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]