Luise White’s scholarship has dominated the field of African vampire beliefs. Speaking with Vampires is informed by 130 interviews that were conducted in Africa between the late 1970s and early 1990s, synthesising numerous research articles on vampire rumours across sub-Saharan Africa that the author published in the 1990s.[1] White examines the multiple functions of the mumiani (or “white vampire”) rumours that periodically re-emerged across sub-Saharan Africa in the post-First World War colonial era. These rumours centred on the belief that European men captured African men and women and drained them of their blood (often with the help of African agents), which they would then drink or use to make medicines. White vampire rumours caused suspicion, frenzy, and panic across sub-Saharan Africa, with vampire-related riots and violence occurring in Nairobi in 1924, Digo District in 1945, Mombasa and Korogwe in 1947, Tanga in 1949, and Buguruni in 1950 and 1959.[2] Examining the common tropes of these white vampire stories, White argues that they constituted a distinct colonial African vampire “genre”.
White uses oral evidence to recover the African voice that is omitted in the colonial archive, in which vampire scares were usually presented as evidence of African “”backwardness”.[3] These rumours play an essential role in revealing ordinary African attitudes toward various different colonial era developments, including: general anxieties about the European presence; advances in colonial medicine and technology; missionary activity and sleeping sickness control in Northern Rhodesia; royal politics in Uganda; the gender politics of property inheritance in Nairobi; and labour issues on the Copperbelt. Such tales constitute a form of indigenous knowledge typically regarded as irrational and therefore “useless”, yet they offer insight into the way that notions of “Otherness” were constructed in the Black subaltern imagination and, consequently, the ways in which “uneducated” Africans have marked the borders and boundaries of their own communities.
These white vampires formed a conspicuous category of enemy, one that was distinctly foreign. The vampires in these stories wore colonial uniforms, practiced modern medicine, drove Western vehicles, and used European technologies. In these stories, the white man was the “Other”, and he embodied what many Africans despised. As Peter Pels observes, the mumiani is a “personification of colonial evil”.[4] White’s study reminds us that gossip functions in local societies as a way of forming communal bonds, and that it is an intimate activity from which outsiders are excluded.[5] Rumour and gossip are valuable historical sources that reveal “the very stuff of history, the categories and constructs with which people make their worlds and articulate and debate their understandings of those worlds”.[6] For instance, the explicitly corporeal nature of the bloodsucking motif provides an insight into how the African non-elite experienced, perceived, and spoke about colonial and racial domination in terms of the physical subjugation of their own bodies.
Speaking with Vampires transcends traditional spatial orthodoxies of historical analysis, with vampire rumours becoming a lens through which to explore the shared transnational experience of colonised African subjects across a vast geographical region. The rumours emerged with remarkably similar forms across the borders of different European colonies; after all, vampirism was a dynamic and polysemous idiom that was continually being adapted by Africans in response to the emergence of new, and often oppressive, social realities. The image of the white vampire was repeatedly remodelled across time and space in accordance with changing power dynamics and new socio-political circumstances.
Inevitably, White’s broad geographical scope obscures some regional nuances. This is true, for example, in the case of East Africa. In Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, colonial-era white vampire rumours only constitute one single phase in a longer history of bloodsucking anxieties in the region. White suggests that vampire rumours stem from witchcraft rumours, yet she does not recognise that vampire fears might be explicitly rooted in bloodsucking anxieties that already existed in East African discourses on witchcraft, such as the blood-sucking vizulu charm practiced in northeastern Tanzania.[7] Speaking with Vampires also fails to account for the fact that the vampires in these stories were not always European. White’s focus on what she calls a “white vampire genre” leads to an erasure of the earliest surviving examples of these rumours – in which the vampire-men are not Europeans, but Arabs, Indians, and Abyssinians.[8] Moreover, due to her focus on the African continent, she pays limited attention to the Indian Ocean origins of mumiani rumours and the fact that they also emerged in colonial India around the mid-nineteenth century.[9]
My final criticism relates to White’s strict “colonial” framework. After all, as Frederick Cooper has argued, it is necessary to move away from the historiographical convention of dividing the colonial and postcolonial eras into separate temporal phenomena.[10] In this context, White might have explored how, during the late-colonial and early-postcolonial era, the vampire motif was reinvented in East Africa according to a perceived new social and economic threat: the South Asian minority. There is certainly more to be said about how rumours about foreign vampires influenced the emergence of the popular Asian “bloodsucker” stereotype in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda in the 1960s-1970s, especially in the lead up to Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972.[11]
Nevertheless, White’s research largely remains sensitive to regional specificities and local variations, with each individual chapter taking a narrower scope. Each of these chapters provides interesting details about what these rumours can show us in relation to different areas of social history, such as gender relations, property inheritance, African interpretations of Christianity, labour relations, attitudes towards medicine, conceptions of blood and the body, and politics. Consistently drawing connections between the different renditions of the white vampire genre as they emerged across the continent, nevertheless, White never loses sight of the larger picture. Speaking with Vampires, therefore, is a foundational text in the historiography on African bloodsucking beliefs and a highly recommended text for scholars working on rumour and gossip.
[1] Luise White, “Bodily Fluids and Usufruct: Controlling Property in Nairobi, 1919-1939,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 24.3 (1990), 418-438; Luise White, “Cars Out of Place: Vampires, Technology and Labor in East and Central Africa,” Representations 43 (1993), 27-50; Luise White, “Vampire Priests of Central Africa: African Debates about Labor and Religion in Colonial Northern Zambia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35.4 (1994), 744-770; Luise White, “‘Firemen Do Not Buy People:’ Media, Villains and Vampires in Kampala in the 1950s,” Passages 8 (1994), 11, 16-17; Luise White, “‘They Could Make Their Victims Dull’: Genders and Genres, Fantasies and Cures in Southern Uganda,” American Historical Review 100.5 (1995), 1379-1402; Luise White, “Tsetse Visions: Narratives of Blood and Bugs in Colonial Northern Zambia,” Journal of African History 36.2 (1995), 219-245.
[2] Charles Muhoro Kareri, The Life of Charles Muhoro Kareri, ed. Derek R. Peterson, trans. Joseph Kariũki Mũrĩithi (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 2003), 41; Zebulon Dingley, “Rumour and History Revisited: ‘Mumiani’ in Coastal Kenya, 1945,” The Journal of African History 59.3 (2018), 382; K
enya Colony Protectorate Native Affairs Annual Report 1947 [British Online Archives; hereafter BOA]; Universities’ Mission, Central Africa: A Record of the Work of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa, Volume LXVI, 1948, 147-148 [BOA]; Darrel Bates, The Mango and the Palm (London: Rupert-Hart Davis, 1962), 47-55; Andrew Burton, The African Underclass (Malaysia: Ohio University Press, 2005), 182.
[3] For example, see Christopher Harwich, Red Dust: Memories of the Uganda Police, 1935-1955 (London: V. Stuart, 1961), 13-14.
[4] Peter Pels, “The White Vampire. A Neo-Diffusionist Analysis of Rumour,” Etnofoor 5.3 (1992), 170.
[5] Max Gluckman, “Gossip and Scandal,” Current Anthropology 4.3 (1963), 307-316.
[6] Luise White, Speaking with Vampires (London: University of California Press, 2000), 55.
[7] The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. XXV (London: Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co, 1896), 223; R. Webb, “A Witch-Doctor’s Kit, from Magila, East Central Africa.” Folklore 15.1 (1904), 70; Universities’ Mission, Central Africa: A Record of the Work of the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa. Volume XXII, 1904, 250-252, and Volume LIII, 1935, 158 [BOA].
[8] Pels, “The White Vampire,” 167; E.C. Baker, “Mumiani”, Man 30.1 (1930), 73.
[9] Dingley, “Rumour and History Revisited,” 384-386; Rājā Śivaprasāda, A History of Hindustan: being an English version of Rājā Śivaprasāda’s [Itihās timir nāśak] part III, trans. Bhāvanīdat Joshī (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1874), 26; Alexander Cunningham, Lādak (London: W.H. Allen and co, 1854), 237; George Grierson, Bihar Peasant Life (Bihar and Orissa: Government Printing, 1926), 411.
[10] Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2-4.
[11] This was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation, titled “Bloodsuckers in the East African Imagination: Rumour and ‘Othering’ in Twentieth Century Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda”, and is touched upon in James Brennan, “Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania, 1958-75,” Journal of African History 47.3 (2006), 389-413.
Cover image: Tanzanian bloodsucking cartoon printed in the wake of the Arusha Declaration. Ngurumo, February 7, 1967. Reproduced in James Brennan, “Blood Enemies: Exploitation and Urban Citizenship in the Nationalist Political Thought of Tanzania, 1958-75,” Journal of African History 47, no.3 (2006), 399.
Carissa Chew 