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Translating Vampires
There are no words in the languages of the people I write about for blood-drinker or blood-taker. The words in African languages that I translate as vampire are already translations—they are words for firemen, game rangers, or animal slaughterers that had already undergone semantic shifts to mean the employees of Europeans whose job it was to capture Africans and take their blood. This of course raises another question: were the practices of firemen and game rangers and surveyors such that they encouraged stories about bloodsucking, or did these terms mean vampire before the tasks of firemen and game rangers became well known? In short, which came first, the use of a term to describe an actual thing or job, or its use to mean vampire?
There is no simple, undialogic answer. One of the oldest terms for vampire on the East African coast, mumiani, first appeared in Swahili dictionaries in the late nineteenth century. According to Bishop Edward Steere’s dictionary of 1870, compiled on Zanzibar, mumyani was a mummy, but could also refer to medicine.[10] It had been a widespread belief in late nineteenth-century India, especially among plague victims on the west coast that hospitals were torture chambers designed to extract momiai, a medicine based on blood. The Indian Ocean trade, with African sailors coming and going between Zanzibar and India, could easily have carried the idea, as well as medicines supposedly made from blood, to East African markets.[11] Just over a decade later, Krapf’s dictionary, compiled near Mombasa, repeated Steere’s definition of mumiani, as the word was transcribed, but added “a fabulous medicine which the Europeans prepare, in the opinion of the natives, from the blood of man.” [12] No one I interviewed, however, said that mumiani appeared that early. Even people born in the 1890s said the practice started after World War I in Kenya and in the 1920s in Northern Rhodesia and Uganda.[13] It may be that some people on the East African coast in the late nineteenth century believed that Europeans made medicine from African blood, but their stories about it did not survive. But the term mumiani was in intermittent use on the coast for over a century, during which time it was given many of the contemporary meanings associated with blood accusations. In the Swahili-French dictionary of the priest Charles Sacleux, compiled on Zanzibar and published in 1941, mumiani is defined as mummy, and a medicine Africans believed was made from dried blood. Jews, Sacleux added, were in charge of getting the blood from people.[14] In everyday use, mumiani was synonymous with kachinja and chinjachinja. This Swahili term came from the verb kuchinja, to slaughter animals by cutting their throats and draining their blood. Doubling the root word intensified its meaning. The prefix ka- meant small in Kenya and gross in Tanganyika. Either or both meanings may have applied when the term was fixed in everyday use.[15] However, the term for slaughtering people, according to A. C. Madan’s 1902 English-to-Swahili dictionary, was a literal translation word that meant the killing of many people (from the verb kuua, to kill) that did not use the root -chinja.[16] The use of a term specific to animals for vampires may have kept the idea of bloodsucking outside of all logic and nature. Indeed, animal butchers were not accused of bloodsucking on the East African coast: firemen were.
The word for firemen, wazimamoto in Swahili (bazimamoto in Luganda), is a literal translation: the men (wa-) who extinguish (from kuzima to put out, to extinguish) the fire or the heat (moto). It became a generic term for vampire, always as a plural, almost as soon as it was in widespread use, well before there were formal fire brigades in most of the places where the word meant vampire. In Uganda, for example, the idea that bazimamoto took Africans’ blood predated full-time firemen by thirty years. Chapters 4 and 7 explore the loose relationship between occupational practices and the social imagination, but the fact that there were no real firemen meant that the term could be applied to surveyors, yellow fever department personnel, whomever. It is not that the term had no specificity, but that its meaning was unstable enough to be made to fit any number of situations and relationships. The term banyama (singular, munyama) for game rangers in colonial Northern Rhodesia was translated by officials there as “vampire” as early as 1931. Not only did it refer to the game department in a neighboring colony, but it was another term depicting actions toward animals applied to humans. The word was never fully translated into Bemba, the local language. The prefix ba- means men, but nyama is Swahili and Nyanja for the meat of animals and quadrupeds who shed blood, either in sacrifice or as predators: cows have nyama but chickens do not. The Bemba word is nama.[17]Although the term does not seem to have been used in Swahili-speaking areas, banyama maintained its Swahili origins for Bemba speakers; it was never naturalized in the local language. Many words for vampires were never given African translations. Among the Nilotic Luo peoples of western Kenya, the word for vampire was the Swahili plural wachinjaji, slaughterers, and not a Luo translation. In Mozambique, the term was Portuguese, chupa-sangue, literally “blood drinker or blood sucker,” although Swahili speakers would note the implicit pun that chupa means bottle in Swahili, a word derived from the Portuguese chupar, to suck or drain.
The pun I impute to chupa-sangue raises another question. When we speak of words used by people who neither read nor write, how useful are terms like “translation,” and “pun,” or even “multiple meanings”? Are we not better served by asking what kind of understandings speakers bring to bear on their own use of these words? The term for those who captured Africans for the Europeans who ate their flesh in colonial Belgian Congo was batumbula (singular, mutumbula), from the Luba -tumbula, translated in Shaba Swahili as to “butcher.” [18] (Shaba Swahili is the variant of the Swahili of the East African coast spoken in present-day Shaba, colonial Katanga, shaped as much by work and migrancy in the area as it was by its historical roots as a trade language.) But the range of meanings for the root tumbula in the region suggest how accurately the term came to describe all the things batumbula did. In Luba, -tumbula means “to overpower,” but also “to pierce or to puncture,” sometimes from below.[19] In many of the languages of Kenya and Tanzania, including Swahili, the meaning is “to disembowel” or “to make a hole with a knife or sharp object.” [20]Batumbula, a term that took hold among the migrant labor population of the mines of colonial Katanga, may have been heard by Swahili speakers with one set of meanings and by Luba speakers with another set. The power and viability of the term lay in its many meanings, which allowed the word to encompass all the things batumbula were said to do, from digging pits, to giving their victims injections, to eating their flesh. And in colonial Belgian Congo, batumbula was also glossed by the Shaba Swahili term simba bulaya, the lion from Europe, another animal term to describe the predatory cannibals who left their victims’ clothes behind.
Why are there so many terms that could mean “bloodsucker”? And why do so many of them describe another activity altogether? Such semantic shifts occur when existing languages do not have the words to convey new meanings. But the fact that wazimamoto meant “vampire” almost as soon as it became a word suggests that these words were semantically malleable: once in everyday use, they could be taken over by their users and given new and potent meanings. They did not simply describe firemen the way a new word might describe a streetcar or an airplane; they described firemen and what Africans thought they really did.[21] The words for firemen and game rangers and small butchers themselves were translated by Africans to describe true meanings not available in the language from which they are taken. Vampires were new. Despite scattered written references and a dictionary definition, no one I ever interviewed knew any precolonial stories about whites or Africans who took blood: “In those days there was nobody looking for blood.” [22] The blood of precolonial sacrifice was bovine; the ritual killings that sometimes marked a king’s death did not draw blood, and the blood of blood brotherhood was thought of as a sexual fluid, more akin to breast milk or semen than to the blood of wounds and injuries.[23] But why do some of these terms require two languages to contain their meanings? Part of the reason is again semantic: blood was not a stable enough category to allow for a local term to describe its extraction. Many African peoples do not have a specific concept for blood that matches the scientific concept of a fluid pumped by the heart into arteries and veins. Many African peoples use a word for blood broadly as a metaphor for sexual fluids, either because of symbolic systems or because of the demands of polite conversation. At the same time, many African languages distinguish between kinds of blood and the circumstances in which it leaves the body in ways that the scientific concept does not, so that the blood of childbirth and the blood of wounds are called by different terms.[24] The red fluid circulating through the body was in some places an alien concept, best described by the Portuguese word sangue or by using a term derived from the verb kuchinja. But different conceptions of the body do not explain why some words never fully became Bemba or why Luo speakers use a Swahili word without translation. The absence of linguistic transformations, however, may be less semantic than genealogical: each plural, and each language carries a historical link to the source of the term. The term never becomes fully Bemba, or Luo, because part of its importance lies in its origin, part of its local meaning is its very foreignness.[25] And throughout this book I shall use wazimamoto, mumiani, kachinja, banyama, and batumbula as synonyms for “vampire,” and vice versa: cultural literacy, like translation, is a two-way street.
Many of the published accounts of vampires have been memoirs: an author encountered the rumor, wrote about it, and theorized its meaning. Only Rik Ceyssens, in an encyclopedic article on batumbula in the Congo, argues that these stories can be traced to the sixteenth century and the slave trade. He relates stories of consumed Africans to precolonial African ideas about agricultural cycles and commodity production. According to Ceyssens, batumbula stories from World War II Kananga and Katanga, for example, were but modern versions of eighteenth-century slaves’ beliefs that they were being transported to the New World to be eaten; he is more concerned with the continuity of African ideas than with the ways in which 1940s batumbula stories described the industrial spaces of the urban Congo.[26] Ceyssens flattens a variety of descriptions of consumption into ingestion and levels much of the sense of region that I try to make prominent in this book. The white cannibals of the slave trade and the white cannibals who captured the imagination of Congolese after the fall of Belgium during World War II were constructed in different social worlds. The tales told by slaves on the Atlantic coast and tales told by fishermen in the Luapula River Valley four hundred years later are not the same. While the idea of cannibalism informs these stories, the white people in each set of narratives have different meanings, different relevances, and different histories. Among Kongo-speaking people in and around Kinshasa and near the Atlantic coast, white people are ancestors and the Americas are the other world inhabited by the dead; the white mine supervisors and priests of Katanga batumbula stories carry quite different connotations; the Americans whose arrival was promised by the Watchtower movement in the 1930s and 1940s had different meanings still.[27] Stories of white cannibals, however similar in plot, are shaped by local concerns and local experiences; stories may travel, but they do not travel through or to passive storytellers. Interpreting stories as regional productions reveals them to be both socially constructed and socially situated; locating such stories in regional histories and regional economies yields historical evidence.[28]
Most of the people I have interviewed—and I have now interviewed about 130—say that white vampires began their work between 1918 and 1925. It seems likely that these stories were triggered by Africans’ experiences during World War I, but that does not explain their meaning over the next forty years, during which time they came and went with dreadful intensity. Not every African believed these stories, of course, and many people assumed that those who did simply misunderstood Western medicine. A Ugandan politician complained that vampire beliefs were a troubling kind of popular nonsense: “My people the Baganda had strange ideas about the British. They thought they drank blood and killed children because they did not understand what happened in hospitals.” [29] A Tanzanian man said that “the British government needed no blood donations because it got blood in this way, but when independence came this government stopped it. That’s why hospitals always ask people to volunteer to give blood.” [30] A man in western Kenya explained that once he realized that “nowadays people are required to donate blood for sick relatives,” he began to “strongly believe” that wazimamoto stories actually described “the science of blood donation.” [31] Misunderstandings or not, these stories presented grim ideas about knowledge, expertise, and therapeutic and political power: “These people were educated in the use of blood, they knew about the use of blood.” [32] In colonial Northern Rhodesia, banyama had “white balls of drugs” that could sap their victims’ wills and, a few years later, butterfly nets that could expand to capture a grown man. In Kenya, the men who worked for wazimamoto were “skilled.” Jobs gave people new tools with new powers. In Uganda, some men said the bazimamoto were really health inspectors or the yellow fever department; in Tanganyika in the 1950s, others said that firemen had injections that made people “lazy and unable to do anything.” [33] Not only did prostitutes in Nairobi dig pits in their small rooms in which to trap their customers for the wazimamoto, the fire station in Nairobi and the police station also had such pits, hidden from public view by clever construction.
Many authors have speculated on how these stories began. An administrator with many years experience in Tanganyika wrote that mumiani was simply the theory by which Africans explained their invasion first by Arabs and then by Europeans. It kept their dignity intact. The Arabs were said to have killed Africans for the blood, which they made into medicine that they drank or smeared on their weapons. “It was this that gave them power over Africans.” [34] Stories about white people taking precious fluids from the peoples they colonized were common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter Pels has written an intriguing article in which he argues that mumiani stories were actually carried from India by soldiers in the 1890s, a decade after Krapf’s dictionary. Drawing on David Arnold’s work on epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India, Pels notes some similarities between Indian ideas about momiyai—a medicine made from bitumen, but said to be made from blood—and African ideas about mumiani. The similarity is too much to explain by the colonial experience, and Pels suggests that Indians’ fear that sick people were brought to hospitals specifically to have momiyai removed from them was carried to East Africa by the sepoys recruited in Delhi in the early 1890s for the East African Rifles. In 1895, the East African Rifles—700 soldiers, of whom 300 were Indian—were quartered in Mombasa; 400 Indian sepoys joined them in 1902. Pels suggests the rumor spread through conversations between these African and Indian soldiers or via the Gujurati shopkeepers he places in East Africa somewhat earlier than most sources do. A single letter to the Tanganyikan secretariat stating that the rumor began in Mombasa in 1906—at the house of a Parsee no less—was confirmation.[35] According to Pels, nothing in Africans’ experience of colonial rule generated these stories.
This book argues something very different. I think there are many obvious reasons why Africans might have thought that colonial powers took precious substances from African bodies, and I doubt if Africans needed to see or hear of a specific medical procedure to imagine that white people would hang them upside down and drain their blood. I think bloodsucking by public employees is a fairly obvious metaphor for state-sponsored extractions, just as vampires are an unusually convincing modern metaphor for psychic ills and personal evil. While I think that vampire beliefs emerged out of witch beliefs—Africans, after all, did not make up these stories out of thin air—what is significant is that these particular beliefs were new. Even witchcraft did not describe what Africans were talking about when they talked about vampires. My concern is not with why the idea of bloodsucking Europeans came into being, but why it took the hold it did, and why Africans used it to depict a wide variety of situations and structures and sometimes acted upon such beliefs. As a historian, I am less concerned with the origin of vampire beliefs than I am with their power, their ability to describe and articulate African concerns over a wide cultural and geographic area.
Even if these stories were originally “brought” there by Indian soldiers garrisoned in East Africa, this does not explain the meanings they had in East Africa fifty years later. Even if these beliefs could be traced to the botched and badly done battlefield medical practices in wartime, or bismuth injections for yaws a few years later, this would not explain why some Nairobi prostitutes were accused of capturing men for the firemen, and why some white doctors, some surveyors, and some policemen were accused of being vampires. The origin of the belief does not explain how these stories came and went, capable each time of describing new situations and relationships. As one Ugandan official told another, the rumor was dormant for a few years “and then something starts it off and for the next few months it’s more than your life’s worth to stop your car for a pee.” [36] It is not a common point of origin that gives vampire beliefs their longevity and periodicity, but how elastic they are, and how broad a category “vampire” is.
The question of how and what to think about imagined events and deeds has long concerned historians. Recent debates about what constitutes “experience”—discussed below—have long genealogies: theological debates in Western Europe—including debates about witchcraft accusations and confessions—were also concerned with questions of memory, corporeality, and proof. In the next few pages I want to explore some questions of evidence raised by the literature on witch beliefs both in Europe and in Africa as a way to both suggest points of origin for African vampire rumors and the vocabularies with which vampires are described.
In a book that was far more influential to historians of Europe than it was to be to historians of Africa, E. E. Evans-Pritchard argued that witch beliefs were not superstitions, but explanations. Witch beliefs did not deny accidents or bad luck or illness, they simply explained why an accident or bad luck or an illness happened to one person and not another. His example of the granary is worth repeating: when a granary fell in the afternoon, collapsing on the men taking shade beneath it, no one questioned that this was due to the termites eating through the poles on which it stood. At the same time, however, no one thought it possible that it had fallen at the precise moment it did without some supernatural intervention: why else did it fall in the daytime, on these men and not on others? Witch beliefs explain the specificity of cause far better than Western explanations of termites do.[37] Years later, Monica Wilson noted that scientific medicine could easily be accommodated to witch beliefs: “I know typhus is caused by lice,” said her assistant, “but who sent the lice?” [38]
Fifteen years after Evans-Pritchard, anthropologists working in Africa began to argue for a sociological interpretation of witchcraft. Suspicions and gossip about witchcraft revealed social tensions, while public accusations of witchcraft revealed social conflict.[39] These anthropologists had for years focused on the way witchcraft is an idiom of intimacy: a person has another bewitched because he or she has been wronged by the other person. A brother slighted in a returned migrant’s gift-giving, a co-wife insulted, or a man impoverished as his neighbor grows rich—these are the people who want to bewitch their offenders. The other horrible things witches did—going naked in daytime, consorting with hyenas and snakes, ingesting what normal people would never touch—amplified the ways that witches inverted everyday life and made it all the more appalling that they harmed those closest to them.[40] The diverse places of intimate socializing—births, for example, or beer parties—are likely to attract witches.[41] For these anthropologists, witchcraft was a way for people to articulate, and sometimes act out, the tensions inherent in specific social structures. Witchcraft was not a system of explanation or phenomenology, but embedded in social structure and social history.[42] Among the Nupe, where women were witches and a few men had the innate power to deal with witches, fatal witchcraft was attributed to the men who had betrayed their gender and failed to constrain witchcraft.[43] Sally Falk Moore argues that witchcraft accusations followed specific patterns for specific reasons, such as when the wife of a middle brother was accused of bewitching her childless sister-in-law. The weak middle brother, already working in town, could not combat the accusation; he lost use rights over his land when his wife left it. The older brother, husband of the childless woman, claimed the land for his farm.[44]
Colonial capitalism does not seem to have made witchcraft any less intimate, but there are hints from after 1920 that witch beliefs were being refashioned. Edwin Ardener’s description of a world of witches and animated corpses at work in hilltop plantations in post–World War I Cameroon placed imaginary beings in the context of economic change. Witch beliefs had continuity but were not constant: a witch finder could cleanse an area of witches so that ordinary people would be safe getting rich from cash-crop production.[45] John Middleton was told that in Lugbara in northern Uganda around 1930, sorcerers who had once been migrants purchased medicines with money and “wandered aimlessly, filled with malice” killing strangers.[46] Among the Bashu in eastern Belgian Congo in the late 1950s, dispersed lineage-based villages had been consolidated just as male migrancy had coincided with the introduction of cassava, both of which increased female labor dramatically. A new kind of witch—women who taught other women to leave their bodies and punish the men with whom they were angry—became a new source of misfortune by the end of the colonial era.[47] Witches were said to be aged in postcolonial Zambia; the crones and the old men thought to be witches suggested the true burdens of kinship obligations for sons and nephews, and in postcolonial Cameroon, the victims of witches were sent to work on the invisible plantations of great men.[48]
New and improved witches did not translate into vampires, however, in either 1930s Lugbara or postcolonial Cameroon. My question, then, is why weren’t the surveyors, the Parsees, or the firemen visible in East Africa before 1925 called witches? They could have at least been described as these new types of witches of the post–World War I era, but these people said to be looking for blood were called game rangers or firemen instead. The reason in part was that they were strangers for whom an idiom that conveyed the intimacies and the disappointments of closeness would have been inappropriate. It would have stripped these agents of the state of all that made them foreign and powerful. Vampires were not thought to be social problems—the result of envy and asocial behavior; they were considered political realities. Although chapters 4 and 5 argue that vampire stories articulate new African social relations in a colonial context, when Africans spoke about vampires—their hired agents, their cars, and the spaces in which they worked—they described political issues in a situation that was categorically different from the tensions between siblings, co-wives, and matrilineal kin. If beer parties had been sites for witchcraft, people in Uganda said that bazimamoto captured men after a night’s drinking, as they staggered home alone. If witches sought the intimate fluids of birth, Congolese batumbula, at least, avoided parturient women. Vampires were more than new imaginings for new times, they were new imaginings for new relationships.[49] I do not mean to suggest a mechanistic connection between social events and social imaginings, however; there is another possible reason why vampire beliefs emerged out of witch beliefs, and I want to turn to European historiography to discuss it.
Europeanists have taken issues of witchcraft and witch hunting very seriously, and in doing so, they have raised some of the questions of evidence that have informed this book. Studies of witchcraft and particularly witchcraft accusations and confessions in Europe have long noted how similar witches’ confessions were. If there was no such thing as a devil, and if witchhunting was a crazed moment in European history, why were the details of witchcraft—the sabbath, the spells, the familiars—so similar over a wide geographical range? Margaret Murray and in a much more subtle way Carlo Ginzburg have argued that witches’ testimony revealed another world altogether: that not of witchcraft but of an older religion of female and agricultural fertility, of shamans and trances. In between Murray and Ginzburg, Norman Cohn wrote an extremely influential account of European witchhunting in which he argued that the sabbaths, trances, and familiars were the imaginings of the inquisitors, who then used torture to shape the answers they wanted and got. All these analyses are framed around either/or terms, however: the narrative of witchcraft in all its rich details either belongs to the common folk or to the inquisitors. These analyses argue that there was no shared vocabulary with which peasant women and clergymen negotiated a description of the world, no genre of talking that both parties might use to different ends.
But shared vocabulary is a tricky concept: knowing the words and using them correctly were very different things. Some vocabularies and their deployment were so far apart that confessions were difficult to obtain. Po-chia Hsia’s studies of the blood libel note that the obsessions and fears of ordinary Christian folk were translated to clergymen with great speed and clarity; accusations of Jewish ritual murder began with parents telling judges that their missing children had been slaughtered by Jews. But even under torture, in trials that were conducted in two or three languages, Jews who only vaguely knew the stories Christians told about them could not always produce a description of Jewish ritual murder that satisfied their inquisitors. In late fifteenth-century Germany, tortured Jews tried in painful confusion to explain why Jews needed Christian blood—to cure epilepsy or for its healing power. To this the judges answered: “Then why is your son an epileptic?” and “we would not be satisfied.” [50] Other vocabularies had to be learned and negotiated. When inquisitors in Friuli first heard people confess willingly that their spirits went out at night to guard crops from witches, they did not know what to call these benandanti. Were they witches or counterwitches? Inquisitors had to coin a new phrase, “ benadanti witch,” to begin to evaluate the information they heard. It took seventy years for benadanti to come to mean witch for both peasants and inquisitors, and even then both parties were uneasy about what kind of witch it meant.[51] In some places and instances, vocabularies were so consistent that women and theologians made concerns about the harvest, food, and nurturance central to women’s everyday lives and the most intense images of Christian piety.[52] Scholars have argued that in early modern Germany, women appropriated the inquisitors’ version of witch beliefs to describe the conflicts and disappointments of their own domestic situation.[53] So shared was this vocabulary in some communities that some accused witches begged forgiveness after their confessions, and others, unrepentant in death, were said to have paralyzed the hands of the executioners attempting to carry out death sentences.[54]
It is with these varieties of vocabularies and the multiplicity of insinuated meanings that historians of witches and vampires work. It is precisely these difficulties of translation—the years when benadanti did not mean witch, the ignorance of Bavarian Jews of what their accusers said about them, all the men who could be called wazimamoto—that describe the world as people in the past saw it, with all the variations that inequalities of power and knowledge bring to such descriptions. The power relations in an interview done in rural Africa, or a judge’s chamber in Friuli, may not shape the content of testimony; there may be no simple one-to-one relationship between a question asked and the answer received, let alone between the relative authorities of interrogator and speaker. Here Hayden White’s analogy of the historian and the psychiatrist is useful, partly because it allows for the loose and slippery ways that information is presented, but mainly because it focuses on how historians reevaluate the information they receive. Historians foreground some meanings and submerge others to authorize an interpretation of the past. Rather than seeking a reality behind the words and images—the task of judges and inquisitors—historians’ reorganization gives some meanings great and renewed power and strips others of their intensity. Ginzburg reflected on Nightbattles that inquisitors and ethnographers simply recoded peasant belief. But however much coding and recoding the interrogator does, the terminology remains that of the informant, and those vocabularies dominate the resulting texts. My point is not that the term benandanti was contested—it was, but that hardly matters for what follows—but that talk about benandanti could only be conducted by using the term. The deep cultural layers constituting the term could be maintained by the speakers even while it eluded the judges; the judges could only access the layers of historical and cultural meaning by using the term. In this way, some of the most powerful evidence in this book comes from Europeans’ accounts of African vampires: they didn’t believe them and often published them to show the depth of African superstition, but they presented these stories in all the rich contradictory details of the genre; they wrote with materials and constructions they themselves did not produce. Like Friulian inquisitors, historians do not reject information out of hand; rather, they rearrange it, stressing different parts according to their own interests and understandings of the world: the gap between the “spontaneous confessions” (Ginzburg’s term) and interrogators expectations is never fully bridged, and terms are never fully recoded by power or culture. For fifty years the judges heard stories of benandanti and could not figure out what the term actually meant. When the confusion was over, when inquisitors and peasants began to speak the same language, benandanti meant witch, but inquisitors now used the term. The array of meanings of benandante—or mumiani, or banyama—could not be fully stifled; judges and officials could never really recode local beliefs.
In wartime colonial Northern Rhodesia, when European officials were thin on the ground, African clerks, settlers, and colonial officials sought to recode banyama into traditional African human sacrifice, which, they claimed, had gone on for centuries. “The old word used before the advent of the Europeans,” mafyeka, which had appeared only once in official writings on banyama,[55] became the subject of memoranda in Northern Province for almost two years. A man was attacked on a path in Isoka District in 1943. When the man’s assailants claimed they were only after a reward from banyama, the district commissioner, Gervas Clay, turned to Robert, the African district clerk, for clarification. Robert told him that in addition to banyama, there were mafyeka, people who sacrificed Africans at Christmas in a chief’s village. The victims’ blood was sprinkled on a drum used in rain-making ceremonies.[56] Africans believed that Europeans approved of this custom, Robert said. Clay sent for the relevant files and studied the fragments about banyama he found, recoding them with his new insider knowledge: “I would suggest the possibility that the activities of the Mafyeka…may not be dead and the whole banyama story may be an invention of those who wish to keep mafyeka activities alive.” Most banyama incidents took place in the rainy season; those that did not were due to “the natural delay” in reports of such disappearances.[57] Although Clay and his wife had filmed the rain dance the year before and found it “completely harmless and rather dull,” two African policemen were sent to observe the ceremony in 1943. They found much that was ominous: “the noise of the drum is different from an ordinary drum, and seems to be made by rubbing rather than beating” and dancers wore red and looked very serious. Clay recommended that the assailants be convicted of attempted murder, to allay African suspicions of European collusion.[58]
A few months later, R. S. Jeffreys, a retired official, wrote an unsolicited letter to the district headquarters (the boma) in Northern Province, explaining that a chance meeting had alerted him to officials’ need for clarification regarding human sacrifice. Recalling that he “really knew these people” and “their dialect” when he lived in Isoka twenty years ago, he noted that kidnapping and killing by strangulation during the early rains of November was “the observance of customary propitiary rites for the securing of an abundant harvest. ” He did not use the term mafyeka, but assured officials that the custom still went on, albeit in great secrecy.[59] Ten days later, the provincial commissioner issued a memorandum to all DCs in which he transformed banyama into ritual murder and a harvest ritual: the word mafyeka had disappeared altogether, and banyama had become “the so-called banyama movement,” which attempted “to obtain people for human sacrifice in connection with rain making ceremonies or to ensure good crops.” A retired African clerk “of the highest integrity” had described the commonplace methods of sacrifice.[60] The letter from Jeffreys was typed (with several carbon copies) and filed, and, over the next few years, copies were sent around to various officials and anthropologists at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute requesting figures on the frequency of ritual murder in the colony.[61] But mafyeka and the recoding of banyama were short-lived; outside of these memoranda, the term was never used. Even as officials proclaimed the new meaning of banyama, they forbade a London parasitologist to collect stool, blood, and skin samples for fear he would be accused of being banyama.[62] By 1945, the word mafyeka was gone and only the acting chief secretary, Cartmel-Robinson, himself accused of being banyama during a smallpox vaccination campaign in Isoka in 1933, defined banyama as meaning human sacrifice.[63] No one else did. Earlier in the year, the PC of Northern Province assured two settlers that banyama was an African superstition of no historical validity and that they should advise their laborers accordingly.[64]
But vampires, witchcraft, and ritual murder were, in Gábor Klaniczay’s words, “a matter of mentality and legal practice.” The place of proof in witchcraft and banyama trials and the place of popular lore in articulating that proof was not simply how the accused were convicted; it was the site in which the many meanings of terms for witch were disclosed and forced into official usage. In a very important essay, Klaniczay locates in the emergence of “vampire scandals” in the Austro-Hungarian Empire starting in the seventeenth century—“the first media event” according to Paul Barber[65]—in the decline in prosecutions for witchcraft there. The many meanings of witch could not survive the newly scientized appeal courts of Maria Theresa’s reign, and the very facts by which vampires were separated from ordinary witches meant that vampires could never be fully investigated; they could only be condemned as superstition and refuted. Vampires straddled the realms of nocturnal bloodsucking beings and biological knowledge in which blood was an object of investigation in and of itself. The new vampire that emerged in the Balkans was categorically different from the bloodsucking entities that had gone before. It was dead, and in rising from the dead, it was a dreadful parody of Christ. Vampires were a very special kind of corpse, they never decayed; they rose from the grave only to have carnal relations or take blood. The blood they took was not a generalized bodily fluid that might be blood, milk, or semen, however: it was a specific red fluid that vampires took from the veins in which it circulated in the bodies of the living. Vampires were very much a product of modern theories of the body. Prosecution of vampires raised far more problems than it would have solved; they remained outside official sanction and in a relatively short time became a literary idiom, mixed with—then as now—spectacular fantasies of sexuality and death.[66] However novel eighteenth-century Balkan vampires were, they could easily be bundled with older ideas about race and blood, so that Balkan vampires and Jewish ritual murder could sometimes be combined. Vampires troubled the tenets of scientific humanism: a belief in vampires insisted that difference did matter, so that the specificity of vampires could be associated with the specificity of Jews.[67] These associations did not make vampires any more or any less real, but it made them both a metaphor and a belief at the same time. The accusation in 1880s London that Jack the Ripper was a Jew in search of Christian blood must be read alongside newspaper editorials from the same year that referred to Jewish immigrant merchants in London as vampires.[68]
I do not want to force Klaniczay’s subtle analysis onto East and Central Africa, but further research might be able to look for the origin of colonial vampires in the banning of the poison ordeal in colonial Africa.[69] I do not wish to imply that vampires rise up whenever witches go uncriminalized, but rather that without the public spectacle of ordeals—like trials—the many things witches mean are not formally debated and contested. African vampires came to be talked about differently, in different contexts: they were a synthetic image, a new idiom for new times, constructed in part from ideas about witchcraft and in part from ideas about colonialism. These vampires might move about at night, but they did not go naked: they wore identifiable uniforms and used the equipment of Western medicine. Witches and vampires were different because they operated in different historical contexts. Vampires were a discursive contradiction—firmly embedded in local beliefs and constructions but named in such a way that their outsiderness was foregrounded. Unlike witches, vampires were not deeply rooted in local society; they did not fly or travel on familiars, but had mechanized mobility. Bloodsucking firemen had none of the personal malice of witches; it was a job. As such, it did not merely imperil people in tense relationships, it imperiled everyone. Firemen and their agents were not evil but in need of money. “Wazimamoto employed prostitutes…they did this for the money, they needed the money, and they could do this kind of work.” [70] “If somebody asked you to look for a drum or a liter of blood for 50,000/-, would you not do that?” [71] “It was not an open job for anybody, you had to be a friend of somebody in the government, and it was top secret, and it was not easy to recruit anybody…although it was well paid.” [72] Vampires were outside the social context that witches continued to inhabit in East and Central Africa; they were seen to be internationalized, professionalized, supervised, and commodifying.
Still, why did Africans, or anyone else, articulate tensions and conflicts with stories of bloodsucking beings? Vampires, Klaniczay argues, straddle the connections between medicine and violence, between the supernatural and new scientific rationalities that were becoming naturalized. They were a way of talking about the world that both parodied the new technologies and showed the true intent behind their use. The very novelty of blood and the very detailed ways Africans said it was extracted provide a powerful way to talk about ideas and relationships that begged description.[73] It is not that there were no other ways for Africans, or Transylvanians, to talk about wealthy men or new machines or the meaning of medical testing, but that these things were so important that they were talked about with new, specific vocabularies.