Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

Studies on the History of Society and Culture

by Luise White

During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets. In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked. Luise White presents and interprets vampire stories from East and Central Africa as a way of understanding the world as the storytellers did. Using gossip and rumor as historical sources in their own right, she assesses the place of such evidence, oral and written, in historical reconstruction.

White conducted more than 130 interviews for this book and did research in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In addition to presenting powerful, vivid stories that Africans told to describe colonial power, the book presents an original epistemological inquiry into the nature of historical truth and memory, and into their relationship to the writing of history.

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Academic, Cultural

374 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2000

Reviews

[Mir]

NOT ACTUALLY ABOUT VAMPIRES

I was expecting a book about belief in or tales concerning vampires. This is a about a phenomenon, in no way perceived as supernatural and not referred to as vampirism except by the author, in which people (usually members of various professions that didn't exist prior to colonial occupation, such as police, firemen, gamekeepers) were accused of kidnapping Africans and draining their blood to treat anemia on the part of Europeans. This was generally believed to happen in hospitals or sometimes private homes, where the victims were suspended in pits and their throats cut or drained by means of needles.

The author explains her use of the label "vampire": I want to use a widespread term that adequately conveys the mobility, the internationalism, and the economics of these colonial bloodsuckers. No other term depicts the ease with which bloodsucking being cross boundaries, violate space, capture vulnerable men and women, and extract a precious bodily fluid from them. No other term conveys the racial differences encoded in one group's need for another's blood. <-- not sure about this last claim; very rarely have I come across any racial element in vampire lore. In fact, they often seem to prey on family and friends first.

I can't help but suspect this title was chosen with an eye to sales. And obviously there's something to be said for that -- I wouldn't have picked it up had the title truthfully conveyed the subject matter. I'm not finishing it. It looks like there are several chapters about how this belief was expressed regarding various medical epidemics.

I like the cover, which is by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu of Zaire. He disappeared during rioting in 1981 and is presumed dead. I may have a look at Johannes Fabian's Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire.

[Ess Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

Luise White takes on the herculean task of legitimizing oral tradition and record as cultural and social history, but not from the standard European schema of colonial extraction. She utilizes the rubric of African vampire stories to contextualize the ways in which rumor articulates shared experience in colonial Africa. For White, these stories are not folklore, but social records she wishes to substantiate into a historical frame by taking them, “at face value, as everyday descriptions of extraordinary occurrences” (5). White chooses this particular idiom as a way of speaking in socially constructed terms about the experience of the colonized. Her analysis focuses on the repeated details of, “firemen and equipment and anemia, so that they might be used as a primary source from which to write, and sometimes rewrite, the history of colonial East and Central Africa” (4).
White organizes her book in three parts. The first is the theoretical basis by which her work should be approached. She is fastidious in outlining her methodology. She is dealing with sources that report things that never happened through the mouths of those who did not experience them, “looking not so much for the reasons behind make-believe as for what such beliefs articulate in a given time and place”(44). The rest of her book is the analysis of these oral traditions in specific time and region from the African vantage, extrapolating meaning from the existing predisposition of Africans towards technology, medicine, gender and labor. In the second part these constructs are leveraged to articulate fear of change and in the third to show how vampire stories tell colonial history. Throughout the book White repeatedly reminds her readership to think in terms of genre, not in terms of individual or performance. The individual voice is not important, the cultural memory being transmitted in the repeated details is; White "privileg[es] words and images over voices" (113).

With the exception of the first chapter, this book is a revised collection of previously published essays. It would seem impossible to know where to being to write a book with such breadth of comparative analysis without an expert grasp of the enormous historiography that these individual essays, written over the course of a decade, lend to the whole. The historiography on gender, medicine, philology, and colonialism White has at her fingertips is dizzying. That she is able to leverage this expansive expertise to legitimize vampire stories, hearsay, as historical inquiry is admirable, if not fully realized. She argues,” that vampire stories offer a better, clearer, more analytical picture of the colonial experience than other sources do” (307), but without the myriad of other sources that she utilizes in conjunction to create that picture, they would be impossible to assess and even with historiography at her disposal, she makes some very large leaps in analysis. In “A Special Danger” she relates the stories of three women discussing prostitution in the 1940’s, a time when there were no clocks in colonial Africa, yet each story includes a specific time detail. White suggests this is indicative of gender and body issues, exhibiting the idea of “women’s time-disciplined blood” through its desirability to the wazimamoto. That the asocial aspects of menstruation can be further extrapolated from these details is ludicrous. She does not look at these time details as being indicative of changes between the 1940’s and the mid 1970’s, when the stories are set, and when they are related to her, respectively. The type of analysis that would be in keeping with the methodology she is trying to establish.

White also falls short in her repeated, intrusive insertion of first person narrative. In several sections it is difficult to immerse oneself in her analysis without her popping up, not to provide guidance or reassert her theoretical framework, but with the regular interruption of what “this chapter” is about, without giving her audience the opportunity to assess her argument in whole. It pulls you out of main narrative to take part in one that is wholly unnecessary at the time and leaves one with the impression that she either doesn’t trust she is making her argument or that her readership is capable of assessing it without her guidance. Or perhaps it is simply that she lacks confidence in her methodology. She invokes Carlo Ginzburg’s work in Night Battles to draw parallels between the changes in the meaning of words that occur between interviewer and interviewee over time, but does not draw this comparison in any substantial way into the body of her book. It lies in the introduction, as if conjuring Ginzburg’s authority will lend legitimacy to her. Given that her argument is open ended by design, rumor can neither be proved nor disproved, and there are endless possibilities to the interpretation of rumor, it is difficult to grasp the validity of White’s analysis. And that may be the point. The analysis is simply there to reinforce her founding of a new methodological theory. She is convincing in the construction of the theoretic scaffolding by which rumor can be analyzed, but the evidence and analysis portions of her work vary so greatly that it is often difficult to assess it as a whole. What she produces, ultimately, is a manual for how to approach rumor as a genre and articulate it into historical discourse.

[Kimathi Muiruri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reference this text more than any other in my day to day life

[Sumayyah · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book contains a number of accounts and stories, it feels too much like the author's entire purpose was to disprove the vampire happenings and relate everything to slights and effects of colonialism. Requires a deeper reading to see if my feelings are correct or misplaced.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure what to think of this one. Very postmodern, not necessarily a bad thing with this work, but makes it difficult to follow when White is intentionally offering differing interpretations of the same events in different chapters. Not sure this had to be grounded in historiography of vampires. Interesting tidbits on the nature of gossip, rumor, and oral history for Africanists.

[Van Til · Rating 1 out of 5]

rambling, self-indulgent postmodern self-contradictory nonsense -- I hate that this trash gets published at all, let alone under the category of historical scholarship

this is a journalist's extended stream-of-consciousness acid trip disguised as academic history

[kalei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting, well-structured and self-aware

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Luise White’s 2000 Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa argue that to understand these rumors is to show how African people understood the changes of this era that affected their lives in Colonial East and Central Africa. White’s book is extremely broad and covers multiple ideas of what the rumors of blood collectors meant to the Africans being interviewed. White covers the anxieties of the newer urban African population during the colonial period in the chapters throughout her monographs, from a vampire scare among female prostitutes in Colonial Nairobi, a high profile trial of someone accused of being a vampire in Colonial Kampala in the 1950s, and labor unrest in the mining areas of the Belgian Congo and British Colonial Zambia. Another aspect of blood collecting rumors was the concept of wage labor among Central and East Africans, including firemen (127). Another aspect in the region was the African understanding of European medical science (105) White also covers how the rumors of blood collecting were involved with labor disputes with Roman Catholic Missions and conflicts over Sleeping Sickness Control in Colonial Zambia.
White uses the term ‘vampire’ to describe these stories about figures who collected blood. She writes that the term ‘vampire’ ties these figures from Colonial African history into an internationally understood genre that contains ideas about how Colonial African bloodsuckers “conveyed the racial differences, crossed boundaries, violated space, captured vulnerable men and women, and extracted a precious bodily fluid from them.” White uses both oral history and primary sources to write her monograph. White believes that in doing an oral history of rumors that ““people do not speak with truth, with a concept of the accurate description of what they saw, to say what they mean, but they construct and repeat stories that carry value and meaning that most forcibly gets their points across. People speak with stories that circulate to explain what happened. People want to tell stories that work, stories that convey ideas and points (30)” White relates what Gregory Sseluwagi, one of her interviewees in Uganda, told her. During the colonial period, Sseluwagi did not believe in vampire stories that people could disappear “like a goat” (30) Sseluwagi then lived through the Idi Amin regime in Uganda and his brother-in-law disappeared. He then realized that there could be some truth to the vampire stories from the colonial period (30). Where White used primary sources, such as in the chapters about the labor dispute with Roman Catholic missions in Colonial Zambia, she read the diaries of a Francophone Catholic Order that worked in Africa to reconstruct the vampire acquisitions against the Order (178). Luise White’s Speaking with Vampires was an interesting monograph.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most powerful histories I have ever written.