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Vampire Priests of Central Africa: African Debates about Labor and Religion in Colonial Northern Zambia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
When I was a girl, I was taught not to gossip by a school game. We would sit in a circle, and someone would whisper a phrase into the ear of the person sitting next to her. By the time the phrase was returned to the first speaker, it was totally deformed—hilarious proof that hearsay distorted facts. I had already published a book based extensively on oral interviews when I realized how insidious this game was, that it rested on two extremely authoritarian principles: Information should be transmitted passively, and no one has the right to alter or amend received statements.
- Type
- Modern Uses of Myth
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1993
References
This essay, perhaps more than most, has been socially constructed. Not only did Leslie Ashbaugh, Kieth Breckenridge, David William Cohen, Ian Cunnison, Johannes Fabian, Karen Hansen, Sharon Hutchinson, Ivan Karp, Corinne Kratz, Pier Larson, Hugh Macmillan, V. Y. Mudimbe, Mwelwa Musambachime, Peter Pels, Lucy Simler, Megan Vaughan, and Ann Waltner and two anonymous readers comment on earlier versions, but seminars at Boston University, the Institute for Advanced Research and Study in the African Humanities at Northwestern University, and the University of Amsterdam, and Anthony Appiah's murder mystery, Avenging Angel, transformed how I thought about writing this material. The research for this article was funded by the American Philosophical Society, the Graduate School of the University of Minnesota, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
1 I take this point from a somewhat different study of Catholicism in Central Africa, Ranger, Terrance O., “Taking Hold of the Land: Holy Places and Pilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe,” Past and Present, 117(1987), 159–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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6 Societé des Missionaires d’Afrique, Rapports Annuels, No. 25 (Alger: Maison-Carrée, 1929–1930), 206Google Scholar, quoting the Monsignor of Chilubula Mission. Societé des Missionaires d’Afrique, Rome: Diaire de Chilubula, 22 February 1929; 18 April 1931; and for sisal plantations in Tanganyika, Diaire de Kayambi, 13 June 1922.
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21 In many vampire accusations the technologies of Western biomedicine, especially injections and bandages, were used to subdue victims. K. D. Leaver, “The ‘Transformation of Men to Meat’ Story,” Native Affairs Department Information Sheet No. 20, November 1960, National Archives of Zimbabwe; Shepperson, George, Myth and Reality in Malawi (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 7–8Google Scholar; Brelsford, W. V., “The Banyama Myth,” Native Affairs Department Annual, 9:4 (1967), 54–55Google Scholar; Ceyssens, Rik, “Mutumbula: Mythe de l’Opprimé,” Cultures et development, 7:3–4 (1975), 483–536Google Scholar: Musambachime, , “The Impact of Rumor,” 207Google Scholar; White, Luise, “Bodily Fluids and Usufruct: Controlling Property in Nairobi, 1917–1939,” Canadian Journal of African Studies, 24:3 (1990), 418–38Google Scholar.
22 Gervas Clay, Taunton, Somerset, England, 26 August 1991.
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24 Mwelwa C. Musambachime, personal communication, 29 January 1992.
25 V. W. Brelsford, tour report 1, 1939, NAZ/SEC2/751, Chinsali District Tour Reports, 1939–40.
26 Ian Cunnison, personal communication, 4 February 1992.
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35 Diaire de Chifobwe-Ipusukilo, 11 December 1926.
36 P. W. M. Jelf, DO, Tour Report Fort Roseberry, June–July 1932, NAZ/SEC2/888. Mee was with Thorn Stores, a manager of which figured in vampire accusations in Northern Province in the mid-1940s. Geoffrey Howe, PCNP to Chief Secretary, Lusaka, 29 January 1944, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs, Banyama; Hugh Macmillan, personal communication, 21 August 1991.
37 J. Moffatt Thomas, SNA, 18 August 1932, Tour Reports Fort Roseberry June–July 1932, NAZ/SEC2/888.
38 Diaire de Chifobwe-Ipusukilo, 9 August 1932.
39 Diaire de Chilubula, 27 December 1931.
40 Ibid., 22 February 1936.
41 Ibid., 27 July 1937, 15 May 1939.
42 Diaire de Kapatu, 31 March 1933.
43 Diaire de Ilondola, 27 April 1948.
44 Diaire de Chifobwe-Ipusukilo, 15–19 April 1931.
45 Diaire de Chilubula, 23 February 1927; 14 July 1927; 22 July 1927; 1 May 1928; 16 November 1933; Richards, , Land, Labour, 145Google Scholar. Richards' footnote clarifies the use of the term: “Ukupula is loosely applied to all forms of scrounging, but technically speaking means labour in return for food only” (p. 145n). It had become very common in the early 1930s as one of the survival strategies available to “deserted wives … during the bad times of the year” but in general “only an absolutely destitute person or an imbecile would reckon to subsist in this way as a regular thing” (p. 145). White Fathers accepted this translation, at least on principle: Kapula was defined as a person who earns a living helping others (Fathers, White, The White Fathers' Bemba-English Dictionary [Capetown: Longmans, Green and Company, 1954], 246Google Scholar).
46 Garvey, , “The White Fathers' Mission,” 155, 157–8Google Scholar. This comparison might have been lost on Africans themselves, since in 1934 there were not many jobs of the Copperbelt. See Moore, and Vaughan, , “Cutting Down Trees,” 528–9Google Scholar, and Ferguson, , “Mobile Workers,” 397–405Google Scholar.
47 Diaire de Mulilansolo, 21 June 1940.
48 Ibid., 24 December 1943.
49 Diarie de St. Mary's, Fort Jameson, 7 March 1938.
50 Ibid., Fort Jameson, 2 January 1940.
51 Rapports Annuels 1948–49, 39, pp. 212–3Google Scholar.
52 Diaire de St. Mary's, Fort Jameson, 25 February 1958; 28 April 1958.
53 White, Hayden, “Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 86–87Google Scholar, and his “Inter-pretation in History,” especially 51–58; see also Lienhardt, Peter, “The Interpretation of Rumour,” in Beattie, J. H. and Lienhardt, R. G., Studies in Social Anthropology: Essays in Memory of E. E. Evans-Pritchard by his Former Oxford Colleagues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 105–31Google Scholar.
54 I take these points from two works by Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” History Workshop 9 (1980), 5–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Ecstacies: Deciphering the Witches Sabbath (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 1–30Google Scholar.
55 Diaire de Kapatu (Saint-Leon de Kaliminwa), 29 March 1929.
56 Thomas Fox-Pitt Papers, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, PP.MS. 6/5, Correspondence 1952–53.
57 Brelsford, , “The Banyama Myth,” 49Google Scholar; D. Willis, PC Kasama District, 24 March 1931, NAZ/ZA1/9/62/2/1; Musambachime, , “The Impact of Rumor,” 205–207Google Scholar; van Binsbergen, Wim M. J., Religious Change in Zambia (London: Kegan Paul, 1981) 349nGoogle Scholar.
58 Gervas Clay, DC Isoka, Memorandum concerning “banyama” and “mafyeka,” 24 January 1944; R. S. Jeffries to SNA, 24 April 1944; LegCo Debates, Hansard 31 August 1945, cols. 221–22, 248–49, 254–55, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama. This was based on genuine customs of human sacrifice—to honor departed royalty, not to feed commoners—and a 1920s Bemba bogeyman, Ne Koroma, and some well-placed anti-royalist feeling among educated Bemba (see Rapports Annuels 24, 1924–1925, pp. 293–94Google Scholar; Stephen Bwalya, Customs and Habits of the Bemba, typescript, Mpika, 1936, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH Mss. Afr. s. 1214; and Clay's memorandum).
59 Bynum, Caroline Walker, “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century,” Women's Studies, 11 (1984), 179–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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62 There is a literature that suggests that “the person of Jesus Christ” is difficult for Africans to incorporate in their belief systems, partly because of his association with a colonial past and partly because his power is both divine and ancestral (see Schoffeleers, Mathew, “Folk Christology in Africa: The Dialectics of the Nganga Paradigm,” Journal of Religion in Africa, 19:2 [1988], 157–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
63 Where transubstantiation was taken seriously, blood accusations frequently involved the host. European accusations of Jewish ritual murder often included the theft of the host which, once outside a church, turned into a bleeding baby Jesus (see Po-chia Hsia, R., The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988], 10–12, 50–51, 54–56, 128, 131, 222Google Scholar). Other accusations of ritual murder in Christian times conflated blood and bread: Early Christians in Rome were accused of hiding in dough the infants they were about to eat and, a thousand years later, it was said that Jews needed the blood of Christian children to make matzoh (see Ellis, Bill, “De Legendis Urbis: Modern Legends in Ancient Rome,” Journal of American Folklore, 96:380 (1983), 200–08CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Dundes, Alan, “The Ritual Murder or Blood Libel Legend: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization Through Projective Inversion,” in Dundes, Alan, ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991], 337Google Scholar).
64 Note pour Monsieur Toussaint, Department MOI, Elisabethville, 15 Fevrier 1943, Archives du personnell, Gecamines, Lubumbashi, Zaire (loaned to me by T. K. Biaya).
65 Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 31–112Google Scholar.
66 See Moore, and Vaughan, , “Cutting Down Trees,” 523–40Google Scholar.
67 Thomas Fox-Pitt, DC Mpika to PCNP Kasama, Re: Banyama Rumors, 6 March 1939, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama.
68 For diverse examples, see Bynum, Caroline Walker, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” Renaissance Quarterly, 39:3 (1986), 399–439CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Farmer, Paul, “Bad Blood, Spoiled Milk: Bodily Fluids as Moral Barometers in Rural Haiti,” American Ethnologist, 15:1 (1988), 62–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bledsoe, Caroline H., “Side-Stepping the Postpartum Sex Taboo: Mende Cultural Perceptions of Tinned Milk in Sierra Leone,” in de Walle, Etienne van, ed., The Cultural Roots of African Fertility Regimes (Berkeley: University of California Press, in press)Google Scholar.
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70 Richards, , Land, Labour, 449Google Scholar. Indeed, children could not suckle from women who had not gone through initiation (Audrey Richards Diaries, 6 March 1931, Audrey Richards Papers, London School of Economics Library, London).
71 Geoffrey Howe, PCNP Kasama to Chief Secretary, Lusaka, 29 January 1944; Cantrel-Robinson, Chief Secretary, LegCo Debates 31 August 1945, Hansard cols. 221–22, NAZ/SEC2/429 Native Affairs: Banyama; Gervas Clay, Taunton, Somerset, England, 26 August 1991.
72 Epstein, Arnold Leonard, “Unconscious Factors in the Response to Social Crisis: A Case Study from Central Africa,” Psychoanalytic Study of Society, 8 (1979), 3–39Google Scholar; see also Gintzburger, Alphonse, “Accommodation to Poverty: The Case of Malagasy Peasant Communities,” Cahiers d’etudes africaines, 92:23–4 (1983), 419–42Google Scholar . Locating active, “irrational” beliefs in hunger or tainted food supplies is not unique to African studies, however. See Lefebvre, Georges, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France, White, Joan, trans. (New York: Schocken, 1973)Google Scholar and Matossian, Mary Kilbourne, Poisons of the Past: Molds, Epidemics, and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
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79 Hinfelaar, , “Religious Change,” 8Google Scholar.
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83 In much of British colonial Africa, including Northern Rhodesia, Africans were forbidden to consume European-type bottled beers and wine (Ambler, Charles, “Alcohol, Racial Segregation and Popular Politics in Northern Rhodesia,” Journal of African History, 31:2 [1990], 295–313)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
84 Feeley-Harnik, , The Lord's Table, 155–56Google Scholar.
85 Richards, , Land, Labour, 77–81Google Scholar; Ambler, , “Alcohol, Racial Segregation,” 295–305Google Scholar.
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87 E. E. Hutchins, DO Morogoro, Report on “Mumiani” or “Chinjachinja,” TNA, Film No. MF 15, Morogoro District, V. I. Part A, Sheets 25–26, August 1931 but inserted into file marked 1938. Hutchins believed that one reason the rumor spread through Morogoro was European surveyors drinking red wine in bottles. I am grateful to Thaddeus Sunseri for taking notes on this file for me.
88 Trant, Hope, Not Merrion Square: Anecdotes of a Woman's Medical Career in Africa (Toronto: Thomhill Press, 1970), 127–44Google Scholar. I am grateful to Megan Vaughan for this reference.
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90 NAZ/SEC2/1297, Northern Province Annual Report, Native Affairs, 1937.
91 Ipenburg, , Lubwa, 5–7Google Scholar; Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 114–23, 163–74, 179–85Google Scholar.
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96 Ibid., 218–20.
97 Diaire de Kayambi, 23 January 1927.
98 Harris, Olivia, “The Earth and the State: The Sources and the Meanings of Money in North Potosi, Bolivia,” in Parry, J. and Bloch, M., Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 233–34Google Scholar.
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101 J. W. Sharratt-Horne, DC, tour report 6/1932, NAZ/SEC2/767, Isoka Tour Reports 1932–33. White ants do eat paper money (see Hutchinson, Sharon, “The Cattle of Money and the Cattle of Girls among the Nuer, 1930–83,” American Ethnologist, 19:2 (1992), 294–316CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
102 Diaire de Chilubula, 10 February 1932; 14 February 1932; 24 February 1932.
103 Musambachime, , “The Impact of Rumor,” 204Google Scholar; Annual Report on Native Affairs, Chinsali, 1935, NAZ/SEC2/1298, Annual Report on Native Affairs, Chinsali 1935–37.
104 Gudeman, Stephen, Economics as Culture (London: Routledge, 1986), 100–01Google Scholar.
105 I have taken the chronology of banyama scares from Gervas Clay, DC Isoka, Memorandum concerning “banyama” and “mafyeka” with special reference to the Provincial Commissioner, Kasama's Confidential File on Banyama and to incidents in the Isoka District during the latter part of 1943, 24 January 1944, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama.
106 Most of the Europeans accused of being banyama are not in the written record. The most notorious one was Arthur Davison, a labor recruiter based at Ndola. Musambachime, , “The Impact of Rumor,” 206Google Scholar; S. R.Denny, “Up and Down the Great North Road,” (typescript, 1970, Rhodes House, Oxford: RH MSS Afr r. 113).
107 Ramsay, Clay, The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in 1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 138–55Google Scholar, and White, , ℌCars Out of Place,” 84–107Google Scholar.
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110 Diaire de Chilubula, 10 February 1932, 24 June 1932.
111 Bishop of Northern Rhodesia, member for Native Interests, LegCo Debates, 31 August 1945, Hansard, cols. 221–22, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama.
112 G. Howe, PC, Northern Province, to Chief Secretary, Lusaka, 29 January 1944; A. T. Williams, for PCNP, Kasama, to Registrar of High Court, Livingstone, confidential, 30 April 1944, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama.
113 S. R. Denny, “Up and Down the Great North Road,” (typescript, 1970, Rhodes House, Oxford, RH MSS. Afr. r. 113); Hobson, Dick, Showtime: The Agricultural and Commercial Society of Zambia (Lusaka: The Agricultural and Commercial Society of Zambia, 1979), 42Google Scholar; Richard Hobson, personal communication, 7 July 1991.
114 Geoffrey Mee, son of L. G. Mee, manager of Thorn Stores in Fort Roseberry from 1940–54 (Lusaka: 10 August 1991, interviewed by Hugh Macmillan).
115 Rat tails themselves were a medical metaphor, even in such unsophisticated hands as Glieman's: Anti-rat and anti-plague campaigns in East and Central Africa rewarded Africans who brought rat tails to their chiefs; in Central Africa most of the rathunting was done by young boys or, less commonly, women (see Vaughan, Megan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991], 40–43Google Scholar).
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120 District Officer, Abercorn, 16 June 1934, quoted in Fields, Revival and Rebellion, 87.
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