is difficult to ascertain. In both the old and new ideas, however, marriage made blood somewhat magical and very private but still largely female: according to Richards, adultery was said to “mix blood,” and if the wife of an adulterer saw the blood of her husband’s lover, the wife would die.^[80] But the blood women shed and the blood men shed were not the same thing in the minds of many Central African peoples.^[81] The special, well-publicized attention given to Christ’s blood—or even the blood banyama took (and mixed) indiscriminately from men and women—may have indicated a degree of specificity that was absent in local concepts. The blood of male missionaries—and of anti-European fantasies—may have represented ideas about commodities and the sale of labor power, as well as ideas about nurturance and colors.

It is important here that we look at systems of color classification, both as it applies to the red of blood and to the red or white of wine (a drink forbidden to Africans in the colony).^[82] In the West, blood and wine, both as fluids and as metaphors, carried exceptional powers that could make rituals ambiguous and their use in everyday problematic: without the mediation of another liquid or specific meals, they could make miraculous rituals exceptionally complex and layered.^[83] But in Northern Rhodesia, wine as an intoxicating liquid seems to have been far less important to Africans than beer was.^[84] Wine seems to have been most meaningful when it was red and bottled and drunk by Europeans. A generic red liquid in bottles took on immense power in ways that clerics and administrators could never have anticipated. The bottled red liquid of mucape could kill an unrepentant sorcerer years after he or she had drunk it,^[85] and during the banyama scares in Tanganyika in 1931, according to E. E. Hutchins, “bad characters” spilled the contents of “bottles of red ink” bumping into passers-by and then claimed that “they were servants of ‘mumiani’ and now their master’s medicine was lost. Considerable sums as compensation have been extorted from ignorant natives by this old ruse.” Hutchins also reported that a group of European surveyors were accused of being mumiami and threatened so often that they had to be withdrawn from the area because, missionaries told him, “some of them were seen to drink red wine.” ^[86] In the late 1940s in Tanganyika, the doctor Hope Trant was accused of being banyama by the people who saw her drink red wine with her dinner.^[87]

Most Central African matrilineal peoples have a tripartite system of classification based on red, white, and black; these are the only colors for which they possess “names.” Of these colors, red represents life and death, depending on context, while white represents purity and health; black is the color of disease, witchcraft, and death. Because of black’s straightforward qualities and its power, tripartite systems tend to give way to binary systems in which red and white become binary opposites. In ritual practice and daily life, red absorbs some of the qualities of black, and red and white can be seen to contradict each other. Thus, the Ndembu of western Zambia say that semen is blood “purified by water,” while among the Bemba, white paint on a hut washed away the pollution of menstrual blood.^[88] In colonial Northern Rhodesia, the contradiction of priests in white robes said to be drinking African blood may have been difficult to tolerate: it announced that the priests were free of any taint that might result from such an action. But Europeans’ power over African blood was not only their real and metaphoric ability to extract it and openly consume it; it was their ability to take it and bottle it and transport it throughout the world.

But what about Fox-Pitt’s second point, that it was not merely Africans beliefs’ about the Mass but racial segregation that left Africans free to imagine such things about the Mass? There were no racially segregated churches in Northern Province, where, as administrators were quick to point out, there were not enough Europeans even to fill all the available government positions.^[89] Segregated Masses took place on the Copperbelt, however, performed not by White Fathers but by Jesuits, who arrived at Broken Hill in 1927, or Franciscans, who moved from Broken Hill to Ndola in 1931. The fact that in rumor most priests were known as White Fathers may have referred generically to the color of priests’ robes, and it may also have represented what the color of those robes and the priests who wore them meant to the peoples of Northern Rhodesia.

But if banyama is a literal, local reading of the Mass, how do we account for the time lag between the first Catholic missions among the Bemba in the late 1890s and the first banyama accusations in the late 1920s? The question suggests a mechanical relationship between Catholic practices and African responses; the issue may not be the Mass, but what the Mass meant to Africans at a given time. Thus, it may be more useful to suggest, as Fox-Pitt asserted, that the idea of blood-drinking priests became a powerful source of anxiety because of the political contexts in which those and other practices were thought to take place. Africans were among the first Protestants to evangelize the Bemba, and the heritage of revivalist movements, especially those of John Chilembwe in Nyasaland and Mwana Lesa in Northern Rhodesia, was strong.^[90] But after the strike on the Copperbelt in 1935, relations between Christian missionaries and Africans became quite tense. At Luanshya, along with other Europeans, Protestant missionaries had been protected from strikers by machine-guns.^[91] Officials later criticized White Fathers for how they had educated the Bemba. White Fathers responded that officials had not done enough to counter Watchtower propaganda—which called the disturbances a “pre-arranged Catholic riot”—but after that, in their churches, White Fathers urged converts to join Catholic Action groups on the Copperbelt and avoid trade unions.^[92] The social context of Christian practices and teachings were those of labor, and any explanation of banyama that does not consider labor relations is flawed.

Details: Work and Pay

Banyama stories were about Africans who were employed by Europeans to capture other Africans. If we locate vampire accusations against White Fathers in the labor relations of each mission and the wider colony, we get a very different picture, one that may link ideas about the alienation of labor power with those about the circulation of money and commodities and the commoditization of blood. Men from the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia had been migrant laborers for years—men went to Katanga, the Lupa Goldfields, and the Copperbelt; during the sisal boom of the 1920s, they went to the plantations of Tanganyika Territory—so that the sale of labor power for money was commonplace by the 1930s. What made it remarkable, apparently, was how it was remunerated.

According to Audrey Richards, money had been circulating in the region since the turn of the century, when administrators were charged with encouraging the payment of wages and taxes in cash, rather than in kind. European-owned stores, mainly those of Thom and the African Lakes Company, also encouraged cash transactions. Although Richards insists that, despite the number of men away, the actual use of money in everyday life was limited, her evidence is contradictory. Many Bemba regarded money as a medium for specific transactions. In the late 1920s, for example, a woman on her way to visit her son on the Copperbelt was found dying of starvation with 2/- tied in a cloth: “It had apparently never occurred to her to use the money to buy supplies,” Richards wrote.^[93] But within a few years, Richards observed, the use of money created new ties of rights and obligations: if a woman who lived alone, or with one or two married daughters, purchased food with money, she was not obligated to share it. Richards saw “a young couple eat meat alone while almost starving neighbors looked on. They shrugged their shoulders when questioned, and said ‘We bought this meat with money.’” ^[94] By the early 1930s, money seems to have become a fairly commonplace medium to exchange for male labor. A small brideprice was creeping into Kasama District, and the 10/- given to fathers instead of service was “money to cut trees,” which according to Richards was “the wage for a month’s work at European rates.” ^[95] My point here is not about the monetization of suitor service, which is part of larger struggles over bridewealth and contested systems of marriage taking place in Bemba country, but that a ritual payment was now reckoned in the language of the labor market, with remuneration measured by time, not work, and at European rates. In this the Bemba were not fetishizing money, giving it properties above and beyond exchange; they were standardizing the relationship of labor power to money. Africans who worked for Europeans for free were ridiculed. At Kayambi in the late 1920s, for example, priests designated two girls to bring reeds to the station for Easter. Although the mission had no authority over them, they seemed willing to do this. Only when they were “abused and insulted” in their villages did the mission agree to pay each girl’s father 2/- for their work.^[96]

But how money was used and how money was talked about may have been different in colonial Northern Rhodesia. When talked about, money is an international language that transcends ethnic and political frontiers and proclaims the sophistication of the speaker.^[97] Debates and rumors about how money is to be used, however, reveal local concerns about the value of money both as a medium of exchange and as a token of political authority.^[98] During the time Richards did her fieldwork, the demand for mine labor dropped precipitously; there was a shortage of money throughout Northern Province, and there were widespread rumors that unemployed copper miners had been promised exemptions from their 1932 taxes.^[99] In Isoka District, returning migrants told the district commissioner that “it was no good looking for work in the Tanganyika Territory because the white ants had eaten all the money.” ^[100] As the suspension of the gold standard came into effect, rumors about the value of currencies circulated. Africans parodied the idea of “face value” amid the dire conditions on the Copperbelt. Men who did not have the money to buy firewood or food claimed that the king of England had been jailed for one month because he demanded “too many taxes” and that the coins with his face on them had lost their value.^[101] In 1933, the rumor circulated that British rule was about to end, and that Englishmen would be replaced by black Americans, who would bring American currency; a year later, the gradual withdrawal of South African silver coins from circulation was said to herald the closing of Chinsali boma.^[102] Taken together, these rumors reflect the importance of money. Stephen Gudeman’s reworking of Richards has characterized the Bemba village economy as one in which commodities and services circulated among villagers, headmen, chiefs, and ancestors according to customary rules of allocation and distribution.^[103] But in the wider, industrialized economy of Northern Rhodesia—at least from the vantage point of Bemba laborers in the 1930s—money did not circulate through commodities but from wage labor to taxation. Money defined the relationship between Africans, Europeans, and the state. The ruptures in these relationships were described in rumors of ingestion, imprisonment, and blood.

What kinds of work relationships obtained at White Fathers’ missions? The priests were not exchanging goods and services for money, or when they were, the amount of money was pathetically small. The barter stores of the Luapula missions, the heavy-handed methods of making Christian men porters—all these contradicted the economic world of which most Bemba had experience. Even boarding schools were subsidized, not by parents’ fees, but by children’s labor. Where the White Fathers did pay in money, those small sums were often contested and sometimes withheld.

The accusations that deformed and parodied conversions, church belfries, and priests’ insistence on monogamy were not popular religion, they were popular economics. Outbreaks of banyama accusations often corresponded with incidents involving unpaid or underpaid catechists. There was a catechists’ strike at Ipusukilo at about the same time that there was an outbreak of banyama rumors in the district; a few months later, the accusations reached Kasama District headquarters at the same time that boarding school students refused to work; banyama accusations came forcibly to the attention of the boma within a week of the threatened strike by catechists at Mulilansolo in 1943;^[104] in 1958, the catechists of St. Mary’s were said to mark victims with the sign of the cross the same year that they were not paid at all. This is not to claim that there is a mechanical relationship between banyama accusations and catechists’ wages. The process by which bloodsucking becomes a powerful and credible metaphor is far too complex for that. But I want to suggest that vampire accusations may have taken hold when relations of work and remuneration were severely disfigured. Accusations that the White Fathers sucked African blood may have described a specific labor market.^[105]

Stories about vampire priests were an idiom—like strikes and slowdowns—with which labor was debated. Vampire accusations did not just debate the nature of the work catechists and Christians did for White Fathers, they debated the specific form of remuneration. The low and frequently nonexistent salaries paid catechists, the White Fathers’ numerous attempts to monopolize local labor, raised the question, why are these people working? These stories explain—or, if that is too strong a term, account for—why catechists might work without pay, why people might trade at the barter stores. The frequent references to the “minions” of the priests as the true agents of banyama sought to understand and give meaning to work relationships that were unwaged.

But the idea of wage rates, commodity prices, and local labor markets may have been abstractions in rural Northern Rhodesia. During the Depression, at least, the competitive labor markets were hundreds of miles away (and rumored to have no money), and there was no agreed upon social necessity by which wages were set. Barter stores and anxieties about the value of money had seriously distorted the value of commodities and wages. Wages had been set by employers; commodity prices had been set by shopkeepers; sometimes commodities and wages were one and the same. If banyama accusations are to be located in labor relations, it is necessary to look as closely as the sources allow at their generic employers and shopkeepers, the Europeans accused.

Details: White Men

How do we read the lack of specificity about the White Fathers in banyama accusations? They were, after all, just a few of the many Europeans who were said to take Africans’ blood. Suppose I suggest that the White Fathers were merely stock characters, like villains in melodrama, in these complex and layered stories, some of many diverse individuals called banyama and made important only by the garbled evidence presented in archives and documents? Suppose I suggest that the real issues in banyama stories were the economic relationships—or un-economic relationships—that gave rise to vampire accusations? What if I locate these accusations in relationships, not events, facts, or figures? In that case the relationship between the catechists’ threatened strikes and banyama accusations of 1943 would be obvious, if mechanistic: the real cause triggered an outburst against imagined practices. What if I locate vampire accusations not only in a parsimonious priesthood but in relations between merchants and patrons? We get the same level of detail about white people—which is not very much—but an accusation firmly rooted in retail trade.

Let me introduce evidence about a white man who was not a priest. Early in January 1944, “a strange man” ran off with a small child in the southern part of Kasama district. “On being arrested this man stated that he belonged to the ‘banyama’ and that he had been sent out by Mr. Glieman (an Abercorn settler) to collect blood.” By late January, he had “changed his story and now states that he ran off with the child as he wished to rape her.” ^[106]

Unpacking such a story is a challenge. Kidnapped or missing children—singly and in groups—figure in many banyama accusations and Northern Province memoranda of the 1940s. This may have been due to child custody disputes, inasmuch as men who had worked on the Copperbelt increasingly insisted on bridewealth marriages and control over children, or to disputes over pawning.^[107] In the early 1930s, for the first time, fathers began pawning their children, the White Fathers noted.^[108] In both cases, mother’s brothers might have taken children back to their homes.

But what do we make of the man’s saying that he belonged to the banyama and had been sent to collect blood for a specific white man, Orne Glieman? I assume the man gave what he thought to be the right answer, the answer that he thought would set him free. If he believed, in the words of the parliamentary member for native interests in 1945, the “popular misconception that the Government knows all about what is going on and is conniving in the practices,” ^[109] claiming that he worked for the European known locally as a banyama may have seemed the wisest possible answer. I cannot assess his second answer nearly as well, because we do not know the circumstances in which it was induced. We can be reasonably certain that this was an answer acceptable to his interrogators, but the first answer took hold locally, and when the man was brought to trial, it was recommended that he not be defended by a district officer—the usual practice— “in view of the widespread suspicion amongst Africans…that the Government in general and the District Commissioner in particular are sympathetic toward the ‘banyama’ cult and are responsible for recent disappearances.” ^[110]

Why Orne Glieman? There are in fact several reasons why he might have been considered banyama. He was shadowy even by the standards of white settlers in Northern Rhodesia. A Scandinavian, he is remembered as having claimed to be the illegitimate son of the king of Sweden or Denmark, and had come from the Congo to a farm in the Siasi Valley, near Abercorn, in 1927. There his oldest son accidentally shot two Africans, killing one. Glieman senior was involved in “the usual labor disputes in which he was not infrequently defeated, much to his chagrin.” ^[111] But Glieman was accused of drinking blood, not in Abercorn, but in Kasama, where he worked as a manager for Thom Stores; there he was known as a man who did not treat Africans very well. In 1939 or 1940, he gravely insulted the Chitimukulu, the paramount of the Bemba. The Chitimukulu wanted to buy a length of valve tubing from Glieman for his bicycle. Glieman rudely asked him why he wanted valve tubing when there were plenty of rats’ tails that could be used for the purpose. This caused great offense; there was a boycott of the store, and Glieman was forced to retire to his farm in Abercorn.^[112]

Without any oral versions of the Glieman-as-banyama story it is almost impossible to get very much out of this account, but the basics are nonetheless compelling. Here not only was an ordinary economic transaction—the purchase of a commodity with money—refused, but the offensive shopkeeper suggested the transaction be replaced by foraging.^[113] The issue was not only that the Chitimukulu was insulted, but how he was insulted: Glieman deformed relationships grounded in money; indeed, he refused them. Vampire accusations not only described unfair extractions, they identified those Europeans who did not participate in the circulation of money. Elsewhere in Southern Africa, blood became a metaphor for money; the difficulties men face in accumulating money—that it burns a hole in their pockets—in so many cultures reflects not only the heat generated by monetary transactions, but the fluidity of cash.^[114] Sharon Hutchinson’s work on the Nuer, however, maintains that in actual practice people do not stress the analogy between blood and money, in order to make the differences between money and people clear.^[115] But the banyama accusations against the missions, their barter stores, and Orne Glieman suggest that money and blood are situational similes, deployed in very specific instances: when people spoke of blood to describe what money was like, they were defining how money functioned in specific relationships, how it in fact circulated.

There is, however, another reason why Glieman might have been known as banyama—he said he was. Such a terrifying boast would not have been out of character for the man described above, and another European in Northern Rhodesia known as banyama—Arthur Davison, a labor recruiter based at Ndola—was said to have encouraged the rumor, enjoying the celebrity it gave him.^[116] But white people do not spread banyama stories; Africans do. Rumors do not take hold because of the credibility of any one person doing the telling, but because of how they articulate and embody the concerns of the people spreading and hearing the rumor.^[117] Understanding banyama requires understanding why these beliefs made so much sense to those who believed them.

Details: Talk

I want to propose a fourth interpretation, one that returns us to the issues raised in the first part of this chapter. What if I were to argue that each outbreak of banyama rumors was part of a transcolonial movement of vampire accusations, and that the form these accusations took in Northern Rhodesia or Katanga had to do with how local events and actors were inserted into widely told border-crossing stories? What if no specific event or action caused a specific banyama accusation? What if specific events and actions were used to make a transcolonial narrative local? Just as mucape and Watchtower crossed ethnic and colonial frontiers, from Nyasaland to Northern Rhodesia and Katanga and northwest to Tanganyika, vampire accusations also swept the countryside “like the Charleston or mah jong in England some years ago.” ^[118] But unlike mucape and Watchtower, banyama rumors were an oral genre. Ideas and images were exchanged and amended, and in each new place, they were literally inscribed with characters and actors and equipment specific to local concerns: ideas and images were embodied and emplotted. Thus, in 1931, banyama accusations ranged from Northern Rhodesia to central Tanganyika; in 1943, there were charges that white men drank African blood from Kananga in the lower Congo region through Katanga to Northern Rhodesia’s Northern Province. Across the copperbelts of the colonial Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia, different images had different meanings and connotations—white compound managers were the cannibals who terrified African mineworkers in Katanga, while priests and shopkeepers and labor recruiters were said to suck African blood a few hundred miles away. The local Northern Rhodesian meanings of banyama accusations—whether about labor practices or the Mass—are no less clear, however, because these movements were transnational. Vampire accusations were specifically African ways of talking that identified new forms of violence and extraction; the actual description of these forms took place in the new technologies and teleologies of colonial economies: with their Catholic priests, white men with beards, and game rangers, banyama stories foregrounded what was both different and dangerous.

Many of the vampire accusations described in this chapter seem to have taken elements from the Book of Revelations—the invisible mark that identifies victims, the final sound that compels its listeners to follow. These were not only new images but ones specific to religious teachings; their power came from the catechism classes and sermons and readings of which they were a part. Rearranged as the props and ideas in terrifying stories, they may have had different meanings in different places, but they brought priests and mission practices into each retelling.

Vampire accusations were the rumors that debated rates of pay, the currency in which payment took place, and the ways in which Europeans articulated relationships reckoned in money; they debated the new medical and religious meanings of blood, and the importance of customary systems of color classification. Vampire accusations debated these issues with each addition of a new character or a new image. These images and characters had the power to terrify and explain because they touched on so many Northern Rhodesian—or Congolese, or Tanganyikan—experiences and concerns. They had intense meaning because they were told and retold in the vocabularies of people’s daily lives and conflicts. For this reason, there is no one interpretation that fits all banyama rumors, no single analysis that can explain how banyama accusations developed and then faded. Like the blood extracted and abstracted in them, banyama rumors had the fluidity to describe many situations.

Notes

7. Blood, Bugs, and Archives

Debates over Sleeping-Sickness Control in Colonial Northern Rhodesia, 1931–1939

This chapter is about the interaction of African ideas and imperial science. It argues that the very specific vampire accusations that emerged in the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s involved local and colonial ideas about the relationship between wild animals, tsetse flies, authority, and citemene, the form of shifting cultivation specific to the poor soils of the Congo-Zambezi watershed. Neither African nor European ideas on these subjects were fixed, nor was one untouched by the other. Although I shall present European ideas and African ideas in sequence, I do not see them as separate and distinct. African experience with tsetse flies shaped European ideas about control of such insects, which were necessarily tailored to fit African realities.^[1] Indeed, it may be more useful to think of what follows as a presentation of scientific evidence (i.e., the kind of evidence we expect to find in essays about shifting cultivation) followed by a presentation of evidence of a very different sort (i.e., the kind usually considered inappropriate for historiography).

This chapter also suggests, with some trepidation, that the African ecological nightmare, whether disease or overpopulation, is in part a trope.^[2] Over the past 100 years, “science” and “medicine” have become ways of talking about Africa that embody ideas about disaster and renewal. The ecological history of Africa needs to incorporate data that will move scholars away from this paradigm. Sleeping sickness is a real and virulent disease, and my task here is not merely to identify a discourse but to describe and elaborate other visions in which sleeping sickness was seen as a manageable disease in Northern Rhodesia. The other visions are not expressed in the language of germs, parasites, or apocalyptic epidemics; they are expressed in the language of colonial departments, officials and assistants, and blood. There is a body of thought in cultural studies that claims that people not only debate the changes taking place around them, they debate the terms in which those changes are described.^[3] But to label either of these constructions “African” or “European” would be a mistake, I think, and I suggest that readers think of both of these as colonial constructions, in which the project and the materials are the same, but the position of the narrator is different.

But where are these narrators found? The sources I use here are from European archives: all the descriptions of vampires here have been mediated through the writings of colonial officials, colonial doctors, and the like. Over the past two decades, African historians have regarded such mediations with grave suspicions; the historian’s task was to find ways to hear the African voices submerged in such archives and to unveil the processes of inscription and recoding that constituted each mediation. In this chapter I look directly at the mediations, at the African ideas distorted in the sources, so that I can relocate African voices—and the vampires they talk about—in those archives. Archives, James Hevia and Gayatri Spivak remind us, do not merely report colonial activities, they report the elaborate colonial attempts to recode local space, local property, and local ideas into imperial terms. The making of a colony out of a variety of African landscapes and disorderly states required that it be reterritorialized, made into a new unit, with new maps and rules to fit the British empire.^[4] The official recoding of African spaces and ideas was as partial as it was elaborate. No land, no population, and no institution was ever made fully identical to the imperial categories in which it was placed, and no imperial codes were ever completely adopted by farmers, chiefs, and porters. The inability of the colonial state to fully recode and reterritorialize is revealed in colonial archives. Reading colonial archives to tease out African voices suggests layers of domination that can be stripped away to reveal a colonial subject buried beneath the imperial project. Another kind of reading might reveal intense struggles over domination in each archival reference to an incomplete recoding, or to another bungled reterritorialization. In such a reading, archives report the struggles, imperial and local, over the vocabularies and tools of domination. Evidence such as vampire rumors opens a space in which historians can accurately see the failures of recoding and the incomplete reterritorialization that was the practice of colonial rule.

But what kind of evidence is rumor, and how can I use it to move from the politics of representation to the politics of tsetse control? In its most positivist form, rumor is the officials’ term for information they have not engendered, shaped, or controlled. It is a category that simultaneously reveals popular conceptions about the actions and ideas of those in authority and declares the weakness of official channels of information and education. But what happens when I read rumors alongside naturalists’ studies and colonial biomedicine? I want to suggest that for academics at the end of the twentieth century, the differences between rumor and research reports are great; they are recounted in different media and they have completely different levels of credibility. But for the subjects of the research and of colonial biomedicine, rumor and our own notions of fact may not have been all that different. The Bemba language does not have separate words for rumor, talk, and conversation. Indeed, how rumor was distinguished from fact in the 1930s is not at all clear.^[5] Both covered the same ground, both contained the same actors and issues, but the rumor—at least as it was told and retold in colonial Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s—was often presented as a personal narrative. Rumors were not thought to be less believable if they were not first-person accounts, however: no one thought something untrue because it was said to have happened to a friend of a friend. Scientific knowledge, however, could be and frequently was disseminated in fragments, without the very frameworks that made it make sense.^[6] The vampire accusations of the early 1930s, for example, referred to activities in Tanganyika Territory that were said to be about to shift to Northern Rhodesia’s Northern Province, but were no less apparent—or frightening—to officials because of that.^[7] Official arguments about citemene, cassava, and deforestation, on the other hand, were often made without reference to African ideas about tsetse flies, ecology, and wildlife. Moreover, officials frequently anticipated that their arguments would be ignored.

The world in which black Northern Rhodesians lived seems to have had more varied forms of information than that of their British counterparts. Starting at least in the 1920s, Bemba-speaking peoples heard tales of a twig that could strip a man of his willpower and of “Kasai cannibals” who kidnapped African mineworkers. They heard that Catholic priests ate people. During the early years of the Depression, they heard that the king of England was in jail and that black Americans would come to replace the British. They heard that Europeans hired Africans to capture other Africans and take their blood; they heard the dangers of citemene.^[8] This is not to say everyone believed everything they heard. People believed stories—even if belief was not a constant state—because of how they appreciated and apprehended certain facts, not because a story was grandiose, frightful, or told orally. From the vantage point of a Bemba village, belief in “rumors” and “facts” appeared to be equally tentative. Audrey Richards dismissed muchape, the transnational witch-finding movement of the early 1930s, as precisely the kind of novelty the Bemba took up and quickly abandoned.^[9]

But colonial science was not the mirror image of an African intellectual faddishness. Colonial science was anything but a monolith; officials continually argued with the state and one another about forests, wild animals, and African agriculture. “Scientific research” had a credibility in colonial circles that the eyewitness accounts of naturalists did not have. But rather than evaluate various trends in colonial thinking, I want to find a way to interpret them all, as representing different visions of the world and ways to understand it that changed over time. Recent trends in literary criticism have argued that it is worthwhile to read scientific texts the way we read novels, as cultural products that reveal the concerns and anxieties of a specific milieu.^[10] In this chapter I suggest that it is possible to read the fictive as the same kind of historical source as scientific texts.

This chapter is about the mosaic of colonial beliefs, African and European, the supposedly superstitious and the supposedly scientific, about sleeping-sickness control. It argues that these beliefs, like so many tiles, can be placed alongside one another so that an observer can discern the different narratives of science, land use, and medicine and see how no single vision of fact and consequence ever fully dominates another. What follows are two discrete histories, one of pathogens, the other of vampires. Without oral evidence, this may be the only way I can proceed. The questions of who is saying what, when, and of who repeats which rumor with intense belief and who argues against it with equal passion—the very evidence that makes rumors form a debate rather than a monolith—is not discernible from archival sources. Where individual African viewpoints appear, they do so at the behest of colonial authorities, so that I am hesitant to read the words of an African writing for a government newspaper or a district clerk’s words as anything more than those of a man doing his job. What follows, I hasten to point out, is a very conservative interpretation, in which I have stayed very close to my documents. This exegesis is based on a reading that could best be called vampire-driven: the questions I have asked and the files in which I have sought answer to them have all been determined by my reading of the Northern Rhodesian vampire accusations of 1931.

Bug Stories

Tsetse flies carry the protozoa, called trypanosomes, that cause sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) in humans and domestic livestock. There are two kinds of trypanosome and two kinds of sleeping sickness, the origins and nature of which are by no means agreed upon: some think these are different environmental responses, others that the structure of the trypanosomes differs. Thus, the two kinds are either called by the names of the protozoa—Trypanosoma gambiense and Trypanosoma rhodesiense—or by the environments in which they occur, riverain and savannah. The terminologies of both types of sleeping sickness involve hosts (sometimes called the reservoir), vectors, and ecologies. The vector is the only method of disease transmission, as the trypanosome transforms in the fly’s body over several days to become infectious. In T. gambiense, infected flies live in the shade on riverbanks and feed off humans, or occasionally reptiles, and infect them; because the disease can be transmitted from human to human, it can be spread by relatively small numbers of flies. Humans are the hosts, flies the vector. In T. rhodesiense, tsetses live in wooded areas—the bush—and feed off wild animals, which do not become infected, but they can also feed off humans or domestic ungulates when they are available: wild animals are the hosts, and the flies are the vector. Entomologists—amateur and professional—have tended to ignore the protozoon for the fly and studied the behavior of various species of tsetse in order to show how different varieties of trypanosomiasis are spread and how different ecosystems encourage that spread. Sleeping-sickness control organizations in British Africa invariably included entomologists.^[11] Protozoologists, who seem to have been more influential in francophone Africa, regarded the differences between the trypanosomes as crucial and saw T. gambiense as an entirely different disease from T. rhodesiense.^[12]

The “discovery” of sleeping sickness was truly a colonial phenomenon. While the disease had been known in West Africa for centuries, its spread in the havoc of colonial conquest to previously uninfected regions—the Congo River basin and Busoga in Uganda are perhaps the most dramatic examples—created epidemics of apocalyptic proportions. The other discovery, of the cause and etiology of the disease, is one of the great stories of tropical medicine, combining all that was exotic about epidemics in Africa with all that was memorable about scientists’ and explorers’ egos.^[13] It was a discovery that would not have been possible without the scientific advances of the late nineteenth century, particularly germ theory. Germ theory made the debilitating diseases of the tropics avoidable; they were not caused by the gaseous matter of climate and decaying organisms (miasma), as had been previously thought, but by protozoa and bacteria, which could be conquered as they had been conquered in Europe.^[14] But as Maryinez Lyons has argued, germ theory had its drawbacks. If the miasma theory had related tropical diseases to their geographical location, the bacteriology and protozoology of tropical medicine alienated disease from the landscape.^[15]

But the sleeping sickness of this grand tradition was T. gambiense; the discovery—or invention, depending on whether one stands with the protozoologists or the entomologists—of T. rhodesiense was pursued with far less excitement and even some trepidation, as researchers concerned themselves with identifying an etiology and relating its cause to the trypanosomiasis of domestic stock, called nagana. T. rhodesiense was difficult to identify in part because local doctors expected humans to develop T. gambiense and in part because victims sickened and died so rapidly that Africans only identified the last stages of the disease, and then only for adults; presumably children succumbed so rapidly that sleeping sickness was confused with other afflictions. It was only in 1912 that the Luangwa Sleeping Sickness Commission, headed by investigators from the Liverpool School of Hygiene, demonstrated that the trypanosome carried by Glossina morsitans could feed off wild animals and humans alike.^[16] Research in Nyasaland and South Africa in 1913 showed that T. rhodesiense was identical to T. brucei, discovered by David Bruce in Natal in 1894, the cause of nagana.^[17] Not everyone accepted the idea that T. rhodesiense was caused by the trypanosome of wild animals and domestic livestock, but the fact shaped sleeping-sickness and tsetse-control policies in the 1930s.

In areas where T. gambiense was prevalent, attempts to control sleeping sickness became attempts to control populations—either by restricting their movements, by isolating the sick, or by removing whole villages.^[18] But areas where T. rhodesiense was prevalent were, according to the thinking of the times, areas where cattle keeping was impossible, so that attempts to control sleeping sickness became attempts to control land use and relations between humans and wild animals. There were never as many cases of T. rhodesiense in East Africa as there were of T. gambiense on the riverbanks and lake shores of East and Central Africa. T. rhodesiense was more virulent, but since it was carried from animal to human, rather than from human to human, it was far less contagious. For that and for economic reasons, there was far more concern about nagana in East and Central Africa than there was about human sleeping sickness. Studies of T. rhodesiense tended to be centered on cattle rather than people. As late as the 1950s, when livestock losses from trypanosomiasis were less than those from rinderpest, tsetse flies and the fear thereof prevented profitable land use.^[19]

In the case of sleeping sickness, the politics of land use was mediated through the new discipline of tropical medicine. In his history of yellow fever, François Delaporte charts the origins of the field. It mapped the interactions of living things to arrive at pathologies and in doing so, imbued insect vectors not only with the power of life and death, but the power of science: they could be controlled by knowledge about them. Tropical medicine drained one ancient symbol of its meaning and replaced it with another: “[D]eath came not now in the form of a man with a scythe but of a biting insect.” ^[20] But if germ theory simply swept the miasma-ists away, along with their intimate sense of peopled locations, parasitologists swept the bacteriologists out of British tropical medicine. “Non-tropical” bacteriological diseases were ignored, and tropical medicine concentrated on worms, insects, and protozoa. The link between parasitology and tropical health convinced experts that these diseases could be prevented without studying how local populations became ill. Much colonial health policy focused on protozoa and vectors. Insect vectors and animal hosts were where protozoa spent part of their lifecycles, and killing the insect or animal could kill the protozoa.^[21]

In the case of T. rhodesiense and G. morsitans, this pitted tsetse control against a vocal hunting lobby and one faction of imperial science. When in 1913, for example, David Bruce was convinced that T. rhodesiense and the trypanosome that caused nagana were identical, he became an even stronger advocate of the extermination of wild animals than he had been previously. His reasoning had to do with ideas about what formed an infectious reservoir and how best to control it. Questioned before a 1913 Colonial Office Sleeping Sickness Committee that had many hunters on it, Bruce was asked why wild animals were the host for infectious T. rhodesiense, rather than birds, immune herds of cattle, or even people. The birds in G. morsitans country were too small and too mobile to be a good source of food for tsetse flies, there were no herds of cattle in G. morsitans country, and humans made poor hosts for T. rhodesiense, because only a few were infected and those were too sick to travel about and spread the disease, he responded.^[22] He strenuously opposed the preservation of big game in “fly country”: “It would be as reasonable to allow mad dogs to live and be protected by law in our English towns and villages.” ^[23]

Although some suggested localized experiments in game eradication,^[24] few of Bruce’s contemporaries agreed with him about the relationship of T. rhodesiense to wild animals. German scholars disputed his findings; Alward May, Northern Rhodesia’s medical officer, disregarded the findings of the Luangwa Sleeping Sickness Commission and claimed that man was the principle reservoir for T. rhodesiense; E. E. Austen of London’s Natural History Museum argued that tsetse were specific to certain habitats: these could be emptied of people and left to game, inasmuch as tsetse flies did not follow game.^[25]

Such debates about vectors and hosts, about flies and buffalo, were debates about how to classify and categorize animals. Such classifications were and are as much a part of scientific research about animals as they are artifacts of “traditional” society.^[26] In the 1920s and 1930s, what was known about T. rhodesiense was the supposedly contagious relationship between reservoir, vector, and victim. Attempts to study the specific relationships—human to landscape, human to animal—that might cause or limit the disease gave way to the study of a vector abstracted into “the fly.” While it is tempting to suspect that this was the result of pressure by the hunting lobby, it seems more likely that it was part of the intense focus on vectors and pathogens that characterized early research in tropical medicine.^[27] Thus, the very people studying fly-human or fly-animal interactions anthropomorphized tsetses—saying, “The Tsetse fly loathes the presence of man,” ^[28] for example—and the fly became as important in research as was the disease. By 1935, there was a Parliamentary Tsetse Fly Committee.

C. F. M. Swynnerton, the most important tsetse researcher in this story, understood that fly behavior was based on human observations. A naturalist of extraordinary capability, Swynnerton had come to Africa as a nineteen-year-old farm manager and first attracted attention with his study of a mixed fly belt in North Mossurise, on the Southern Rhodesia–Mozambique border, in 1921, in which he noted, among other things, that male flies sometimes traveled on humans, causing some observers to think they were attacking.^[29]

Swynnerton’s studies of the tsetse fly’s ecological niches, including his 580-page monograph The Tsetse Flies of East Africa (1936), which catalogued the various species’ eating, breeding, and resting habits, put the fly in the foreground. Swynnerton read the landscape to show how tsetse could be limited without the wholesale slaughtering of game. Knowledge of the fly, Swynnerton argued, would allow science to combat the vector without significantly disrupting the reservoir or destroying the hosts—a method of disease control that David Bruce had characterized twenty years before as “a nice pious wish.” ^[30]

Land, Flies, and Science

Different varieties of tsetse fly live in different places. In East and Central Africa, the colonial concern was about G. morsitans, the fly that carried the trypanosome fatal to domestic livestock, and, to a lesser extent, humans. While the riverbank-dwelling T. gambiense could be transmitted from human to human, the trypanosome carried by T. morsitans required an animal host, so that methods of describing and of preventing one kind of sleeping sickness came to be about the relations between humans and animals. If sleeping sickness of the savannah was carried by wild animals, then the goal of biomedical policies was to separate humans and wild animals, big and small.

From these policies came studies of “the fly.” By the 1930s, most scientific knowledge of G. morsitans was based largely on Swynnerton’s research, which demonstrated the viability of African methods of tsetse control. Nevertheless, the major impact of Swynnerton’s work both on his own career and on the shape of tsetse research was to suggest an either/or paradigm in which centralized settlements and tsetse flies were inexorably opposed.

Swynnerton showed how knowledge of various tsetse flies’ behavior could be used to control their numbers and habitats. G. morsitans, for example, breeds on barren ground toward the end of the rainy season; G. brevipalis lives in wooded undergrowth that remains in leaf throughout the year; all tsetse flies need shade. Well-timed grass burning could therefore limit the habitats of two species of Glossina. Ngoni in North Mossurise had burned grass late in the dry season, when leaves had fallen and the grass was at its driest, so that the fires would be intense enough to draw a wind. Such a fire would not only destroy the grass but much of the young growth and some high shade; with sufficient rain, however, the grass would rapidly grow back. Swynnerton became a proponent of late burning, a method of tsetse control that he believed white settlement had greatly disrupted: “Under the white man everyone burns as he pleases.” White farmers’ uncoordinated grass burning failed to check tsetse populations, and different species of fly flourished.^[31]

The behavior of wild animals, according to Swynnerton, was shaped by human intervention as well. Under Ngoni domination, large parts of the Central African countryside had centralized states with concentrated populations. Densely populated areas and mile after mile of cultivated fields surrounded by deforested areas allowed Africans to live and keep cattle in health.^[32] When the population decreased, or when an area was raided and the population scattered, the land reverted to bush and game, and tsetse became widespread—a medicalized version of tribal warfare. Swynnerton had been very impressed by Ngoni accounts of methods of tsetse control. When Umzila conquered North Mossurise in the 1860s, the somewhat scattered population lived near belts infested by G. morsitans; cattle had to be sent to highlands or they died. But Umzila ordered his population to draw near the king, moving villages and settlements to the lower altitudes of the territory. “Every one of my informants has described most graphically the result of this concentration,” wrote Swynnerton. “The bush simply disappeared and the country became bare, except for the numberless native villages…and gardens.” All that was left of the woodlands was an uncleared and uninhabited “Oblong,” virtually a game reserve for Ngoni hunting parties. Outside the Oblong, hunters tracked wild pigs and buffalo herds whenever they appeared.^[33]

It was on the strength of this research that Swynnerton was appointed the game warden of Tanganyika Territory in 1921; his goal was to control tsetse flies without the wholesale slaughter of game, the policy already in sporadic operation in Southern Rhodesia. In 1923, he chose Shinyanga for the site of his research, where he was to experiment with ideas about competing ecosystems, bush and wild animals, and cattle and cultivation—mainly through bush clearing and centralized settlements.^[34] Shinyanga had been the site of a major epidemic in 1923, but Swynnerton had selected it because of its particular cycle of retreat and advance of tsetse flies: cleared land was free of tsetse, but when the population declined or moved on, the tree roots sent up shoots on which tsetse flies from adjacent infested bush alighted and then traveled to human settlements on passersby.^[35] In practice, however, Swynnerton’s subtle analysis of the local landscape was overwhelmed by the sheer scope of widespread bush clearing, which by the mid 1920s required a levy of almost 8,000 men.^[36] Swynnerton has been contested academic terrain in recent years. Although John Ford praises his attention to seasonal details, John Iliffe sees him as a harbinger of soil erosion, and John MacKenzie as an agent of the hunting lobby.^[37] A close reading of Swynnerton’s work reveals the complexities of daily life in sleeping-sickness areas, however, rather than an ignorance of rainfall patterns or apologies for bushpig and buffalo. During the Mwanza epidemic of 1922, for example, he suggested that T. rhodesiense could be transmitted by man-to-man contact, based on his observations of the division of labor between sick and well Sukuma in their households. The absence of animal vectors, however specific, was taken up by the hunting lobby, but not because Swynnerton was their mouthpiece. He was a keen hunter and very close to the hunting lobby, but, as we shall see, from 1923 until his death in 1938, he proposed a variety of methods of tsetse control, including the seasonal and the agricultural. Time after time, however, the proposals that were implemented were those that conformed most closely to official agricultural policies.

The importance of the landscape to the location of tsetse flies made epidemiology and land use overlap. A new dimension, population density per square mile, one of the most important markers of scientific discourse in this story, became the cause and cure of sleeping sickness. There might be tsetse flies in areas with population densities as low as one person per square mile, but that was not sufficient to sustain an epidemic of sleeping sickness. Areas with population densities of five per square mile would not have enough cleared land to prevent tsetse flies, and they would have epidemics. Where there were twenty-five people per square mile, there would be enough cultivation and tillage to prevent tsetse advance. Best of all would be a hundred people per square mile, a population density that could crop and clear a fly-free area in which Africans and cattle could live in health.^[38] In 1930—a year after Swynnerton had resigned to start the Department of Tsetse Research—Tanganyika Territory attempted to establish large, compact settlements, as if population density, in and of itself, could combat tsetse flies and sleeping sickness.^[39] Concentrated villages, like tracts of cleared bush, encouraged soil erosion, however; Swynnerton’s biomedical theories of the 1920s became the environmental terrors of the 1930s and 1940s.^[40]

In tsetse research, the science enshrined in population ratios was translated to tsetse populations, which were measured according to the numbers Swynnerton’s African assistants could catch. In the early 1920s, the “fly boys” of Tanganyika Territory stood still in the bush and recorded the number of flies each caught per hour. The resulting figure—flies per boy/hour—was later rejected by two of Swynnerton’s entomologists, W. H. Potts and T. A. M. Nash, as unscientific.^[41] To time discipline, they added the discipline of distance. Potts divided the Shinyanga bush into sections according to vegetation; each fly boy was assigned a section and would then walk along a path, stopping to collect flies every twenty or hundred yards, to establish the density of flies per boy 100 yards or, where flies were densest, flies per boy/yard. These fly rounds became increasingly complex, precisely laid out in grids or octagonal spirals to compensate for seasonal variations in flies’ whereabouts or the number of flies scared away by these activities. Even so, in 1930 a zoologist, C. H. N. Jackson, published a critique of the flies per boy/mile measurements, writing that they did not systematically accommodate flies’ eating habits.^[42] By the early 1930s, if not before, the very extent of fly rounds—in some areas there were thirty miles of paths—was thought to have disturbed mammalian hosts, so that tsetse and animal populations moved elsewhere.^[43] In Northern Rhodesia, which had no official tsetse-control organization comparable to that of Tanganyika Territory, fly rounds were considered a viable research method by district officers well into the 1930s: “In order to survey the density of the fly an African (immunized by injection, of course) walked along the bush path with a white cloth pinned to the back of his shirt. A man with a notebook walked behind him and counted the flies which settled on the cloth. The result was later recorded in a graph as ‘Density of fly per boy mile.’” ^[44]

Also in Northern Rhodesia, human population densities had more than a biomedical meaning. They offered ways both to understand and to problematize citemene, the very productive and reliable system of shifting cultivation taken up by hoe cultivators when they entered the area. The Bemba, who engaged in widespread raiding until the end of the nineteenth century, had lived in large, stockaded villages. Once they too took up citemene, a very specific pattern of settlement and land use developed. Citemene cultivators scattered to mitanda, the garden huts families lived in during the growing season: by 1904, for example, no villages could be seen in Mpika.^[45] In large-circle citemene, the system of the Mambwe and the Bemba, trees are lopped, not felled, and pollarded trunks are left at chest height. Branches are carried for miles to form a large circle, often of about an acre, in a clearing and left to dry in the sun. Burning takes place late in the dry season: too early and the ash would scatter in the wind; too late and the wood stacks would be wet and the burn incomplete. After the branches are burned, the large ash circle is planted with a sequence of crops, starting with finger millet the first year. Burned-over land is sometimes cultivated for as long as five years.^[46] Citemene depleted the woodland—burned areas made up from 4 to 10 percent of deforested areas—and the intense heat of the late burning destroyed the forest canopy and retarded the growth of new trees.^[47] Nevertheless, it was burning that transformed cut branches into a garden. Burning was the only occasion Richards observed in which the Bemba acted as “one economic unit.” ^[48] Citemene was also a system of great productivity: experiments at the research station in Lunzuwa compared yields from Mambwe citemene fields and Mambwe hoed mounds: from 1935 to 1940, citemene gardens produced at least three times more finger millet per acre than hoed gardens.^[49] The official construction of citimene in the 1930s, of primitive cultivation, performed with an ax, gradually gave way to an official and scientific understanding that citimene was combined with permanent gardens and was both adaptable and productive.^[50]

However productive it might have been, citemene was considered an administrative and agricultural nightmare. Whatever it did to forests and ecosystems, it made ordinary Bemba hard to rule and harder to tax. In large-circle citemene, gardens were scattered and temporary, and for much of the year families lived in mitanda. From the early years of colonial rule, mitanda dwellers guarded their independence fiercely: they were “malcontents who renounced the authority of the chiefs and the Boma.” ^[51] Mitanda became sites of new community and social relations for Bemba.^[52] In 1906, the British South Africa Company, which then governed Northeastern Rhodesia, banned citemene. Widespread hunger followed. By 1908, the Chitimukulu, the Bemba paramount, complained of his people’s starvation and poverty. Administrators complained of a new, menacing attitude of opposition among the Bemba, and expressed some anxieties about the newfound unity of chiefs and commoners—against the boma. Citemene was restored in 1909, and in 1910 administrative units were made smaller to accommodate mitanda.^[53]

Objections to citemene did not cease, but they ceased to be described in administrative terms. The problems with citemene became agricultural, not political: environmental degradation replaced social disintegration. By the late 1930s, a new official line had emerged, claiming that while fly-infested areas had long existed, they had also been uninhabited, but as the security of Pax Britannica went on, villages broke up and smaller villagers formed, and Africans “drifted” into fly areas, just as the bigger villages ceased to function as fly barriers.^[54]

The scientific study of African land use and population densities gave expression to colonial anxieties about deforestation, late burning, and Africans’ relationship to authority. But colonial anxieties, even those sanctioned by science, were not uniform. The biomedical view was that the greater the population density, the fewer renewable resources, whereas entomologists believed that the greater the population density, the fewer the tsetse flies. Population density statistics were used in Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s to show the damage done by citemene and, sometimes, land alienation. Officials bandied grim figures for population per square mile to proclaim ecological doom, to be sure, but also to participate in scientific discourse. None of the figures so pronounced took male migrancy or environmental variations in the landscape of the plateau into account.^[55]

Animals, Flies, and Officials

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, many officials thought that the low population densities of citemene encouraged garden raiding by elephants, which was said to cause “serious starvation” in Lundazi, for example, starting in 1919, when elephants had first come into the area. In 1922, villages in Luwingu, Lundazi, and Abercorn were said to have no food.^[56] Africans were too poorly armed to fight off garden raiders themselves, and after much debate, the district commissioner in Abercorn adopted the policy already in place in southwestern Tanganyika and gave a white hunter free license to shoot elephants in inhabited areas.^[57] Soon after, many white hunters wrote to the boma requesting employment on Tanganyika Territory terms. Throughout the 1920s, the basic structure of authorized elephant hunting remained the same. A hunter was appointed elephant control officer and was allowed to kill any elephant tracked from garden raiding. To avoid the authorization of ivory harvesting, it was specified that elephants had to be caught in the act or shortly thereafter, but according to Norman Carr’s description of elephant control in Nyasaland in the 1920s, this rarely happened. A hunter “went out, as I did, and shot the first elephant he saw with reasonable tusks and called it a garden raider.” ^[58]

The hunter’s fee for shooting an elephant was, with variations according to weight, to keep one tusk. The other tusk went to the boma and the meat went to the villagers, distributed in theory according to local hierarchies, but in practice at the discretion of the hunter.^[59] The importance of this meat is clear. Audrey Richards provides a compelling description of the meaning of meat to Bemba villagers in 1931. They claimed the meat from an antelope she had shot gave them energy, “not only before the food was digested, but before it was cooked!…The next day they went to work early, declaring that their arms were strong.” ^[60] Indeed, 1920s elephant control almost at once became a local source of meat, the sale of which proved almost as profitable for hunters as the sale of ivory. One hunter worked out complex equations by which he might profit most: he would not shoot young elephants; he would keep all tusks under thirty pounds or 35 percent of tusks under fifty pounds, or he would be allowed to sell the meat without a butcher’s license.^[61] Indeed, false reports of raiding, designed to bring a well-armed hunter into an area, were common, and attempts to withdraw hunters or verify complaints were unpopular: chiefs tended to encourage false complaints whenever continual hunger eroded their authority.^[62] By the late 1930s, for example, hunters readily acknowledged the pressures on African game rangers: they were subject to “a good deal of temptation” if posted to their own areas and were frequently used by their chiefs as suppliers of meat.^[63] Even elephant culling became a food issue, which then seeped into issues of race and propriety. Once a rudimentary Game Department was established, it was loathe to hire African game scouts, because “the villagers with whom they stay are often naturally keener on getting meat than on genuine crop protection,” and lobbied for an increase in white rather than African personnel.^[64] African game scouts may have seen the situation somewhat differently. According to Norman Carr, “A ‘fundi’…with tons of meat at his disposal became the most popular man in his community.” ^[65] For these reasons, most conservationists were uneasy about elephant control.

The official emphasis on population densities and deforestation meant that citemene was thought of solely as a system of shifting cultivation. It did not take into account the ways in which citemene engendered relationships with government hunters that could provide valuable sources of meat and prestige for chiefs. Nor did it take into account the late burning that citemene required, and the decrease in G. morsitans populations that late burning caused year after year. Not only did late burning destroy the shade tsetses needed, but grass became dense in the burned areas during the rains, destroying G. morsitans’s breeding grounds. Moreover, the barren areas produced by citemene created barriers to tsetse flies.^[66] Despite some hints in tour reports, citemene was on the whole not considered a tsetse-control measure. In all probability, this was because sleeping sickness, particularly the variety caused by T. rhodesiense, was seen as a cattle disease, the absence of which was best demonstrated when people kept cattle. As a cattle disease, T. rhodesiense implied a specific landscape, free of bush and big game, occupied by cultivators and their herds, a paradigm so powerful that scholars and scientists were disinclined to see T. rhodesiense in the same terms in which non-cattle-keeping Africans might have seen it.

Game preservation had been under attack for years for causing the spread of sleeping sickness. As early as 1911, a game park bordering Nyasaland and Northeastern Rhodesia—named, appropriately enough, Elephant Marsh—was closed because of missionary complaints about the increase in tsetse flies and sleeping sickness.^[67] By the 1930s, game parks created another layer in the either/or paradigms of tsetse control, adding the issue of people versus animals and tsetse to a landscape already mapped by official thinking of cultivation versus tsetse. The landscape that emerged from debates about game preservation and game parks was mandated to house animals for European sensibilities and hunting, rather than those of Africans. Animals in game parks, as in some tsetse-control schemes, became an undifferentiated category of prey in which hunting was racially and technologically specific, although assisted by Africans.^[68]

Where did these biomedical ideas that proposed either the destruction of fauna or the destruction of flora come from? The line between African ideas and imperial science was never a sharp divide. Swynnerton’s bush-clearing campaigns had originated in Ngoni practices of land use, relations between domestic and wild animals, and authority: in Shinyanga, he tried to make them scientific and experimentally sound.^[69] The game preservation of tsetse research and reclamation of the 1930s had European as well as African antecedents, however, and these blurred the lines between hunters, conservationists, and scientists. The creation of game parks and game preserves, for example, came out of two contradictory turn-of-the-century motivations: to safeguard the natural world, in manageable proportions, so that the modern world would not lose touch with it, and a desire to subdue that same natural world, regardless of whether or not such actions had any social context. White hunting in Africa had a very different meaning in 1885, for example, than it did in 1935. Early game parks were created to be “unpoliced spots on a map,” to be protected from African exploitation. Early colonial game parks were places where African hunting was illegal. They preserved hunting land for foreign hunters—many of whom were museum collectors and scientists as well.^[70] In the early years of game preservation, wild animals were not romanticized, white hunting was.^[71] Within the next thirty years, game parks became sites in which decreasingly important imperial interests could assert their power against growing biomedical and social lobbies.^[72]

Blood Stories

In June 1930, Major Hingston of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire—the ideological wing of the hunting lobby—visited Northern Rhodesia as part of his African tour. Northern Rhodesia was, however, a special concern because it was the only British colony in Africa without a game warden. Without a game warden or national parks, there was nothing to prevent the excessive slaughter of game. Officials agreed, but noted: “All agriculturalists, whether European or native, are equally anxious to prevent game damaging their crops.” Hingston proposed that a game department and game parks be established; he dismissed the idea that African nutrition would suffer if African hunting was limited by citing evidence from Uganda and Kenya, and noted that in Tanganyika Territory, Africans were not subject to game laws unless they indulged “in barbarous practices or wholesale slaughter.” By March 1931, many officials concurred with the recommendations, which had proposed game parks in areas considered unsuitable for European settlement.^[73] Also during the first six months of 1931, and between April and August 1932, C. R. S. Pitman, then game warden of Uganda—which had East Africa’s model game department—visited Northern Rhodesia to prepare a report on wildlife there. He traveled 8,000 miles and corresponded with white hunters in twenty-seven districts. He proposed game regulations and licensing quotas, based on his game census, and recommended the creation of an official elephant-control department and game parks from which a “meat-eating armed population” had been removed.^[74]

Northern Rhodesia may have been the only British colony in Africa without a game warden, as Hingston noted, but it was also the only British colony where Africans understood “game ranger” to mean vampire. In March 1931—during Pitman’s first visit—the provincial commissioner in Kasama District first wrote about banyama, a word that combined Swahili and Bemba to mean “people of the game, or meat.” That banyama (singular, munyama) was never elided into its literal Bemba form reveals how both the term and the concept were maintained as a neologism, something foreign and new.

Science, Flies, and Land

Rumors about banyama seemed “to have arisen from a perverted notion in the Native mind as to the function of the Tanganyika Territory Game Department,” which had been so fully recoded and reterritorialized that the banyama were said to consist of “large bands” of Africans under the charge of European officials. These officials wore khaki uniforms and helmets with a badge with a small antelope’s horns on it; what the African staff wore was not known. These banyama were said to make their camps in the bush where Africans, “expert in the art of tracking and hiding…are sent out to murder any native, male or female, found alone,” an official report noted. After killing their victim, the banyama drained his or her 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.” ^[75]

The rumor had been circulating in the district for about three years and became particularly intense early in 1931, when Africans returning from Tanganyika’s sisal plantations claimed that “the natives of Tanganyika Territory had found effective methods of frustrating the efforts of banyama who were accordingly being sent to Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia in search of victims, the employers remaining in Tanganyika Territory.” ^[76] It was said that the Tanganyika Territory Game Department aroused suspicion because the game wardens “‘do not walk along the paths like normal men, but wander through the bush like outlaws.’” Moreover, the insignia with the buck’s head may have reminded many Bemba in Northern Province of witchcraft, as the skull of the buck is often associated with those practices.^[77]

As we have already seen, much of this was true. The men of the Tanganyika Territory Game Department did wander through the bush on foot or bicycle.^[78] Their purpose was not to hunt Africans but to count tsetse flies in units unique to imperial systems of measurement and discipline. Tanganyika Territory’s fifteen African fly collectors wore dark blue puttees; Swynnerton’s chief fly boy, Saidi Abdullah, wore a brass buffalo head on his pillbox cap. According to T. A. M. Nash, Abdullah was a superb naturalist who knew trees and plants and could track animals. He discovered the species of tsetse fly that was named for Swynnerton. In the Mwanza sleeping-sickness epidemic of 1922, Abdullah ferreted out victims who had been hidden by their relatives; it was said that he took blood smears from corpses.^[79] He and many other tsetse researchers, African and European, diagnosed sleeping sickness by taking a sample from lymph glands, hence the “incision behind the ear.”

But what did fly boys do to earn this reputation? There is no documentation regarding their actual activities during tsetse control: entomologists and officials tended to write about what they intended to do, not what transpired. In the absence of such data, however, we should not assume that each and every fly collector was overzealous in his performance of his duties. Such an assumption would presume a uniform identification with a job and a regime for which there is no evidence; it would assume that Africans misunderstood, rather than recoded, imperial practices. Indeed, the question of what these men did on the job may not be the best way to approach the complicated and often contradictory origins of vampire rumors. There was probably not a simple correlation between an action and its fantastic representation as banyama; it seems more likely that banyama represented the often puzzling meanings of activities in which counting flies and protecting animals or prohibiting agricultural practices fused.

The association of Tanganyika’s Game Department and vampires was specific to the Northern Rhodesia. In August 1931, officials in Morogoro, Tanganyika Territory, identified surveyors as those thought by Africans to drink their blood, a group referred to by the older Swahili terms cinjacinja or mumiani.^[80] It was not until the mid 1930s that whites in Tanganyika began to hear of “Bwana Nyama,” the veterinary or game officer who went alone into the bush to look for blood.^[81] Although individuals may have been called that during the 1930s, no form of bwana nyama took hold as a collective term for vampire in colonial Tanganyika, which remains mumiani or chinja-chinja to this day.^[82]

The Northern Rhodesian rumors continued well into 1932, but there were no other official alarms about their import until 1936. Then it was the tsetse-fly pickets, men stationed on paths to physically remove flies from travelers leaving infested areas. How fly pickets came to be considered a viable method of tsetse control discloses many of the concerns and blind spots of colonial thinking, both about tsetse flies and about African agriculture, in the mid 1930s. The language of tsetse control and the language of citemene control both described a landscape that was either usable or had to be abandoned—the simplified either/or paradigm of Tanganyika’s Game Preservation Department, headed by Swynnerton, in the mid 1920s. Where the boundaries between infested and uninfested landscape were violated, or ignored, cattle and people sickened and died. In Northern Rhodesia, some cattle deaths were the result of ambitious attempts at cattle keeping in known tsetse areas, so that when 2,000 head of cattle died in the Luangwa Valley in 1930–31, no one paid much attention. When cattle became infected in the formerly fly-free area of Isoka in 1932, “notoriously bad” African husbandmen were blamed for bringing the disease into the area, and the cattle were left to die.^[83] But for European coffee growers in Abercorn—the district of greatest labor migration to Tanganyika—already reeling from a drop in coffee prices, cattle keeping was a necessity. Their industry depended on successful mulching and manuring, and their farms bordered on fly-infested areas, so they needed either to keep their cattle free of sleeping sickness or to import fertilizers.^[84] When in 1932 one settler had lost half of his cattle, he blamed the increase in fly numbers on motor transport from fly-infested areas. His complaints to the governor met with the stern response that in impoverished times, Abercorn farmers had to accept the risks of having plots in fly areas.^[85] After two years of discussion the Abercorn Coffee Growers Association invited Swynnerton, then of the Tanganyika Territory Department of Tsetse Research, Shinyanga, to come and investigate Abercorn—one of the areas suggested by Pitman as an elephant reserve—on his way to a hunting holiday in Nyasaland.^[86]

The main work of the survey was done by Swynnerton’s two head fly boys, including Saidi Abdullah, who preceded him to Abercorn. Their report was finished at the end of October 1935. It showed that the planters had good reason for alarm: the coffee area was to the west of a “cultivation steppe”—plains and glades that had been grazed bare and hills cut for agriculture, the result of the close settlement of African reserves—that would be an ideal habitat for G. morsitans, should it ever reach there. Before Africans were removed into their present reserves, their cultivation had provided a natural barrier to the fly. Because of years of slash-and-burn agriculture, the low trees and dense shrubs were among “the best” example of miombo woodlands Swynnerton had ever seen. The regular burnings of grass had maintained semi-open patches, vipya, on the ridges and hillsides. The creation of African reserves in 1930 had not only destroyed that barrier, it had provided a good source of food for G. morsitans.

It was the relationship of land use to fly feeding and breeding that Swynnerton and his team examined. G. morsitans is associated with miombo but cannot survive in “large stretches of homogenous wooding, even if miombo.” Instead, it requires miombo-like wooding “in which to lie up when fed and in which to breed” and “glades and dambos interspersing it” that provide good visibility and animal life on which to feed “every two or three days in the late dry season and every dozen days in the wet.” Any semi-open country is thus hospitable to G. morsitans when interspersed with miombo, but only if it does not cover large stretches of the countryside. The gallery forest of Abercorn covered too large an area to be an ideal habitat for G. morsitans, but because buffalo lived there, tsetses could feed at its edges.^[87] Given that the landscape was “naturally” appealing to G. morsitans, why was sleeping sickness only becoming a serious problem in the early 1930s?

In the “natural” scheme of things, Swynnerton argued, sufficient African population and their burned gardens “would constitute an excellent barrier to tsetse and a measure for tsetse control,” however dangerous they were to forests: “[T]setse do not like country that is generally open and do not for some years find very favorable the regrowth of felled miombo.” ^[88] When native reserves were formed in 1930, they created unprecedented population densities, as high as sixteen or twenty per square mile. Although citemene-cultivating Mambwe responded by reducing their citemene and expanding their hoed gardens, the degeneration of the surrounding woodlands was rapid and spectacular.^[89] Administrators extolled the virtues of hoed garden crops, but had “no reason to believe,” the provincial commissioner wrote in 1933, “that hoeing will become general until the last tree in the Reserve is cut and burnt.” ^[90] But according to Swynnerton, the removal of citemene cultivators into “reserves far from the tsetse” was harmful to the ecology of the region. It “appears to be responsible for such danger as attaches to the present position.” The land to the east of Abercorn had been protected by Africans’ citemene, but with the Africans gone, “fly advance will be facilitated.”

Swynnerton dismissed any move to eradicate wild animals, because new animals would simply move in to to replace them; miombo was a good animal habitat as well. Instead, he suggested that tsetse be controlled by African land use, especially citemene. In a powerful argument for citemene as a method of fly control, contrary to all official thinking in the mid 1930s, he claimed that leaving areas fallow and unburned for years at a time would actually cause a retreat in G. morsitans populations.^[91] Tsetses need bare ground to settle on; G. morsitans in particular need visibility and dry ground to breed. When grass is not burned for years at a time, the conditions for fly breeding are destroyed: a grass mat forms and the undergrowth becomes dense and inhospitable. There is no place for G. morsitans to settle or breed. “ I have seen no area which is so suited to this measure as in Abercorn, ” Swynnerton wrote (emphasis in original). Moreover, burning the grass “very early” in the dry season—a method Swynnerton had already used in Southern Rhodesia—“made grass so dense that it proved unfavorable to morsitans.” Since Africans in Abercorn did not burn their woodpiles until late in the dry season, he thought that they would support bans on burning at other times during the dry season.^[92]

Late burning—burning woodpiles late in the dry season—had been problematized at least as much as citemene itself, as we have seen. Even when officials tolerated citemene, they emphatically opposed late burning. Slash-and-burn systems depend on fire: when it is time to burn the stacked branches, the flames run riot, sweeping through the leaf litter and vegetation nearby. This vegetation would be particularly dense if the ground had been burned early in the dry season. The later in the dry season burning takes places, the dryer the surrounding vegetation, and the hotter and more intense the fire. According to Richards, “The piled-up branches, dry and brittle from three or four months exposure to the sun, crackled and flamed in a moment.…Next morning nothing was left but a circular bed of ashes around the blackened trunks of mutilated trees.” ^[93] But late burning, year after year, was held to retard the regrowth of trees, and destroy the forest canopy. The “scientific proof” of burning experiments in the 1930s was offered to show that citemene had only survived because there had not been repeated late burnings. Early burnings—early in the dry season—which were less intense and cooler, allowed trees to regenerate more rapidly.^[94] But the intensity of late burning at the end of the dry season produced overgrown ground, its shade cover retarded by fire, early in the rainy season that was inhospitable to G. morsitans; the long-term effects of late burning destroyed areas of shade that were essential to G. morsitans’s survival. While Swynnerton argued that the overall patterns of citemene provided natural barriers to tsetse flies,^[95] he underestimated the extent to which late burning also prevented tsetse breeding.

Swynnerton’s recommendations were sent to the deputy director of agriculture, William Allen. His response was swift and severe: these plans were not really worthwhile and were too expensive “to protect a few Mtungu Road coffee farms.” ^[96] But Abercorn’s white farmers persisted, offering their own version of reterritorialization; they proposed early burning over large areas and argued with officials who said that the value of the district’s cattle did not warrant drastic ecological or hunting measures. Within a few weeks, the provincial commissioner requested that Lusaka authorize Swynnerton’s other recommendations: the resettlement of Africans in areas they had formerly occupied and the use of fly pickets to remove flies from travelers.^[97] Pickets immediately became a charged issue. Various planters’ association wanted pickets installed at once, as did the medical officer at Abercorn, who wanted pickets on selected paths, to which Africans would be confined.^[98]

A month later, the survey botanist of the Tanganyika Territory Department of Tsetse Research, B. D. Burtt, explained how pickets worked and what they were expected to do. Fly pickets were to consist of two Africans in khaki uniforms—“proved to be the most suitable garb” for catching flies—and provided with a hut; their hours should be 7:00 a.m.–5:30 p.m.; “each picket would examine each passing native coming up from Isoka or Mewilo areas” or passing up and down the Abercorn-Mpulungu road; flies caught should be placed in a tube and shown to inspecting officers, who should visit frequently to make sure that the work was being done efficiently; and a record of “the fly take” at each picket should be kept and inspected.^[99] Pickets were assigned to the posts nearest their villages in order to simplify rationing procedures, and Africans traveling on picketed paths were to submit to examinations by the pickets and could not “proceed until this has been done to their satisfaction.” ^[100] Such a system may have allowed pickets great latitude in determining who to stop or what “their satisfaction” might require. Nevertheless, fly pickets did not stay on the job very long, and gave notice often.^[101]

Pickets began operation in June 1936 and were soon in use throughout the district.^[102] They were also soon recoded:

Curious rumours have become extant concerning the existence of human vampires. These were alleged to prey upon solitary persons come upon in the bush whose blood is conveyed to a white master for the manufacture of pernicious medicines. In 1936 the anti-tsetse operations and the natives armed with nets to take fly off travellers at fly posts furnished fuel for these stories and at one time hindered the efficacy of control measures. Propaganda caused these rumors to die out but they have unexpectedly broken out again in other parts of the district and it is difficult to say what, or to whom, their origin is to be ascribed. Variants of the rumor suggest that Government is itself interested in the taking of blood.^[103]

The fly pickets were said to “stupefy their victims, murder them and extract their blood which is an essential ingredient in medicine concocted by the European.” ^[104] It was said that the butterfly nets of the fly pickets could expand to capture a grown man.^[105]

Officials, Animals, and Flies

What was government doing at this time, to earn such a reputation? Also in June 1936, provincial commissioners met in Lusaka to discuss the implementation of Pitman’s recommendations for game parks, a game department, and elephant control by licensed hunters. The PCs liked the idea of a game department, and all suggested ways in which it could be established inexpensively: they could second someone already in service to head it, for example, and employ the African game scouts “already being effectively trained by elephant control officers.” Settlers were so keen on the idea of a game department and game preservation that they “had gone so far as to guarantee part of the cost of the establishment of such a Department.” PCs neither wanted any Africans moved to create a new reserve, as Pitman recommended, nor wanted to distinguish between amateur and professional hunters’ licenses the way other colonies did.^[106]

In 1938, a white hunter was accused of being banyama, although the evidence about the accusation is vague. In July 1938, G. Kennedy Jenkins, a cadet, toured part of Mpika District with two goals in mind. First, he planned to preach the control of grass fires and the merits of early burning—a scheme, he wrote, that “must have struck some as revolutionary” but that would protect young trees—and second, he hoped to investigate a “disagreeable encounter” between a white hunter, identified only as Captain Henderson, and local villagers, who thought he was a munyama. Jenkins wanted to find out what had happened and “to dispel the fanciful rumours which made such a incident possible.…I made it clear at the outset that my intentions were simply to find out why these stories received credence and to allay the fears they aroused.” Yet almost no one in the village would talk to him; villagers seemed to believe that “any confession of complicity in the Captain Henderson incident or even belief in the banyama stories would at once be rewarded with punishment.” The only person who spoke of the incident was one of Henderson’s porters. Traveling with Henderson had brought him within a few miles of his home, but when he went to find his mother working in her garden, “To his surprise she greeted him with an outburst of maledictions and harangued him for allowing himself to be engaged in so dishonorable a project.” She ran to her village, where her “grief…was calculated to unsettle the minds of her fellow villagers.” The villagers did not threaten Henderson, but they did believe he was a munyama and feared “he might conduct his business on their doorsteps.”

Despite his belief in Africans’ “ingrained appetite for such fancies,” Jenkins quickly realized the limits of his investigations and his inability to recode those fantasies into imperial words. “It was impossible to arrive at any very clear conclusions or to discover in what manner the minds of these people had arrived at any such alarming ideas.…I doubt whether people with such a curious turn of mind are at all likely to be won over by rational argument,” especially as villagers denied any knowledge of banyama beliefs. His solution to such silences was to warn locals that “if harm came to any strangers punishment would not be mediated because the victim was an alleged munyama,” in his hope that this might guarantee an end to such incidents.^[107]

What did Henderson do? It is impossible to tell from these records; all we can really discern is that he was a sport hunter with an African staff—although in Northern Rhodesia amateur hunting had the same status, and the same appearance, as elephant control in the late 1930s. But just as banyama accusations did not emerge from the specific deeds of “fly boys” they did not emerge from official or sportsmen’s acts. The extractive power of Europeans—whether taxation, migrancy, poorly paid fly pickets, or the creation of new reserves—was in the air: banyama accusations were leveled at figures in a specific locale because of local issues and concerns.

Banyama rumors related to hunting and tsetse control seem to have died out after 1939. There were few banyama scares during World War II, most of which were anticipated by officials.^[108] Wartime economies reduced administrative staff and curtailed activities not directly related to the war effort; W. V. Brelsford, DO, Chinsali, noticed a decline in banyama accusations when the Game and Tsetse Fly Control Departments were not working. According to Brelsford, Unwin Moffatt, the agricultural officer at Abercorn, told how in 1939,

accompanied by one or two Tsetse Fly Catchers, he went to speak to a group of African men resting by a stream. The whole group rushed off into the bush abandoning all their loads and possessions. Unwin Moffatt, a descendant of David Livingstone, whose father was a famous missionary and whose two brothers were administrative officers, all well known to the Africans of the area, had been stationed in Abercorn for many years and he was universally liked by Africans. But even the appearance of a familiar and trusted man did nothing to banish the panic raised by the sight of those little white Banyama nets.^[109]

I have combined Jenkins’s self-conscious account and Moffatt’s unreflexive one to make a text. As such, it raises another question: were officials feared because they were considered banyama or were they considered banyama because of their individual association with anti-citemene policies? But that question is read off my text; it is not necessarily one that Africans in Northern Rhodesia in the late 1930s would have worried about: the very question imposes a distinction between tsetse control, early burning, and banyama that individuals in the region may not have made. Indeed, such ambiguity may be a hidden strength of documentary evidence, however. I think it is unlikely that oral interviews conducted in Mpika today, for example, could uncover whether or not Africans believed in the late 1930s that white hunting was emblematic of official disdain for citemene as a form of tsetse control. Even if such a viewpoint could be extracted from personal memories and narratives, such evidence might obscure the ways in which banyama rumors blended and disputed the issues of African and European ideas about disease and agriculture. The very layers of meaning that make some oral accounts so rich might, in this particular instance, decontextualize the ideas and concerns these rumors contained. Just as villagers refused to speak about banyama to Jenkins and many other officials, individuals do not speak to me; I can identify neither speakers, believers, nor nonbelievers. However, without individual African voices, I may nonetheless be able to listen to general anxieties and concerns. Using only archival sources, I lose a great deal of meaning, of African specificity, of who believed what and possibly even why, but I gain the complexities and confusions of and about agriculture and science, late burning, and blood in a colonial situation. The archive reveals not only its own confusions and contradictions but the inability of colonialists to locate their practices completely in imperial rather than African terms.

Notes

8. Citizenship and Censorship

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

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

Vampires, Politics, and the Colonial Situation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

News, Rumor, and Newspapers

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

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

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

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

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

Villains and Vampires

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stories and Strategies

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

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

judge:

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

kisitu:

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

judge:

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

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

Conclusions

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

Notes

9. Class Struggle and Cannibalism

Storytelling and History Writing on the Copperbelts of Colonial Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo

This chapter, like several others in this book, posits two distinctive sets of historical materials, one expressed in the vocabulary of blood and abduction and one that we might call conventional, the standard narrative and the facts and figures with which that narrative is proved. This chapter is intended to take the notion of two kinds of histories a step further. It argues that the two sets of materials, which are, as we have seen, different in different places, can be compared across political and cultural boundaries to produce a more comparative history, which can in turn reveal a broader range of African workers’ strategies than other sources have done.

Jigsaws, Holograms, and Labor History

This chapter compares vampire stories on the two central African copperbelts, that in the Belgian Congo, where mining was controlled by one company, Union Minière d’Haute Katanga (UMHK), and that on the Northern Rhodesian side of the border, where mining companies—the Anglo-American Corporation and the Rhodesian Selection Trust—competed for labor and profits during the 1930s. Although African laborers, artisans, and hangers-on crisscrossed this border well into the 1940s, working men told different stories of abduction and extraction in both places. The banyama who sought their victims around Northern Rhodesia’s copper mines took men’s blood, but they also captured men’s wills. Banyama stories from the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt produced some terrifying descriptions of how men became workers:

This story was going around when I arrived at Luanshya in 1935.…The Banyama…snatch live men and sell their bodies to people who need them.…Another story is that the European has a special license from the Government, and he employs natives armed with charms to do his work in secret. These secret agents are never known and they go about at night. Having picked their victim they lure him to a secret spot where they hit him on the head with a “mupila.” A “mupila” is said to have a rubber tube full of medicine which steals the man’s mind and he even forgets his name and can be taken anywhere.^[1]

In colonial Katanga, batumbula captured Africans with the same methods found in banyama and wazimamoto stories elsewhere, but ate their flesh and did not take their blood. Africans were hired by white men to capture other Africans and give them an injection that made them “dumb.” Finally, victims became fat, white or pinkish, and hairy like pigs. Sometimes a special diet transformed the victims into cows. White men then ate them on special occasions like Christmas and New Year.^[2] Sometimes these white men worked for Americans. The revolts of the early 1940s—Luluabourg and Katanga—were fueled by rumors of white cannibalism.^[3] A Belgian priest, Dom Grégoire Coussement, was said to be a batumbula in Elisabethville. After he was transferred to Kasenga, on the Luapula, in 1943, he was said to kidnap Africans on both sides of the river, imprison them in the belfry of the mission church, and drive them to Elisabethville, where they were killed and eaten.^[4]

The next section shows how laborers from Northern Rhodesia worked in Katanga’s mining industry well into the 1930s. This raises the question, why, if the men telling the stories were the same, are these stories so different on the two copperbelts? Finding out is not easy. The source materials for both copperbelts have little in common. Even before the 1935 strike on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt, officials and missionaries had been concerned about the impact of migrant labor on African society. As we have seen in chapters 6 and 7, officials worried about the moral fiber of migrants—already compromised in their eyes by how they imagined matrilineality—and the vulnerability and privation of women left alone to farm. The Depression had shocked these officials even more, showing them the grim realities of rural poverty as nothing had before: when the world price of copper dropped by almost half, and all but two of Northern Rhodesia’s mines closed, many African laborers did not return home. By 1933, the International Missionary Council’s Department of Social and Industrial Research, founded in 1930, published the results of its research on Northern Rhodesia’s mines, Modern Industry and the African, which offered a wealth of evidence with which to reconstruct the lives of copperbelt workers, and how they managed urban life. Of the African workforce at Nkana Mine, 10 to 15 percent had Barclays Bank accounts, for example, and a large number of miners at Roan Antelope Mine ordered blankets and other goods by mail rather than patronize local shopkeepers.^[5]

The 1935 strike generated another set of concerns. Typical of the labor protests of the 1930s, African miners had actively and collectively left work, apparently to protest a tax increase, and in the subsequent panic the police shot and killed six Africans and wounded many more at Roan Antelope Mine. Although Africans soon returned to work without incident, officials launched a commission of inquiry that served to inscribe the strike with a level of leadership and organization that their findings disputed. The commission also produced page after page of miners’ and managers’ testimony about work, remuneration, and relations underground and in the compound.^[6] More than dockworkers’ strikes elsewhere in Africa, the 1935 Copperbelt strike had a profound impact on British imperialism: the anthropology of urbanization was born, as were studies of the conditions of mine labor and urban life. Indeed, the banyama story quoted above comes from a government-run newspaper sold—without much success—on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt in the wake of industrial strife. Its editor sought to make it the vehicle by which educated Africans could offer information to their less educated fellows.^[7] This particular tension of the reporting of a story by those attempting to prove it wrong informs many of the banyama stories in this chapter. P. K. Kanosa, the author of the quotation above, cautioned that Africans “who have some sort of education” had an obligation to “kill this story,” but noted that as long as “ignorant natives continue to arrive on the Copperbelt there will always be people to believe stories like this.” ^[8]

No such sources, let alone uses of storytelling, exist for UMHK in the 1930s. The details of consumption and pleasure that percolate in and out of the Northern Rhodesian material are absent, as far as I can tell, from the Congolese material. Missionaries in Katanga, as we shall see, did not see themselves as opponents of state labor policies. Visitors who had just come from South Africa, such as Margery Perham, were usually impressed by the differences between the two countries. The Belgian government in exile conducted no large-scale investigation of Congolese labor protests of the early 1940s; it was assumed that Belgium’s status as an occupied country encouraged African extremism. Northern Rhodesia and the Congo do not have equivalent data; the material presented here cannot, in and of itself, yield a reliable historical comparison: data on African banking on the Rhodesian Copperbelt cannot usefully be compared with travelers’ anecdotes about the Congo.

So I ask readers to bear with me and think of this chapter as two kinds of histories at once—the history of the puzzle, in which each and every piece clarifies and completes the picture, and the history of the hologram, in which the image is constructed from the light shed on a fragment. This is a history-writing strategy, a way to get at two different kinds of knowledge at once. The material on consumption and savings on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt allows for a detailed examination of how workers regarded their wages and all they contained. There are no comparable data for the Belgian Congo. But there is a level and commonality of description from the Congo that is unlike anything for Northern Rhodesia—descriptions that are so similar that, seen in the same light, they make a hologram, a single image that becomes vivid and three-dimensional when seen through a single, consistent illumination. African miners were not alone in describing the physical transformation that accompanied their sojourns in Katanga. Margery Perham used the metaphor of castration to describe the hospitalized Congolese mineworkers she visited in February 1930. Listening to them “rasping out” responses to a nun, she reflected: “There is something almost ludicrous about it. Ten, five years ago (now, if they had the chance) these men were indulging in tribal warfare, perhaps in torture and cannibalism; now they look as docile and as lifeless as bullocks in a fat-stock show.” ^[9] The barely fictionalized autobiography of a willful Belgian nun in Elisabethville in the late 1930s includes the powerful image of a hospital orderly, sent to sleep off a binge on local brew, eaten by ants: “. . . on the dirt floor was a man-shaped mound of white ants that had eaten Banza clean to the skeleton. Not even a tuft of hair was left on the skull.” ^[10]

Let me argue that the Northern Rhodesian copperbelt is the jigsaw. Between missionaries’ studies, testimonies about the 1935 strike, a generation of anthropologists and another generation of labor historians, the data about the Copperbelt in 1930–45 provide a number of “pieces” with which I can reconstruct a picture. The Congolese side is the hologram—whether I recreate an image from Dame Margery, African miners, or former nuns, the image is always the same: Africans are being eaten alive, their shapes transformed, and emasculated. Each of these images is blurred and incomplete. Taken together they do not add up to the kind of picture one gets from diverse pieces; they add up to something somewhat different, made three-dimensional by the way it is looked at.

Two Copperbelts, Two Histories

The history of both copperbelts may have been made into separate colonial and national histories because few historians worked in both French and English. The history of UMHK has been seen as separate and distinct from that of the mines on the British side of the border. In part this has to do with Africanists disinclination to mix the history of francophone and anglophone regions, and in part it is because the two histories do not provide a good chronological or comparative fit. Although copper mining in Katanga had begun well before World War I, copper production on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt only began in the late 1920s, and a few mines were only ready for production when they had to close due to the Depression. More important, perhaps, was the fact that labor policies differed in the two colonies. By 1926, before the first copper mine in colonial Northern Rhodesia was fully operational, the UMHK had begun to stabilize its labor force. Officially, copper mines in Northern Rhodesia did not encourage a family presence, but most mines allowed women to settle in compound housing.^[11]

Both copperbelts had separate and distinct histories with deep play between them. They also had separate and distinct historiographies, and the different sources for production and reproduction on both sides of the border have meant that, with few exceptions, the threads that link the two copperbelts have been overlooked, and the fluidity with which African labor penetrated colonial and cultural borders has not been the source with which history was written. It has also meant—incidentally, I think—that employers’ categories have dominated the analysis more than was necessary, and that colonial mythologies have survived longer than they might otherwise have done. The idea that labor was stabilized in Katanga, while the copper mines of Northern Rhodesia relied on a system of migrancy has gone unchallenged; there has been a disinclination to look for sources that might suggest what these categories might have meant to the men engaged in mine labor in either place.

Belgian and British copper mines in Central Africa shared labor and managerial expertise from a very early date. In its early years, copper mining in Katanga was dependent on Northern Rhodesian labor and British expertise: until World War I, in fact, the main language in Elisabethville was English.^[12] As late as 1929, there were almost 11,000 miners from Northern Rhodesia working for the UMHK, and the most common language spoken in the mines of Katanga was Bemba. In the early 1930s, Northern Rhodesian Africans also seem to have dominated petty trade and artisan labor outside the mining sector in Katanga.^[13] The wages paid to Northern Rhodesian workers were the same on both sides of the border, but had a greater purchasing power on the Belgian side. The preference for working in Katanga may have had to do with commodities, not wages.^[14] The Depression served to make the border more porous than it had been before. Workers of all races migrated in search of better wages. In 1930, white miners crossed the Congolese border in numbers great enough to alarm Belgian officials, and within a few years, skilled, literate African workers, most of them from Nyasaland, crossed the border from the Congo into Northern Rhodesia after the UMHK reduced the wages for clerks and capitães.^[15] But it was not only mine workers who crossed the border between Belgian and British Africa. European peddlers and hawkers and a few Indian traders carried goods across the border and sold them for less than they could be purchased for at Katanga’s newly opened shops. After 1930, African and Greek traders sold dried fish to migrants on both sides of the border.^[16] Northern Rhodesian women also crossed the border with ease. In 1938, district officers complained that several hundred women lived in temporary unions in Katanga with men from Kasai: “There is no intention that it should be a proper marriage—it is only a means of getting money and clothing.” Parents routinely crossed the border to visit their daughters; “they all admitted that they were going to see what they could get from their ‘sons-in-law.’” ^[17] Some sources suggest that one reason for the 1935 strike was that the Belgians had closed the border to Northern Rhodesian trade and produce the year before, thus making Africans more dependent on income from wage labor than they had hitherto been.^[18] Even when the border was officially closed, religious movements, witch-finding movements, and new dance fads crossed the border regularly.^[19] These movements must be added to the picture of African labor—the jigsaw puzzle again—that has emerged over the past twenty years, in which African workers’ gossip passed on the latest information about the safest working conditions, the best living conditions, the best wages. Such talk sent African workers across cultural and colonial boundaries to work and to make money, where they found themselves in worlds and seams and stopes that had different safety records, different standards of living, and different rates of remuneration.^[20] Moreover, such talk placed Africans in worlds and seams and stopes that required different descriptions and different imaginings.

But given the intensity of travel and association, why are the region’s stories about whites who, some way or other, consumed Africans imagined so differently? Is it a matter of storytelling conventions, that a genre of story shaped and set in one place becomes the framework that all future storytellers use? Is there a standard plot in which characters and place-names are inserted? Or are these differences a matter of experience? Is the reality of work and life so different in each place that it can only be described with different narratives? There may not be an either/or answer, of course—stories and imaginings and lives are not such separate domains that they can be rigidly segregated—but the question of whether these differences of detail are about the social construction of narrative or the social construction of experience may reveal far more than is usually discerned from regional studies of the Central African copper industry. I do not argue that banyama and batumbula stories are more important than any other aspect of this region’s history, however. My point is that by looking at these stories, historians can examine workers’ strategies and experiences more closely than they could with other sources.

The writing strategy of the jigsaw and the hologram notwithstanding, how solid a wall is the divide between storytelling in colonial Katanga and the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt? Images and clichés did not stay put on one side of a border, unable to cross colonial boundaries. They slipped across, where, based on the evidence I have, some took hold and others did not. Two separate accusations involving priests from the first half of 1932 show how stories might travel without settling. In March 1932—in the midst of intense banyama accusations, many directed at two priests at this mission—the monsignor of Chilubula, the White Fathers’ Mission in Kasama District, a major recruitment area for mine labor of both copperbelts, received a letter written in English containing “gross insults not to be repeated” in the mission’s daily diary. It was signed “your good roast mutton captivity, imprisonment, and bandages.” ^[21] It hardly matters whether this letter can be demonstrated to be a banyama accusation, although I think it is. The word “bandages” echoes the medical idiom of contemporary banyama accusations. But “roast mutton captivity” does not correspond to blood accusations in Northern Rhodesia either of this time or later. It recalls Congolese stories of captured Africans being made into animals to be consumed. Two months later, a young priest in the Belgian Congo asked to be sent home. For six months he had been accosted wherever he went by Africans who accused him “of imprisoning women and mistreating children,” he said.^[22] Imprisoning women was a standard theme of batumbula accusations but harming children was not. Indeed, the Congolese painter Tshibumba recalled that when he was a toddler, in about 1948, his mother was accosted by two batumbula, but they said to each other, in Swahili, “Shouldn’t we let her go? She’s with a child. We’ll let her go.” ^[23] But by the early 1940s, however, kidnapping children was a standard theme of banyama stories in the Kasama District of Northern Rhodesia. One official reported that these kidnapped children were killed on Christmas Day, a theme of Congolese stories absent from Northern Rhodesian ones.^[24]

But if the images and clichés of banyama and batumbula crossed boundaries as regularly as they went back, what about individuals, the stock characters of these stories? Did they travel across borders as well? Dom Grégoire appeared in many banyama accusations in colonial Northern Rhodesia. By the time he was transferred to Kasenga, stories about him circulated on both sides of the Luapula River: in Northern Rhodesia, where he was said to be a White Father, Africans claimed that an African man offered the oldest of his wives to Grégoire for the banyama; the priest refused and asked the man to kill the younger one for him.^[25] By 1949, stories about “Gregory” involved the crisscrossing of boundaries, conceptual and political. He was said to pay men on behalf of the Belgian government to cross the river and capture Africans in Northern Rhodesia, who would be sold to his mission, said to be Chibondo, where there was a strange building connected to the mission station in which captured Africans were killed and their brains eaten. The few victims who were not killed were unable to speak when they were found. Images of dumb captives seem to have stuck in Northern Rhodesian banyama stories, whether bundled with those about Dom Grégoire or not. A headman was forced to leave Northern Rhodesia for the Congo; people insisted that he was banyama, charging that he had captured a man from his own village and when they found the man he could not speak.^[26] But not every banyama—or every priest—crossed boundaries. The European called Yengwe on the Copperbelt was said by Africans on the Luapula to have been working with Greek traders in Kasenga and with Belgian plantation owners in the Congo, but only his victims were said to cross the border.^[27] In 1944, an administrator in Northern Rhodesia wrote that Africans in the Luapula River valley believed that an Italian priest was the “head” of banyama, “and if he should cross to our side of the river they intended to kill him.” ^[28] Does this mean that stories and rumors and ideas do not diffuse, but that some individuals and objects carry with them bundled traits and associations that do cross borders and rivers? If so, it may be that these images and clichés, the traveling priests and silenced Africans, may reveal regional rather than local concerns.^[29] The individuals who became the subject of transnational accusations may have been those who embodied local ideas about colonial policies in the wider regional economy. In other words, Dom Grégoire and the headman were associated with speechlessness because he and speechlessness were associated with Belgian rule. The Italian priest who was considered a banyama who did not cross the Luapula had no such associations. I return to these issues at the end of this chapter, but for now my point is that while parts of stories cross borders, they do not do so as storytelling idioms. Whatever their narrative strengths and appeals, they do not survive in local storytelling unless they reflect local thinking and local experiences.

Work and Talk

My question is simple: what is the relationship between the jobs men do and the stories they tell about them? The answer, however, may be complicated: I have no oral material that I collected so as to let Africans reconstruct their workplaces of the past, no “voices.” But even with voices, with Africans “speaking for themselves,” what kind of picture would I have? The idea that a pure voice can be distilled and disembedded from the struggles of colonial experiences is itself problematic. It argues that colonial African language and thought and imagination were not sullied by the categories and constructs of the oppressors. A clear, pure African voice may be an impractical vehicle for the ambiguities that rested in the relation between underground work and the drinking of African blood. Had I, or anyone else in the 1990s, interviewed African miners about banyama in the 1930s, would the interviews be shaped by the increased control and the intensified supervision of the post-1935 Copperbelt? The complexities and contradictions of a past workplace might best be reconstructed from sources officials did not take seriously, stories considered the domain of “ignorant natives,” stories that were in fact handed over to Africans like P. K. Kanosa to debunk.

Let me return to the story Kanosa heard at Luanshya in 1935. Who are these men with licenses and tubes of drugs that can steal another man’s mind? I suggest that this is a discussion (as opposed to a description) of the relations of production at Roan Antelope Mine at Luanshya. At Roan Antelope, there were far more flat, scraping stopes than at other mines, and these stopes required more semi-skilled hoist drivers than other mines. More important, because of these flat stopes Roan Antelope required more underground blasting, and therefore more mineworkers with blasting licenses than any other mine in the 1930s. Indeed, in 1934, 34 percent of the underground workforce at Roan Antelope was classified as skilled.^[30] At Roan Antelope and Nkana mines, Africans were required to take a training course to get blasting licenses, and 112 obtained licenses by examination in 1934.^[31] At Roan Antelope, such a high percentage of skilled workers must have decreased the level of supervision underground, an ideal version of which was set at Nkana at 1 white miner:1 boss boy:16 underground workers.^[32]

But what of the term mupila and its place in mine labor in Central Africa? Mupila is a word for rubber, ball, or football that probably entered Central African languages from Portuguese or possibly French. In the languages of colonial industrialization, Shaba Swahili and Town Bemba, mupila came to refer to the qualities of expansion, a quality stressed in usage more than anything to do with resilience. Thus, while throughout the region kapila means ball, in northeastern Zambia the same term can be used for the mechanism that inflates balls. On the Copperbelt, kapila can refer to miners’ boots; in Shaba Swahili, it can mean a pullover sweater. What then do we make of an early 1930s gloss of mupila as a white tube of drugs?^[33] The use of pila means this cannot refer to tablets of medication, whatever their size or shape. It is conceivable that it refers to a syringe, the contents of which do not expand but contract, although no Bemba-speaker I asked had ever heard this usage. More likely, the meaning of mupila as a tube of drugs rests on another translation, that of drugs: it probably glosses the Bemba umuti, meaning medications or drugs in the sense of any substance taken internally or applied externally for healing purposes. It can thus include bandages—such as those in the salutation of the letter to the monsignor of Chilubula—and splints and poultices. Tubes filled with drugs may well gloss rolls of bandages, which were white and which expanded, the standard first aid equipment carried by boss boys throughout the region. Indeed, the possession of bandages identified an African miner underground as the boss boy.^[34] Men enthralled by mupila may have been captured by boss boys at the very time that blasting licenses fixed the hierarchies of underground work teams. Where most underground mine labor was unskilled, boss boys maintained their position by continually negotiating coercion and consensus. Starting in the mid 1930s, however, blasting licenses may have given them a degree of permanence they otherwise would not have had.

But if the banyama who capture men have many of the attributes of boss boys, what are they doing above ground, and why must they snatch a man’s mind to get him to follow them? Such a story seems to have been specific to the Copperbelt. It had little in common with other 1930s versions reported in rural Northern Rhodesia.^[35] But an earlier version of Copperbelt banyama stories told of European banyama. “In 1930 thousands of Africans…left the Copper-belt and fled home to their villages because they believed that white men were going into the compounds and capturing Africans. The method used was to strike an African with a stick of rubber—mupila—which paralysed him, and then throw him into a lorry and drive him off,” Thomas Fox-Pitt recalled.^[36] The changes between 1930 and 1934 and 1935 might not have had anything to do with the extractive power of mupila or even the uses to which they were put; it had to do with the race of supervisory personnel and skilled labor in the copper mines that operated in Northern Rhodesia during the Depression.

In copper mining, the Depression years were 1929 to 1936, with copper prices starting to fall in mid 1930 and hitting bottom in 1932. But throughout the 1930s, there were substantial improvements in underground conditions, so that in many mines the conditions in which men worked improved and remuneration for skilled labor increased. As late as 1930, the proportion of skilled workers on both sides of the border was high; at the Roan Antelope Mine, the percentage of labor classified as skilled more than doubled in 1931. This meant that even though starting wages were reduced in most of the mines in the region, skilled wages remained high enough that the average wage bill per shift increased. In Northern Rhodesia, the increase in skilled labor coincided with an improvement in underground efficiency, so that there was a reduction in accidents and mortality, while—as would seem probable during the Depression—turnover was at an all-time low, with workers staying on the job for about sixteen months.^[37] By 1935, an underground worker engaged at 22/- could, with overtime and bonuses, earn almost 40/- a month.^[38]

But was the man working overtime the same man engaged at 22/-? Did more than one man work on the same ticket and share the month’s earnings?^[39] Copperbelt workers testifying before the Russell Commission spoke of unemployed Africans living in the compound, men on whom some were eager to blame the 1935 strike. Did these men work a few shifts each month in exchange for accommodation or a portion of a wage? There is probably not enough evidence available to answer this question, but it does provide an additional context for the banyama who could make a man forget his own name. This might refer to the name under which a man worked a few shifts a month.^[40] But the man made to forget his name may have been a fleeting trope from Katanga, a part of the story best understood by men who had spent some time working in and around Elisabethville. Men with the same name—or even men who chose to be called the same name—claimed a name relationship, a practice that in urban Katanga developed into a bond that was often considered stronger than kinship.^[41] There is no reason to have an either/or interpretation of part of a story about banyama, of course. What is important is to note how part of a story might have different and overlapping meanings to different men, depending on where they had worked.

In Katanga, UMHK’s African workforce increased dramatically during the Depression years. In general, each mine had a large core of semi-skilled or skilled workers on contracts supplemented by the number of short-term unskilled employees production processes required. At the same time, the 1920s policy of replacing white skilled labor with black skilled labor was reversed, and the policies of migrancy were applied to white workers. In an attempt to lower skilled wages overall and to take advantage of the decreased mechanization of 1930s mining, a great number of white workers were laid off between 1929 and 1933. But it was usually local white workers who were let go—thus saving UMHK the family wages these men required—and white contract workers from Brussels or London were hired, the cost of whose repatriation was to raise the wage bill per shift.^[42] In 1932, more than 80 percent of UMHK’s African workforce were on three-year contracts. This percentage declined throughout the 1930s. By 1936, contract laborers were graded according to qualities that had little to do with skills. Each laborer was evaluated on a point system according to personal qualities such as intelligence, dexterity, endurance, and education and according to the requirements of the job, its hazards, the training it required, and how many others wanted that job. A wage scale was devised according to the personal qualities with which a worker performed his job. Thus, an “indifferent” surface worker with a rating of four on the scale and three years’ experience would earn a quarter of what a “very good” worker in the same job with a rating of fourteen on the scale and many more years’ experience would. A man stripped of his labor classification could be transferred to an unskilled job in another mine or factory.^[43] This rating system disrupted all the fluidity and all the violence by which men advanced through the ranks of mining workforces elsewhere. Not only did it put African advancement more firmly under European control, it undermined stabilization and the camaraderie of a skilled workforce.^[44]

Although the number of UMHK workers on long-term contracts decreased slightly during the Depression, the company’s involvement in the private lives of those workers increased dramatically. In 1931, UMHK executives asked Dom Grégoire to organize leisure-time activities for their workers who lived in the camp, UMHK’s compound: “It would be quite dangerous if this time were to be organized by Africans themselves, but it is likely that organized activities within the camp will be more successful if there is an intermediary between UMHK and the Africans.” Dom Grégoire was only too eager to be that intermediary, and within a few years he had introduced scouting, TB clinics, and camp schools that banned the children of Protestant and customary unions.^[45] Catholic missions, urban and rural, began to medicalize African childbirth as early as the 1920s. Bottle-feeding regimes to shorten birth spacing and thus end polygyny were introduced in UMHK camps in the early 1930s, supported by Dom Grégoire and coerced by Leopold Mottoulle of the UMHK. The company policy of paying bridewealth in some regions for some workers began in the 1920s as well.^[46] It is not possible to prove that these embodied interventions were translated into batumbula accusations—nor do I think it is necessary to my argument—but both Catholic priests and white mine supervisors were accused of being batumbula.^[47] In several oral batumbula accounts, people describe embodied sensations—inebriation, full stomachs, full bladders—along with cheerful recollections of Thursday vaccinations or mine dancing, while they describe white supervisors eating Africans. A woman complained that men who lived in the camp often went to the Cité—the African settlement outside the camp, and the control of UMHK—to drink and returned drunk and violent. “One group of batumbula would beat men up when they found them drunk at night. These men would lead these men to the house where white men ate human flesh. They never managed to eat all the flesh so they saved the rest in tins, like corned beef,” said Thèrese Mwadi.^[48] According to Kasongo Ngoiy, bodily discipline could protect Africans from batumbula. “People did not go out at night, at least not after 9 o’clock. If you wanted to go to the W.C., you would have to take every precaution to go to the W.C. before that hour. Whoever dared to go out after 9 o’clock was at the mercy of batumbula.” ^[49]

And then there is the story of Kanka Jean, the “official leader” of a pick-and-shovel team at Kolwezi, who disappeared just as UMHK began to dismantle the ticket system early in 1943. His team had been evaluated by a time-and-motion expert, and he disappeared the night before his team was scheduled to compete with a mechanical shovel driver. His fellows refused to believe that he had gone home because of marital problems, as they were told; they went to the compound manager’s home to insist that Jean had been taken by batumbula and demand his release.^[50] Although John Higginson argues that this incident revisited the issues of the 1941 strike, I suggest something more mundane: Kanka Jean was a boss boy, a man whose considerable authority would vanish if the ticket system was replaced by mechanical tools. Although work stoppages and threats thereof were common in batumbula stories in 1940s Katanga, this disappearance may not be of one man only but of a way of organizing labor and extraction underground. According to Kasongo Ngoiy in the 1940s, “Things changed a little when workers got together and demanded that the compound manager help them find their kidnapped brothers.” ^[51] Without a ticket system, the rankings of semi-skilled workers became infused with new meanings. Moreover, these rankings were temporary and not based on seniority. The new manpower regulations that replaced the ticket system favored some men, but such favoritism had only temporary advantages. Some men were treated well, but they were firmly under European control, described in terms of imprisonment and migrancy. “The captives of batumbula did not eat maize meal. They drank sugar water or they ate sugar cane. The captives who were favored this way became fat and hairy, and were taken to the Hotel Biano, where they were killed and eaten. When there were enough captives, one group was transported to Belgium and another to America.” ^[52]

Migrancy, Stabilization, and Clothes

This section addresses the differences between the jigsaw and the hologram, the history reconstructed from many different pieces and the history reconstructed from one piece illuminated over and over again. Through banyama and batumbula stories, it reexamines workers’ strategies on both copperbelts to problematize some of the ways in which historians have dealt with stabilization and migrancy. The batumbula accounts from the early 1940s preface the strikes of 1941 and 1944 and thus provide a point of comparison with the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt in which the vampire stories of the early 1930s are read through the details provided by missionary writings, the literature of urban anthropology, and the commission of inquiry into the 1935 strike.

In recent years there has been much debate about the nature of migration to and on the Northern Rhodesian—and, indeed, the Zambian—Copperbelt.^[53] Despite a colonial and developmentalist description of rural Northern Rhodesia as a classic labor reserve, forty years of scholarship have shown that migrants to the mines of the Copperbelt tended to migrate from mine to mine, or from job to job on the Copperbelt, rather than alternate periods of work with long periods not working at home. I want to shift the terms of this debate somewhat and look at migrancy in and out of Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s and stabilization in the Belgian Congo, not to establish which copper regime was truly migrant and which was truly stabilized, but to examine the reasons why one or the other might have provided workers with a reliable accumulation strategy in the Depression. My argument is that both migrancy and stabilization were employers’ categories that when taken up by historians have tended to obscure the various strategies by which workers enhanced the value of their wages. For example, the clothing issued to African workers was not simply symbolic or “smart.” Clothing was part of the wage, easily converted to cash or goods valued in and of themselves, and I want to suggest that the wages Africans sought—either as migrants or long-term workers with a family presence—can best be understood in terms of the commodities embedded in those wages.

The wages paid to African miners on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt during the Depression are by no means a straightforward issue. Indeed, after recording 800 pages of testimony, the Russell Commission could not decide whether miners had gone on strike in 1935 for higher wages or to protest a tax increase. This was not because workers and mine owners did not know which was which, but because they could not tell which caused the greater hardship. More to the point, “wage” was a pervious category, covering not only the money paid to workers as their regular stipend but bonuses, deductions, tickets, commodities, and clothing. During the Depression, at the latest, Africans in Northern Rhodesia had begun to problematize money both as a medium of exchange and as a token of political authority. As copper mines closed in 1932, there was a shortage of money in the colony, along with widespread rumors that unemployed miners had been promised exemptions for their 1932 taxes.^[54] In the Isoka District, returning miners told the district officer that they could not work in Tanganyika Territory “because the white ants had eaten all the money.” ^[55] But on the Copperbelt there were rumors of devalued English coins and the king of England being jailed for taxing his subjects too heavily.^[56] The next year, there were rumors of an end to British rule, government by black Americans—bringing American currency with them—and, as South African silver coins were withdrawn from circulation, at least one rural administrative headquarters was said to be closed.^[57] Tickets, on the other hand, were things that muddled ideas about time and about money in both Northern Rhodesia and the Congo. Tickets were the method by which the length of service by African laborers was measured: a ticket was a booklet containing thirty slips of paper, each representing a shift, not a day. Wages were paid when each slip or ticket in the booklet had been signed by the ganger in charge; “a contract worked out in months was in practice worked out in tickets,” Charles Perrings notes. Margery Perham, admiring the torn-off tickets workers’ placed on nails in the Congolese mine office each day, wrote: “At the end of six months the whole book goes on. Then there are a whole series of other labels…a blue one for bad work and so a reduction in pay; a yellow one for absence in hospital; a green one for prison, etc. It is possible by looking at a man’s nail to see his whole industrial history.” As late as the 1960s, Africans in Elisabethville saw these tickets as synonymous with time: they worked for UMHK for “6 or 10 tickets” before returning home.^[58] In the 1930s, many mines in Northern Rhodesia paid a bonus to Africans who completed their ticket books in a month, and Nkana Mine paid a bonus of 2/6 for every six months’ continuous work.^[59]

On both copperbelts, commodities, especially clothes, were the subject of uneasy negotiation. Whether boots, leggings, and hard hats were issued free or charged for, they seem to have been regarded quite differently by managers and African workers, for whom they seem to have constituted part of the wage. Certainly, they were converted to cash as often as they were used. In Elisabethville in 1930, Margery Perham heard of a Belgian businessman ruined by the liberal regulations of the Congo. He had provided each of his African workers with a blanket of good quality as required by law. The workers promptly sold them, and when the inspector came, the businessman received a heavy fine for not providing his workers with blankets.^[60] In Northern Rhodesia, however, which items of clothing were free and which were deducted from wages, and from which kind of wages, varied from mine to mine. According to the Russell Commission, at Nkana Mine, where well over 80 percent of the workforce earned under 30/- for thirty days’ work, there was no bonus, but one hard hat, one blanket, and one pair of boots were issued free. After that, the cost of these items was deducted from wages. Two candles per shift were issued free to underground workers in the early 1930s, but the uses to which they were put and Nkana’s solutions to free issues and deductions reveals the extent to which Africans sought to make homes under the conditions their employers called “migrant.” Africans tended not to use their candles underground, saving them to light their rooms at night. Enforcing candle use proved difficult, and in 1932, Africans asked if they could have lamps, offering to buy them. “The same light that is supplied to Europeans” was deducted from African wages at 8/6, “voluntarily, for the reason that they have not only got good light underground but can also use them at their houses at night.” ^[61]

At Mufulira, most of the workforce was unskilled and worked above ground in construction. Ninety-five percent of Africans earned under 30/- for thirty shifts, and one hard hat and one waterproof coat were issued free; boots were compulsory, but miners were charged 10/- for a pair (the Commission noted that they cost Mufulira Mine 15/9) and lamps could be purchased for 8/-. The cost of these items was deducted from thirty days’ pay at the rate of no more than 10/-. At Roan Antelope Mine, the system was almost arcane. Just over half the African workforce earned under 30/- per thirty shifts, and 85 percent earned under 40/- per thirty shifts; all workers were issued hard hats free, but they were charged 20/- for boots, 13/- for coats, and 2/6 for leggings. Lamps could be purchased for 7/9. Workers received a bonus of 11/3 for working thirty days, from which the cost of clothing was deducted at the rate of no more than 11/3 per thirty days.^[62] Workers could recoup the cost of boots, leggings, and hard hats by thirty days of work for wages. African workers did not necessarily think of this bonus the way their employers did, however. In 1936, miners complained to the visiting Ngoni paramount chief that they were charged for their first issue of clothing.^[63] It seemed that African workers considered sequential issues of clothing to be part of their wages. By 1935, Nkana’s safety officers ruefully noted that the boots issued African miners were almost at once sent home or sold. The second pair was deducted from their pay.^[64] These deductions—20/ for boots and 8/- for lamps at Nkana—were contested; a mineworker from Mufulira said this was a bigger problem than taxes, and the compound manager from Roan Antelope said that Africans frequently said they would prefer the money.^[65] But at Roan Antelope Mine, many men seemed to have stayed on the job for the commodities provided there. When output restrictions decreased production at Roan Antelope by one-third in early 1935 and retrenchments threatened semi-skilled African workers, desertions were at an all-time low.^[66] But what about men who worked short periods at different mines, each time getting a new pair of boots? What about the man who had worked at two mines in eleven years, and then, during the Depression, worked at Mufulira for eight months, then went back to Nchanga for five months, then to Bwana Mkubwa for six months, and then back to Nchanga?^[67] Were such migrations within the Copperbelt—the source of academic debates about how stabilized the Copperbelt actually was—to do with wages, retrenchment, or the opportunities of a free issue of boots and candles?

Different mines’ amalgamation of free issues, compulsory clothing, and wage labor muddle any apparent difference between the three categories on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt. From the evidence of banyama stories, it would seem that these policies naturalized clothing, making it much more a part of African bodies than compulsory dress underground. Thus, in 1931, the Copperbelt rumor was that banyama had white balls, called mupila, “and the balls were thrown into the path of the victim, and as the victim came up the banyama spoke to him. If he answered then all his power left him, his clothes fell off, and he no longer had any memory or will.” ^[68] Clothing was not a free issue or a compulsory purchase; it was part of a person, like will or speech or potency, that could be stripped away by the dreadful power of the boss boy. This suggests that commodities do not become commoditized when the waged context in which they are acquired blurs the line between money and commodity.

With substantially less secondary evidence, African ideas about clothing in Katanga can be read in batumbula stories. Vampire stories from elsewhere in East Africa are less concerned with clothing, whether that of the victims or the abductors. At least one Ugandan said it was impossible to say what the bazimamoto were wearing, because they did their work at night. Others said they wore black, or white coats and black trousers. Clothing figures frequently in twentieth-century industrial urban legends and rumors, however. Folklorists have written extensively about the stories of snakes found in the sleeves of department-store coats, of young women abducted from dress shops in France, and of racist slogans sewn into the linings of jackets sold to American youths.^[69] All of these are stories about clothing or consumption rather than stories in which something happens to clothing. These narratives animate clothing with relationships, dangers, and risks. They valorize and criticize commodity fetishism with stories of clothing’s hidden affiliations. The clothing described below has no such hidden meanings; the relations of production and reproduction are present in it and in what happens to it. The clothing in the batumbula stories below does not depict fetishized commodities that conceal the relations of production; on the contrary, it depicts the processes of wage labor, leisure, and capture. According to the artist Tshibumba, batumbula “wore long black coats and miners hats with lamps”; when they caught someone they took his clothes.^[70] A former mineworker recalled that in the 1940s, batumbula “wore hats so they could not be recognized.” ^[71] In Leopoldville in 1960, Africans spoke of muntu wa mudele, “the men with the lamp,” Europeans who captured Africans and ate them.^[72] Again, in the 1960s, batumbula in Katanga were said to wear dirty, slovenly clothes,^[73] a wary comment on stabilization and independence. Indeed, if Northern Rhodesian migrancy allowed for several pairs of boots and hats—and the money obtained from reselling them or the loyalties accrued from sending them home—stabilization seems to have left Congolese workers feeling naked and vulnerable, their hats, lamps, and uniforms turned against ordinary miners. Recalling how batumbula captured people in Elisabethville in the 1940s, men and women interviewed in 1991 said “they undressed them and tossed their clothes far away from the place of capture. When people found these clothes the next morning, they knew batumbula had captured someone.” ^[74] “When batumbula kidnap people, they do not come back to pick up the traces. You see clothes thrown on the road,” Kasongo Ngoiy claimed.^[75]

Why were clothes thrown out on the road such a powerful image that they informed popular paintings and were talked about fifty years later? Karen Hansen has noted that there was a trade in second-hand clothes from the Belgian Congo to Northern Rhodesia beginning in the 1920s.^[76] The existence of such a trade would have made stories of abandoned mounds of clothing all the more chilling, and make the purchasers of such garments seem cynical and monstrous. At the same time there seems to have been a demand for luxury clothing. As early as 1929, White Fathers complained that villages in Northern Rhodesia nearest Katanga had emptied as men sought clothing: “The fashion is hats and white shorts, shoes and stockings.” ^[77] In Elisabethville itself, men needed dress suits for malinga—ballroom—dancing. In the domestic workers’ history of Elisabethville, written in 1965, men recalled that even in the midst of the Depression, when “everyone suffered a lot from hunger.…The big thing was to go to the malinga dance.” When a man had work, his friends came to his place “to eat and to clothe themselves.” ^[78] The layers of relationships and layers of clothing may have had a straightforward meaning in the regional economy of both copperbelts, however. A man who had lived in Elisabethville for many years recalled that in shops, clothing was purchased in sterling.^[79] Ready-made clothing may have been more than a scarce commodity; it may only have been available to the few who with access to the currencies of British colonies. But what about the clothes available to Congolese workers? Well into the 1960s, domestic servants complained of Belgians’ unwillingness to allow Africans to wear shoes on the job.^[80] For miners, the clothing issued in the late 1930s and early 1940s was thought by miners to be insufficient for the work required of them. By 1940, underground and factory workers complained bitterly that they were not issued shoes, jackets, or shirts that were sturdy enough to protect them from serious injury. Furnacemen demanded heavy woolen shirts to protect them from burns from flying ash. In November 1941, a few weeks before the first of many wartime strikes, a company official complained that African peddlers, selling mainly clothing, invaded the camps every payday. In strike-torn war years, commodities became disaggregated from miners’ wages. John Higginson has noted that the connection between the workers and the peddlers, with its inevitable relations of credit, informality, and multiple currencies, was strengthened by the weakness of the company’s relationship to its workers.^[81] Africans, however, demanded a return to the bundling of clothing, wages, and stabilization. On 4 December 1941, when wives joined strikers at the central workshop at Panda, they demanded that the company reinstate the incentives it had formerly given women to remain in the camps, mainly sewing machines and cloth.^[82]

In the three tense years between the strikes of 1941 and 1944, a number of batumbula accusations terrified European personnel in UMHK camps. But the African men armed with machetes who surrounded the houses of mine supervisors and compound managers did not demand a return of their clothing, but of their wives. Their grievances stemmed from the tensions of a family presence. In January and February 1943—around the time of Kanka Jean’s disappearance—European supervisors and camp directors were threatened. In the camp at Sofwe, men armed with axes and machetes surrounded the manager’s house shouting, “You have eaten the woman, you took her by force.” ^[83] In other camps, Europeans required police protection when workers attacked their houses, accusing them of eating missing women.^[84] The director of Mwale camp was trapped in his house by workers shouting, “You have taken the wife of our brother, you are not looking for her, but we will finish the whites. You, you think you are allowed to eat this woman?…whites will not eat sugar after tomorrow, Monsieur Donnay is finished, he is batumbula, a lion of Europe.” ^[85] Tensions around clothing, embedded in other versions of these stories, were part of the nervous relations around matrimony, property, and the place of UMHK in allocating them. Even the most cautionary tales had clothing in them. Joseph Kabila Kiomba Alona recalled “that in many arguments between husband and wife, wives are in the habit of packing a suitcase and returning to their parents’ home. For batumbula this was an opportunity to capture women who abandoned their husbands late at night.” ^[86]

Stories and Migrants

Many of the qualities of batumbula stories appeared in accounts of banyama in the late 1940s in eastern Northern Rhodesia, on the border with colonial Nyasaland. These were, according to the young researcher John Barnes, “people (i.e., Africans) who are employed by Europeans to capture people…by touching the captive with a wand, which made the captive invisible and helpless.” Sometimes they used a lorry at night: “All the children from the villages run out to see and the amnyama who have come in the lorry touch the children with their wands.” The children “cannot help getting on the lorry” and are taken away, across the border. Captives were taken to Lilongwe “where they were fed on special foods that make them very fat. Then they are in some cases killed and their blood drunk by the European employers of the amnyama, in other instances their blood is just drained, and eventually they get back to their villages very emaciated.” Barnes’ informants, many of whom had worked on the Copperbelt, assured him that amnyama also operated there, but they used a “flexible piece of rubber” instead of a wand.^[87]

Kamupila or kampira (ka- is a Bemba prefix meaning diminutive) became synonymous with banyama in various places: in Lusaka in the early 1950s, in Broken Hill a few years later, and in Southern Rhodesia in 1960. In Lusaka, kamupila was a synonym for banyama, and stories similar to the Congolese ones were told using specifically Northern Rhodesian idioms and images. The capture of children that had become a feature of Northern Rhodesian stories in the early 1940s was refined in Lusaka, where kamupila were said to capture children, give them injections that made them docile and dumb, and lead them to a faraway place, where their captors drank their blood. Sometimes, adults were captured, and a rubber ball was forced into their mouths as they were marched off to the Belgian Congo for slave labor.^[88] In the ferment of anti-Federation activity in Northern Rhodesia in the early 1950s, rumors circulated that whites had poisoned the sugar sold to Africans, that whites gave away soap that would sap the will of Africans, that tinned meat marked for African consumption was made from human flesh.^[89] Officials took extreme action: two clerks who printed a pamphlet warning Africans about the poisoned sugar were tried and sentenced to three years each, while on the Copperbelt the district officer in Kitwe ate a can of meat at a public meeting to show how harmless it was.^[90] But stories still circulated: the pro-Federation Capricorn African Society was banyama, and government newscasters—two of whom played guitar and sang in the Central African Broadcast Service’s most popular show, the Alec Nkhata Quartet—were banyama as well, reading news that made Africans lose their will.

In 1957, the African Welfare Department in Broken Hill had to confine its youth and boys’ club activities to daylight hours because no parents would let their children out at night for fear they would be taken by banyama to their headquarters in the Belgian Congo.^[91] A year later, in Fort Jameson, it was said that the White Fathers had chosen their victims in advance and had marked their clothes with “the Sign of the Cross,” which was invisible to all but the priests and their African henchmen. When enough victims had been marked, lorries were sent out to the villages, whistles blew, and “victims of the Cross” were “collected.” ^[92] In 1960, in what was then Southern Rhodesia, stories resembling those specific to Katanga far more than those specific to the Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia were told. Kampira in “a typical district”—according to Brelsford, Fort Victoria—was something that was “alleged to mark miraculously the clothes of people for future slaughter by the cannibals known to exist in the northern territories and particularly the Belgian Congo.” People in the district “believe that a big lorry comes across the country and when it hoots all those who have a mark on their garments will rush to the lorry to be carried away to ‘Burumatara’—a mythical land. On arrival there they are injected with a chloroform solution which changes them from human beings to pigs. They are then fattened up prior to slaughter.” In Salisbury, the capital, Africans were captured, given injections, loaded onto a Sabena airplane while they were unconscious, and changed into pigs during the flight.^[93]

What is migrating here? The stories, the details and the words, the storytellers, or the circumstances that made these good and credible stories? Why do idioms and images that do not take hold fifty miles away from where they are first told take hold a thousand miles away fifteen years later? All of these stories were most likely carried by returning migrants. Why did they tell these stories, in all their variants and power? To entertain or to articulate grievances and animate political analyses? Did a part of the story that was not believed in Mufulira in 1934, for example, find a credible audience in Fort Jameson in 1948?

Such questions may isolate these stories from other parts of speech. Men and women may not repeat rumors so much as they report the hodge-podge of events, ideas, and images they have heard circulating in and out of where they worked. If rumors are narrative attempts to figure out the meanings behind events, postwar Africa was a fertile ground for rumors as the cost of living rose amid stagnant wages and increasing political demands, made both by Africans and colonial powers. In Central Africa, this tension was heightened by the Central African Federation, which was to unite Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland into one political unit, making settler control greater in Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia than it had been before. There is no clearer indication of the distrust felt by Africans during this period than the widespread stories of drugged and ingested Africans, kidnapped children, poisoned sugar, and dangerous soap. Thus, in this section, I shall not discuss what these rumors are about—they seem to describe how the last gasp of colonial control was imagined—but how they come to contain so many elements of 1930s and 1940s Congolese stories that had not been in widespread use in stories on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt during that time.

The question is, who knew the bits and pieces of these stories, whom did they tell them to, and how did they tell them—which details did they put into a story? All the evidence above comes from written sources, so it is impossible to tell who said what, let alone who said what to whom. A. L. Epstein’s study of gossip on the Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt in the late 1950s shows how people conversed across a number of domains. These conversations did not distinguish between migrant and countryman, between stabilized worker and new arrival, between wife, mother, and young man in the context of the urban centers to which people have come and gone and come again. Epstein heard of an unremarkable (but nonetheless amusing) case of adultery in Ndola from one of his research assistants, who heard the story from a neighbor. The assistant knew the adulterer because both men played on the same football team. The neighbor had gone to school with the wronged husband, and they were still close friends. The neighbor had told Epstein’s assistant the story when he visited his house while he (the assistant) was entertaining a close friend. Epstein also heard the story from a schoolmate of the wife’s, whom he knew because her husband was a senior clerk and political activist on the Copperbelt. She, however, had not heard it from the wife herself but from another woman who had been to the same school. This woman then told several woman friends and a younger man from her home area, who had quite a good job in town. Epstein then heard the story from another research assistant, who had grown up in the mine compound at Mufulira, where his parents were close friends of the adulterous wife’s parents. This assistant had met the adulterous man at a boxing match at a boy scouts’ jamboree in 1947. But he had not heard the story from the wife or the adulterer but from the wife’s mother, who lived on the outskirts of Ndola, whom he visited often. This assistant soon heard the story again from the young man who had heard it from the wife’s schoolmate. The young man had told Epstein’s assistant one night in the beer hall because he himself was involved with a close friend of the wife’s, who sometimes let the adulterous couple use her house but feared that her husband would think that her sanctioning such actions would cast doubt on her own fidelity. The young man was quite concerned about the extent of gossip in Ndola, since his activities might easily be disclosed, and complained bitterly about the woman who told him this story and the impact her gossip about adultery had had on his wife.^[94]

The issue then is not who tells stories but the number of overlapping ways in which people hear stories in urban situations of great mobility and even more affiliations and loyalties. Childhood, school, sport, home area, new friends, old friends, and relations all provided occasions where news was exchanged; untangling who heard a story first and who passed it on may not be as important as noting that someone who hears news might not be the person to whom it was originally told and may pass it on for different reasons than it was first repeated in their presence. And stories may not be heard the same way by all who listen to them: some may hear about the threat of banyama to their children, others may hear a story about the danger of injections, and still another may hear an explanation for the increased availability of canned meat.

The capture of children and the draining of their blood that emerges so strongly in banyama accusations in Northern Rhodesia’s Northern Province in the early 1940s may have been a way to talk about the status of children in households in which some husbands demanded bridewealth and increased control over their children, while others wanted to be able to pawn those children.^[95] On the Copperbelt, children had been considered sources of industrial disorder for years. Between 1935 and 1940, officials proposed a variety of plans to send children over ten back to rural areas. These were all unworkable, and officials noted that however much they wanted children gone, parents wanted them residing with them.^[96] But in Fort Jameson, the situation might have been different for the patrilineal Ngoni. There the kidnapping of children may have reflected a wider change in the regional economy, and the involvement of children in agricultural labor in neighboring Nyasaland.^[97] But what of the secretly marked clothing of the late 1950s? Is this a version of the clothing of batumbula stories? I think not. Even though many Ngoni men worked on the mines, and many of them and perhaps a few of their fathers worked in Katanga for a time, stories about cast-off clothing in the workplace do not necessarily diffuse into stories about marked clothing hundreds of miles away. The power of supervisory staff in Katanga, with their hats and dark glasses, to strip their victims of the very clothes that wages and employers provided reveals the anxious place of dress in wage labor. The power of banyama in Fort Jameson fifteen years later to mark clothes and persons with a sign only they could see reveals something both broader and more menacing, the subtle power of the colonial state and the variety of operatives that did its work. These stories made the most sense in both places when they included trucks and rich foods rationed to Africans for the most horrific of motives, just as stories of kidnapping and consumption in 1940s Katanga and late 1950s Southern Rhodesia made the most sense when told with details of injections and canned meat. How stories make sense and how they become credible returns us to the question with which I began this essay: do banyama and batumbula stories describe experiences or do they conform to rules of storytelling? Do they sound like reasonable stories because of how they are told or because of what they are told about?

Stories and experiences, performances and topics are not separate and discrete domains; a story sounded reasonable because it described what Congolese mine workers or Ngoni fathers considered the likely motives of Europeans; rumors contained other proofs—hazardous injections and stolen clothes—that both added credibility to the story and structured it in credible ways.^[98] But the issue here is not that people must believe stories to retell them or act on them. They probably do, but how is that belief established—and for how long and in which contexts—by the stories of kidnapping and injections themselves or by how those stories are told?^[99] But such a distinction may not be necessary and may not explain why a story becomes widespread and powerful. Instead, banyama stories function both as rumor and gossip, simultaneously containing contradictions that underscore the wider contradictions in the late colonial project. The details of storytelling reveal the details of experience—the hidden motives of the state, the dreadful importance of clothes, the true meaning of colonial medicine, and the dramatic and contradictory tools with which it is carried out.

Northern Rhodesian rumors about government newscasters in the early 1950s may fuse some of these issues in particularly useful ways. The proposed Central African Federation was opposed by African political organizations in Northern Rhodesia, particularly the African National Congress, led by Harry Nkumbula. It was also opposed with popular distrust that was probably not manipulated by the ANC. If Africans in Northern Rhodesia actually supported Federation, it was generally through membership in the liberal, multiracial, elite Capricorn African Society, originally founded in Southern Rhodesia. This group’s members tried to recruit educated Africans in Northern Rhodesia and other British colonies.^[100] Although it never had serious status as a political party either for whites or Africans, it did actively support Federation. Africans in the Capricorn Society, or Africans suspected of such membership, were accused of being banyama and police informers as early as 1950.^[101]

The association of the Capricorn Society with banyama reached its peak in Lusaka in 1952. This was in part fueled by the play of rumors of drugged food and commodities between the Copperbelt and Lusaka, and in part by the tactics of Capricorn Society members, whom European liberals opposed to Federation accused of terrorizing women and children in the capital with “drunkenness and hooliganism.” ^[102] By the end of the year, fears were such that an ANC meeting in Lusaka passed a resolution condemning the government for “failing to deal with the Vampire men threatening the peace and order…of the country.” Two months later, Harry Nkumbula wrote to the member of Northern Rhodesia’s Legislative Council who represented African interests “with regard to the vampiremen incidents it is high time that Government took action.” ^[103]

At the same time, radio announcers were accused of being banyama. According to Peter Fraenkel, the director of the Central African Broadcast Service, the reasoning behind these new accusations was logical: “How could the announcers broadcast ‘bad news,’ news which displeased Africans, unless they had lost their will-power? How else could they be made to read pro-Federation propaganda on the air?” ^[104] These accusations have their own histories: one broadcaster was so frightened of being poisoned that he cycled miles to his home village once a week to buy food; another, Edward Kateka, was accused of kidnapping a child and took refuge in a police station; Alick Nkhata, arguably the most influential of Central Africa’s influential guitarists, wrote a song about banyama stories, which was well received as a dance tune but made little impact on the rumors.^[105] These however are beyond the scope of this chapter. What I want to discuss now is how men whose job it was to tell stories came to be accused of being banyama—of being, in short, something made real by storytelling.

Did every accuser believe these broadcasters were banyama? Did they think they actually sold Africans to whites for their bodies and their blood? Some did. An anonymous letter threatening Nkhata and Kateka contained many of the details and hierarchies of Copperbelt banyama stories: “You people Capricornists,” it began, “you are selling your people to Yengwe in Ndola.” Although Yengwe/Arthur Davison had died in 1951, the court interpreter explained to the judge that he was a European who lived in Ndola who supposedly bought Africans and sold them to the Congo to be eaten. “[Y]ou wanted to kill Nkumbula you even received revolvers from your Minister the General President of the Capricornists…you are all civil servants…you are the people pretending to become maneaters, kamupila, ” the letter claimed. The colonial state’s response was swift, but perhaps not what Nkumbula had in mind: handwriting samples were sent to police in Livingstone and South Africa, who examined 200 of these before they found the culprit, a twenty-year-old office worker from Western Province. He claimed that he had only wanted to warn the broadcasters. The magistrate observed, “This is not a letter of kindly warning” and sentenced the man to five years’ imprisonment.^[106]

But others believed the story, rather than the literal existence of banyama and Yengwe. According to Nkhata, “My best friends are afraid to come see me…I am quite alone. They don’t even greet me in the street. They cross over to the other side to avoid me. It is not that they believe this nonsense, but they’re afraid. They think they too will be accused if they are seen with me.” Another announcer complained that he could not fathom the reason for this accusation: “Why us?…They’ve always trusted us. I know they’ve mistrusted other departments, but then people like the Forestry officers do bully them to stop cutting wood. But we, we’ve always been popular. We bring them education and entertainment and we don’t even ask a license-fee. Why pick on us now?” ^[107]

What did cause these accusations? Was it the general panic, the men themselves, the stories newscasters told on the air or the way they told these stories? Would Federation described, however favorably, with reference to injections or lorries have been as suspicious, while Federation described as a negotiated political process aroused fear? Given the evidence available—banyama accusations filtered through so many layers of European translation and summary that the narrative is lost—I cannot say what kind of stories were told about banyama, much less about the kind of stories newscasters told. But the experience of Alick Nkhata in concert, performing a song that joked about banyama, supports the view that it was the work that was suspicious, not the man. Nkhata and his quartet performed in the midst of the most aggressive banyama accusations: “A large audience turned up, paid their entrance fee and applauded his amusing songs about modern town-life.…The new song about vampire-men went down fairly well and caused some laughter.” But during a break Nkhata went outside, and members of the audience standing there shrieked and ran away.^[108]

Nkhata the broadcaster might have been thought banyama, but Nkhata the guitarist was not. The song itself named Kateka, named the Information Department, but included none of the details of head banyama, injections, and fattening captivities that made banyama stories powerful and immediate. Nkhata’s song discredited banyama stories because they were false, not because of what they were about. “Who is Nyama? / Nobody knows him / Some say it is Kateka / Who works for the Information Department / There are no Vampiremen / Do not scare people.” ^[109] The experiences, real or imagined, of marked clothes, stolen children, dangerous injections, and fattened captivities were absent from a song that only reprimanded African ideas. It may not have been frightening because it contained no evidence of banyama.

A banyama or batumbula story that travels, that carries words and ideas hundreds of miles across borders for many years, is told with experiences. Without those experiences, however compressed and cryptic they might be, it is just another song—another example of educated Africans’ condescending advice, perhaps the reason for the audience’s laughter. These experiences did not need to have the same meaning to all who heard the story and repeated it, but their presence in a narrative, told with injections and marked clothes, rather than any specific storytelling conventions, made it a banyama story.

Notes

10. Conclusions

I began this book by asserting that vampire stories could be used like any other historical source. But in several chapters I have argued that vampire stories offer a better, clearer, more analytical picture of the colonial experience than other sources do. Did I just become more self-confident as I wrote, or did I in fact manage to use these stories to illuminate new areas of inquiry, to articulate concerns and connections that other sources had simply glossed? Do vampire stories actually make for a more thorough reconstruction of the past, or do they simply add another layer of interpretation to already known histories?

Historians should, I think, find vampire stories good to write about, just as the people quoted in this book found vampires good to talk about. They make for better, more comprehensive histories. As chapter 1 argues, vampires themselves are revealing beings: a separate race of bloodsucking creatures, living among humans on fluids that they extract from human bodies; vampires mark a way in which relations of race, of bodies, and of tools of extraction can be debated, theorized, and explained. No vampire stands alone. The incorporation of vampire stories in any historical reconstruction allows for a description of these debates. And that description alone should generate a more nuanced reconstruction of the past. The reconstruction does not come from vampire sto-ries alone, but rather from how those stories feed off the other stories through which a past is known. The vampire stories that prostitutes told in colonial Nairobi, for example, did not change the way I thought about the history of that city,^[1] but they did allow me to access changing ideas about gender and culture, about menstruation and property and its transmission in colonial times. In other places, vampire stories offer insights that can help historians rethink and recontextualize local histories: vampire and batumbula stories ground the place of free issues of clothing in the wages paid on the copperbelts of colonial Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo and suggest a way of thinking about migrancy as a workers’ strategy. Here the details of vampire stories transform conventional wisdoms; stories of bloodsucking and cannibalism in which clothes play a prominent part illustrate what was significant about work, what was seen as remuneration, and which strategies—and which form of engagement, in which mine—could increase a wage that was partly commodified.

But the problem of this book has never been vampire stories, but history writing. The stories, as I wrote early on, are fine, worth taking at face value as few other texts are. Historical reconstruction is somewhat more ambiguous and complex, and it does not emerge full-blown from the deployment of good stories. Some of the issues that have recently troubled historians—are we writing truth, or stories? is history constituted by facts, or by many narratives?—are themselves troubled by vampire stories. The line between fact and story, indistinct as it is for most historians, is made concrete by people who believe that some agency of the colonial state captured Africans and took their blood. Vampires are a story, but belief in vampires is a fact, just as the attacks on fire stations in Mombasa, policemen in colonial Nyasaland, and prospectors in Tanganyika are facts. The imaginary makes the real, just as it makes more imaginings: it is the inclusion of both that gives depth to historical analyses, and, if not some certainty, at least solid grounds on which to assess motivations, causes, and ideas.

In February 1959, Nusula Bua was convicted in a Kampala court for offering to sell a man to the fire brigade. A fireman testified that he had met Bua a few days before; Bua had said he had a man he wanted to sell to the fire brigade for 1,500/- and asked the fireman to help him. Bua’s defense was that he had taken his friend Alubino Ongon to the fire station to help him find a job. Once there, he was offered 1,500/- for the man, and was waiting for the money when he was arrested. Ongon gave evidence that Bua had told him he would help him find a job. It was only when he was taken to the fire station that he realized he was being offered for sale.^[2] The firemaster, a European, joked about the event: 1,500/-, he said, “works out to about Shs. 12/ a pound, including bone, for the rather skinny Alubino Ongon. Turkeys are cheaper.” ^[3] There is little reason to try to find out which, if any, of these statements is true. Even if that were a viable line of inquiry, it would have disembedded each statement from its own context—the belief in bloodsucking firemen, the ways that white employers played with and off this belief, and the vulnerability of job seekers and their dependence on networks and acquaintances to find work. All of these statements together make a vampire story and vampire actions. It is the several contexts within a vampire story, those contradictions bound within a rumor, that offer historians a space in which ideas and beliefs and motivations come together.

Such a sense of context might unfix academic concerns about whose history should be studied. At some point or other in their careers, most historians—of Africa, of Europe, wherever—have been reprimanded for studying the ordinary, the small, and the insignificant, because it detracts from the larger narrative of tragedies and triumphs that shaped the respective histories of colonies and empires. The same criticism has been applied to those who study the exotic or the extraordinary. Such complaints, however, arise more from historiographic traditions than from specific subjects of historical inquiry. The idea that history must record a national biography, and must provide an explanation for the evils and ills of a nation or a region, is an integral part of the discipline.^[4] But it is important, especially at this time in academic life, to turn this idea on its head: the biography of a nation (or region, or locality) can be done by historicizing the ills and evils historians wish to exorcise. I would argue that the issue is not what one studies, but how one studies it. The issue may be expressed most clearly as one of how a historical subject is constituted, not as a subject but as a historical project, with which sources and kinds of evidence.^[5] The ordinary (or the extraordinary) does not exist separate from the material and the political. The anecdote about Nusula Bua, repeated as a whole story, demonstrates a range of colonial predicaments in late 1950s Uganda. It provides its own overlapping contexts. Whether it is labeled a fragment, trivial, exotic, or supernatural, it contains these different interpretations within it. It is only by the incorporation of these different interpretations that the ordinary and the extraordinary can be historicized.

I have tried to respect the many different interpretations of vampire stories in this book. Each chapter in parts 2 and 3 has argued that a set of vampire stories—taken together either by locality or theme—can be interpreted to tell us a history we did not already know. This raises another question of concern to historians at the end of this century: are vampires a good historical source in and of themselves, or are they simply so slippery and fluid that I have recast them into the dominant concerns of African historians of the past two decades, labor, medicine, and nationalism? Is any history written with vampire stories a valid use of vampires? Is any representation of vampires—themselves a representation—acceptable?

There is too much at stake to let vampire stories be interpreted without close attention to time and place. There are right ways and wrong ways to write history with vampire stories. It is not that vampires are not really wonderful historical evidence in and of themselves, and if historians had nothing else, they would be a good place to start, but history is not written from one kind of evidence. Evidence is situated, lying in relation to other evidence. The chapters in parts 2 and 3 have used vampire stories in relation to other kinds of evidence to do the work of historical reconstruction. Vampire stories from Uganda, for example, say too much about chloroform to ignore the place of inhaled drugs in ideas about colonial intervention. Vampire stories from colonial Northern Rhodesia are told with the changing techniques of tsetse-fly control. Such stories describe colonial intervention and the ways in which insect-borne diseases were considered part of that intervention. A number of chapters in this book posit two kinds of history—one in letters of blood and one in something more stable, like pathogens, high politics, missionary medicine, or the historiography of migrant labor—not because of any implicit love of binaries on my part, but because it allows me to work through the relationship between different kinds of evidence as I reconstruct the past with that evidence.

Recent struggles about history and history writing may have made evidence, fact, and truth much more solid categories than they ever were before. It is easy to forget, in the heat of argument, how transient evidence, fact, and truth have historically been, and how regularly they have been replaced by new and equally replaceable facts. More to the point, historians’ struggles have obscured the way evidence has been deployed and the multiple, overlapping uses to which it had been put long before historians’ came to use it. There is no dividing line between evidence and its interpretation; primary and secondary sources are not cast-iron categories. What historians call evidence, or facts, are interpretations of events written down or spoken by others. What historians find—or hear in an interview—was interpreted in many ways before it became “evidence.” Thus, the evidence employed to find witches is evidence of a peasant culture when used in later centuries. The evidence against a “well-known stupefier” in Kampala was used to get rid of a low-level chief during a moment of intense royal crisis. The evidence officials wrote to demonstrate the depths of African superstition is used in this book to revise the history of sleeping-sickness control and the meaning of shifting cultivation. And that evidence—in courts, in official reports, as heard by inquisitors—was not produced passively. People interpreted what they saw, what they heard, what someone else had heard, to make personal narratives. Think of Zebede Oyoyo taking a well-known story about the Nairobi fire department and remaking it as his own anecdote about his years as a railway worker in Nairobi. His account of his near capture and escape, used twice in this book to make different points, is both a personal construction and an interpretation. This well-known story, which Oyoyo had been telling for years, best expressed his ideas about his experiences in Nairobi wage labor.

This does not make eyewitness testimony any less or any more reliable, as this book asserts. Eyewitness testimony has an authority because it grounds the history based on it in first-person accounts. It reflects the vision of participants, whether or not it is completely accurate. Eyewitness testimony does not have some pure or unmediated status, which any historian with a penchant for theory deforms. Eyewitness testimony has already been mediated, as people decide what to say or write and how to say—or write—it. The stories individual eyewitnesses appropriate and pass off as their own make the social worlds of circulating stories personal and intimate: the process offers a context that describes what eyewitnesses saw and experienced as they understood it. This process is how people interpret what happened to them; it is the way they describe it. And it is this process that should make historians reflect on our own project and those of the people we write about. Interpretations have been made before we come to an interview or an archive, and it is those multiple interpretations that result in what we call evidence.

So does this mean that any interpretation is acceptable? Hardly. It means that interpretations have to be made with care and caution, not because they are risky in and of themselves, but because interpretations build on so many layers of interpretation that they have to be well grounded or they topple over. This should perhaps be more obvious to people who write about, and with, rumor and narrative than to those who write about diplomatic history, for example, or who use census data or wills. Stories and rumors are produced in the cultural conflicts of local life; they mark ways to talk about the conflicts and contradictions that gave them meaning and power. These conflicts and their meaning can only be reconstructed if the stories are grounded in relation to other evidence, other interpretations, other stories. It is not that vampire stories are such a different kind of evidence that this is any truer of them than of any other kind of evidence, but vampire stories make more connections than other kinds of evidence do. The force with which vampire stories insert themselves into domains of power and regions of the body makes this point clearly: other kinds of evidence are not so invasive; they do not reveal the same breadth and depth of daily life and thought.

Notes