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]