Concealing Men

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

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

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

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

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