On Unpacking the Occult:
Why We Need to Go Back to Friuli (or Transylvania. for
that matter)
Luise White
University of Florida
I don’t belong at this conference.
Except for a few years’ when I read science fiction when I was a
teenager, I’ve never been interested in the occult. The vampire book grew out of my interest in storytelling and
evidence and how they could be used by people doing oral history: I just
happened to use vampire stories as my lens those issues. I was never as interested as what vampires
meant as I was interested in what talking about vampires meant, and why stories
and accusations about who was a vampire might be a big deal at one time and not
another--why, in short, an accusation of a European drinking blood might be met
with quiet resentment for months and months and then, well, in the words of one
district officer in Uganda, “it’s more than your life is worth to stop your car
for a pee.” In other words I was interested
in some very traditional historical questions, but I happened to interrogate
these questions with stories about Africans, working for white men, who
captured Africans and took their blood.[1]
For people who are interested in the
occult, however, this is such an exciting time to work in Africa. This is a time to see these local idioms
emerge and insert themselves in larger global circuits and concerns, that
there’s a certain analytical power in lumping cannibals, men who sell eyeballs,
witches, and baboons with shopping bags together:[2] the appearance of such beings, and local attempts to
do away with them, throws into high relief the kind of crisis we have often
been encouraged to write around. This
is a real academic moment here where historians and anthropologists and
political scientists are starting to take seriously all these issues and
concerns and concepts that had been relegated to the bad old days–not just the
bad old days of Africa, but of Africanist scholarship. For many of us, taught that we have to be very careful about the
vision of Africa we put forward to our colleagues and our students, taught that
a large part of our job was to demolish stereotypes, our newfound authority to
describe what’s happening on the ground is has been more than exciting, it’s
given us a renewed commitment to scholarship and analysis. But I want to be that obnoxious academic
who cautions us not to carried with away with out moment, to remind us that the
more subtle and specific we can be about Africans’ concepts of evil and the
invisible world, the more complicated our vision of Africa. If we label heart thieves and
witches
and vampires as belonging to this specialized realm we may reproduced African
modes of thought but I suspect we have also leveled any number of subtle and
crucial distinctions between the heart thieves and witches and vampires. But this leveling is I think unintentional:
it does not come out of our own intellectual agendas as much as out of the
genealogies of categories and concepts we bring to thinking about popular
beliefs. So even though I’m here under
false pretenses, I want to lecture everyone, and suggest that we try to
disaggregate the ogres and the witches and the vampires and all the different
kinds of cannibals we might meet–they might well all be supernatural to us but
the use of that term should alert us to how ill-equipped we are to interrogate
it. Supernatural is the category for
the things our informants can’t naturalize, I’m not at all sure it means a
realm where all these things belong.
Besides, some of those supernatural, occult beings are natural. Some are just men doing their jobs, and
others are part of the natural world Africans live in day in and day out and
still others are considered evil by behaviors that were not considered evil
fifty years earlier.
But the question isn’t simply can we
separate cannibals from witches, vampires from people who turn into animals but
what kind of material allows us to do this fine tuning, and locate the men
selling eyeballs and the witches in the categories and constructs to which they
belong. I think the easiest way to do
this is to look at the difficulties literate, sometimes dominant, culture have
had translating and recoding local beliefs into idioms they understood. In the decades it took inquisitors to make
witches out of peasant beliefs, and in the administrative failure to make
vampires human sacrifice by kings we see something about the specificity of
belief, when it emerges, who clings to its meaning for how long and perhaps
why, and the kinds of connections recodings make and the kinds of connections
ordinary people make. It also allows us
to glimpse how these same ordinary people recode and translate their own
beliefs.
Needless to say, I will use some of
my own material here, but first I want to look at the literature on witchcraft
in Europe for two reasons. First, it was influenced by African anthropology far
more than African historians were, and second, most of the historiography is
about how local idioms got misappropriated by more literate and more powerful
regional interlocutors. Whether
scholars did this on a broad, pan-European level or at the level of the town,
this was the concern, so we have almost seventy-five years of scholarship that
is precisely about struggles over who defines what people who believe in
witches believe. Many Europeanists, for
example, noted how similar witches' confessions were. If there was no such thing as a devil and if witchhunting was a
crazed moment in European history, why were the details of witchcraft--the sabbath, the spells, the
familiars--so similar over a wide geographical range? Margaret Murray and in a much more subtle way Carlo Ginzburg took
this in one direction and argued that witches' testimony revealed another world
altogether: not that of witchcraft but
of an older religion of female and agricultural fertility, of shamans and
trances. In between Murray and Ginzburg
Norman Cohn wrote an extremely influential account of European witch hunting in
which he argued that the sabbaths, the trances and familiars were the
imaginings of the inquisitors, who then used torture to get the answers they
wanted. All these analyses are framed
around either/or terms, however: the narrative
of witchcraft in all its rich details either belongs to the common folk or to
the inquisitors. But all these analyses
are involved in determing the broader meanings of witch beliefs, not what they
mean, and how they are deployed, on the farm, in the valley, or in the
marketplace.
These analyses also simply assumed
that there was no shared vocabulary with which peasant women and clergymen
negotiated a description of the world, no genre of talking that both parties
might use to different ends. And
indeed, in some inquisitions, there were no shared vocabularies, no way that
inquisitors could obtain confessions for the crimes they were
investigating. Po-chia Hsia's studies
of the blood libel, for example, noted
that the obsessions and fears of ordinary Christian folk were translated to
clergymen with great speed and clarity; accusations of Jewish ritual murder
began with parents telling judges that their missing children had been
slaughtered by Jews. But even under
torture, in trials that were conducted in two or three languages, Jews who only
vaguely knew the stories Christians told about them could not always produce a
description of Jewish ritual murder that satisfied their inquisitors. In late fifteenth century Germany tortured
Jews tried in painful confusion to explain why that Jews needed Christian
blood--to cure epilepsy or for its healing power. To this the judges answered
"Then why is your son an epileptic?" and "we would not be
satisfied."[3] Elsewhere,
inquisitors and peasants had to learn each others’ terminologies in order to
talk about local beliefs. When
inquisitors in Friuli first heard people confess willingly that their spirits
went out at night to guard crops from witches, they did not know what to call these benandanti. Were they witches or counter witches? Inquisitors had to coin a new phrase,
benadanti witch, to begin evaluate the information they heard. It took seventy years for benadanti to mean witch for both peasants
and inquisitors, and even then both parties were uneasy about what kind of
witch it meant.[4]
I want to suggest that we’re in a
bit of a Friulian situation now. I do
not mean any of the sillier things that have been written about this, including
those by Ginzburg, that argues that the Holy See was engaged in an ethnographic
recoding of peasant belief or that anthropologists are just like
inquisitors. I think we’re in a
Friulian situation now because we are suddenly confronted with a wide variety
of beings that traffic with the invisible world, and we have very limited
vocabularies and categories with which to study them. So I want to make a plea that we pay concerted attention to the
varieties of vocabularies and the multiplicity of insinuated meanings in which
people talk about witches and cannibals.
It is precisely these difficulties of translation--the years when
benadanti didn't mean witch, the ignorance of Bavarian Jews of what their
accusers said about them, all the men who could be called wazimamoto in
Nairobi--that describe the world as the people we study see it, with all the
variations that inequalities of power and knowledge bring to such
descriptions. The power relations in an
interview done in rural Africa, or a judge's chamber in Friuli, may not shape
the content of testimony; there may be no simple one-to-one relationship
between a question asked and the answer received, let alone between the
relative authorities of interrogator and speaker. Besides, however much coding and recoding the interlocutor does,
the terminology remains that of the informant, and those vocabularies dominate
the resulting texts. My point is that
talk about benandanti could only be conducted by using the term. The deep cultural layers constituting the
term could be maintained by the speakers even while it eluded the judges; the
judges could only access the layers of historical and cultural meaning by using
the term. The array of meanings of
benandante--or mumiani, or banyama--could not be fully stifled; judges and officials could never really recode
local beliefs.
But once we give up, or mess with,
local terms, do we have the same specificity of meaning, do we have the same
cultural layers of contest and contradiction, do we have the same context that
local people do? I want to suggest that
when local terms get recoded by political processes, from the top down, not
only do distinctions between witches and cannibals and heart thieves get messy,
but agency and the allocation of responsibility are deformed. My evidence for this is flimsy, however, and
involves re-reading Chanock on the ordeal in Central Africa. If in the early nineteenth century ordeal
had been used primarily to ascertain who had caused a death and by which means,
by the end of the century it was widely used by the conquest states of Ngoni,
Lozi and to a lesser extent Yao communities as a way to consolidate their
power. Ordeals still detected witches,
but also the perpetrators of any number of trivial disputes, and anyone who
threatened royal authority. For the
subjects of these states, the poison ordeal became a way to establish their
innocence, not the guilt of a witch.
And as the ordeal became a mechanism for establishing innocence, rather
than responsibility, it also became a proxy institution: one’s slave could take
the poison, and if the slave died the owner was guilty of wrong-doing and
fined.[5] My point is
oversimplified, but it’s that once witches were subsumed into categories of
ordinary criminal behavior, witchcraft lost some of its specificity, but also
protections against witchcraft were weakened.
According to Chanock, inequalities and economic stratification became a
new basis for witchcraft accusations.
And indeed, a few decades later Monica Wilson notes that Nyakusa who ate
“fine food” alone without offering to share it were considered witches,
probably for the first time.[6] This particular of
witchcraft was not true throughout the region, however. Audrey
Richards, which began a year earlier,
noted that people who ate alone and did not share food were evidence of the new
values that money brought to Bemba society.
These two insights, from a five year period and not five hundred miles
apart should remind us that Africans have been actively involved in redefining
the meaning of evil and witchcraft for generations, and the subtle chronologies
we need to access those redefinitions.
When new definitions and meanings
for occult forms were disclosed and forced into official usage it seems to have
been another matter, it revealed the precise chronology in which new monsters
and changing price lists for body parts and vital organs emerged. Let me return to European material for a
moment: in a very important essay, Gabor Klaniczay locates in the emergence of
"vampire scandals" in the Austro-Hungarian Empire starting in the
17th century--"the first media event" according to Paul Barber[7]--in the decline in prosecutions for witchcraft
there. The many meanings of witch
could not survive the newly scientized appeal courts of Maria Theresa's reign,
and the very facts by which vampires were separated from ordinary witches meant
that vampires could never be fully investigated, they could only be condemned
as superstition and refuted. Vampires
straddled the realms of nocturnal bloodsucking beings and biological knowledge
in which blood was an object of investigation in and of itself. The new vampire that emerged in the Balkans
was categorically different from the bloodsucking entities that had gone before. It was dead, and in rising from the dead was
a dreadful parody of Christ. Vampires
were a very special kind of corpse, they never decayed; they rose from the
grave only to have carnal relations or take blood. The blood they took was not a generalized bodily fluid that might
be blood, milk or semen, however: it
was a specific red fluid that vampires took from the veins in which it
circulated in the bodies of the living.
Vampires were very much a product of modern theories of the body. Prosecution for vampires raised far more
problems that it would have solved;
they remained outside official
sanction and in a relatively short time became a literary idiom, mixed
with--then as now--spectacular fantasies of sexuality and death.[8] However novel
18th century Balkan vampires were, they could easily be bundled to older ideas
about race and blood, so that Balkan vampires and Jewish ritual murder could
sometimes be combined. Vampires
troubled the tenets of scientific humanism:
a belief in vampires insisted that difference did matter, so that the specificity of vampires could be
associated with the specificity of Jews.[9] These associations
did not make vampires any more, or less real, but it made them both a metaphor
and a belief at the same time. The
accusation in 1880s London that Jack the Ripper was a Jew in search of
Christian blood must be read alongside newspaper editorials from the same year
that referred to Jewish immigrant merchants in London as vampires.[10]
I do not want to force Klaniczay's
subtle analysis onto east and central Africa, nor do I wish to imply that
vampires rise up whenever witches go uncriminalized, but rather that without
the public spectacle of ordeals--like trials--the many things witches mean are
not formally debated and contested.
African vampires came to be talked about differently, in different
contexts: they were a synthetic image,
a new idiom for new times, constructed in part from ideas about witchcraft and
part from ideas about colonialism.
These vampires might move about at night, but they did not go
naked: they wore identifiable uniforms
and used the equipment of western medicine.
Witches and vampires were different because each one was conducted in
specific contexts; they shared culture and history but animated culture and
history differently. Vampires were a
discursive contradiction--firmly embedded in local beliefs and constructions
but named in such a way that their outsiderness was foregrounded. Unlike witches, vampires were not deeply
grounded in local society; they did not fly or travel on familiars, but had
mechanized mobility. Bloodsucking
firemen had none of the personal malice of witches; it was a job. As such it did not imperil people in tense
relationships, it imperiled everyone.
Firemen and their agents were not evil but in need of money. "Wazimamoto employed prostitutes...they
did this for the money, they needed the money, and they could do this kind of
work.”[11] "If
somebody asked you to look for a drum or a liter of blood for Shs. 50,000,
would you not do that?"[12] "It was
not an open job for anybody, you had to be a friend of somebody in the
government, and it was top secret, and it was not easy to recruit
anybody...although it was well paid."[13] Vampires were
outside the social context that witches continued to inhabit in east and
central Africa; they were seen to be internationalized , professionalized,
supervised, and commodifying.
Still, why did Africans, or anyone else, articulate tensions and
conflicts with stories of bloodsucking beings?
Vampires, Klaniczay argues, straddle the connections between medicine
and violence, between the supernatural and new scientific rationalities that
were becoming naturalized. They were a
way of talking about the world that both parodied the new technologies and
showed the true intent behind their use.
The very novelty of blood and the very detailed ways Africans said it
was extracted provide a powerful way to talk about ideas and relationships that
begged description.[i] It is not that there were no other ways for
Africans, or Transylvanians, to talk about wealthy men or new machines or the
meaning of medical testing, but that these things were so important that they
were talked about with new, specific vocabularies.
What Transylvania gives us, I think,
is a way to look at the coexistence of witches and vampires and the sequence
with which they emerge. I’m not trying
to make a rule here, to say that whenever this happens to witches vampires will
appear. Instead, I’m asking for a
specific kind of reading of occult phenomena that locates each one not in the
supernatural world but the material one, the world of beliefs not only in blood
sucking beings, but belief in bloodsucking needles and tubes, belief in the
circulation of blood and the diminishing power of blood as a sexual fluid.
But what about when officials and
experts mess with local terms, and try to recode them into other meanings? My data suggests this does not always
work. In wartime colonial Northern
Rhodesia, when European officials were thin on the ground, African clerks,
settlers, and colonial officials sought to recode the local term for
bloodsucker, banyama, into traditional African human sacrifice that they
claimed had gone on for centuries.
"The old word used before the advent of the Europeans," mafyeka,
which had appeared only once in official writings on banyama,[14] became the subject of memos in northern province for
almost two years. A man was attacked
on a path in Isoka District in 1943.
When the man's assailants claimed they only after a reward from banyama,
the district commissioner, Gervas Clay, turned to Robert, the African district
clerk, for clarification. Roberts told
him that in addition to banyama there was mafyeka, people who sacrificed
Africans at Christmas in a chief's village.
The victims' blood was sprinkled on a drum used in rain-making
ceremonies.[15] Africans
believed that Europeans approved of this custom, Robert said. Clay sent for the relevant files and
studied the fragments about banyama he found, recoding them with his new insider knowledge: "I would suggest the possibility that the activities of the
Mafyeka...may not be dead and the whole banyama story may be an invention of
those who wish to keep mafyeka activities alive." Most banyama incidents took place in the
rainy season; those that did not were due to "the natural delay" in
reports of such disappearances.[16] Although Clay
and his wife had filmed the rain dance the year before and found it
"completely harmless and rather dull" two African policemen were sent
to observe the ceremony in 1943. They
found much that was ominous: "the
noise of the drum is different from an ordinary drum, and seems to be made by
rubbing rather than beating" and dancers wore red and looked very serious. Clay recommended that the assailants be
convicted of attempted murder, to allay African suspicions of European
collusion.[17]
A few months later an retired
official wrote an unsolicited letter to the boma in Northern Province,
explaining that a chance meeting had alerted him to officials need for
clarification regarding human sacrifice.
Recalling that he "really knew these people" and "their
dialect" when he lived in Isoka twenty years ago, he noted that
kidnapping, killing by strangulation, in the early rains of November was
"the observance of customary propitiary rites for the securing of an
abundant harvest." He never
used the term mafykea, but assured officials that the custom still went on, but
with great secrecy.[18] Ten days
later the Provincial Commissioner issued a memo to all DCs in which he transformed
banyama into ritual murder and a harvest ritual: the word mafyeka had disappeared altogether and banyama had
become "the socalled banyama movement" that attempted "to obtain
people for human sacrifice in connection with rain making ceremonies or to ensure
good crops." A retired African
clerk "of the highest integrity" had described the commonplace
methods of sacrifice.[19] Meanwhile the
settler's letter was typed (with several carbon copies) and filed, and during
the next few years copies were sent around to various officials,
anthropologists at the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, requesting figures on the
frequency of ritual murder in the colony.[20] But mafyeka
and the recoding of banyama was short-lived; outside of these memos the term
was never used. Indeed, even as
officials proclaimed the new meaning of banyama they forbade a London
parasitologist from collecting stool, blood and skin samples alone for fear he
would be accused of being banyama. By
1945, the word mafyeka was gone and only the Acting Chief Secretary,
Cartmel-Robinson, himself accused of being banyama during a smallpox
vaccination campaign in Isoka in 1933, defined banyama as human sacrifice. No one else did, however. Earlier in the year the PC of Northern
Province assured two settlers that banyama was an African superstition of no
historical validity and they should advise their laborers accordingly.[21]
Despite authoritative experts, Bemba
anti-royalists, despite official research and investigation, banyama remained
banyama: Africans employed by whites to take Africans’ blood. Turning it into human sacrifice never
mattered to anyone except a few bureacurcrats.
The recoding became a debate between experts. By 1944, mafyeka had all but disappeared as a term, and officials
had to reassure settlers that the phenomena that did not exist was
banyama.
Twenty years later, banyama accusations
were widespread in Northern Rhodesia.
The proposed Central African Federation was opposed by African political
organizations there, particularly the African National Congress, led by Harry
Nkumbula. It was also opposed with
popular distrust that was probably not manipulated by the ANC. If Africans in Northern Rhodesia actually
supported Federation it was generally
through membership in the liberal, multi-racial, elite Capricorn African
Society. Originally founded in Southern
Rhodesia by the founder of the British Special Air Services, it was an
association in which white liberals tried to recruit educated Africans into it.
[22] Although it
never had serious status as a political party either for whites or Africans, it
did actively support Federation.
Africans in the Capricorn Society, or Africans suspected of such
membership, were accused of being banyama and police informers as early as
1950.
As early as 1950, Africans in the
Capricorn Society–or those suspected of being members–were accused of being
banyama, and of drugging Africans into supporting Federation. This was in part fuelled by the play of
rumors of drugged food and commodities between the Copperbelt and Lusaka, and
in part by the tactics of the non-elite segment of the Capricorn Society
members. European liberals opposed to
Federation accused them of terrorizing women and children in the capital with
"drunkenness and hooliganism."[23] By late 1952,
fears were such that an ANC meeting in Lusaka passed a resolution condemning
the government for "failing to deal with the Vampire men threatening the
peace and order...of the country."
Two months later, Harry Nkumbula wrote to the members of Northern
Rhodesia's Legislative Council who represented African interests "with
regard to the vampiremen incidents it is high time that Government took
action..."[24]
Also in 1952 radio announcers were accused of being
banyama. According to the Director of
Central African Broadcast Service, the reasoning behind these new accusations
was logical: "How could the
announcers broadcast 'bad news,' news which displeased Africans, unless they
had lost their will-power? How else
could they be made to read pro-Federation propaganda on the air?"[25] These
accusations have their own histories: one broadcaster was so frightened of
being poisoned that he cycled miles to his home village once a week to buy
food; another, Edward Kateka, was accused of kidnapping a child and took refuge
in a police station; another, arguably the most influential of Central Africa's
influential guitarists, Alick Nkhata, wrote a song about banyama stories, which
was well-received as a dance tune but
made little impact on the rumors.[26] Did every
accuser believe these broadcasters were banyama? Did they think they actually sold Africans to whites, for their
bodies and their blood? Some did. An anonymous letter threatening Nkhata and
Kateka contained many of the details and hierarchy of Copperbelt banyama
stories, accessing a long history of accusations and rumors that involved
kidnaping, forced labor, drugs that made men lose their will, and Congo
cannibals who bought Africans so as to consume them: "You people Capricornists," it began, "you are
selling your people to Yengwe in Ndola."
Although Yengwe was Arthur Davison, a labor recruiter often accused of
being banyama who had died in 1951, the court interpreter explained to the
judge that he was a European who lived in Ndola who supposedly bought Africans
and sold them to the Congo to be eaten.
The letter claimed "...you wanted to kill Nkumbula you even
received revolvers from your Minister the General President of the
Capricornists...you are all civil servants...you are the people pretending to
become maneaters, kamupila..."
The colonial state's response to this letter was swift, but perhaps not
what Nkumbula had in mind: handwriting
samples were sent to police in Livingstone and South African; they had examined
200 handwriting samples before they found the accused, a twenty year old office
worker from Western Province. He
claimed he only wanted to warn the broadcasters.[27]
Typically, the banyama rumors on the Copperbelt involved very
specific ways to drug Africans and make them powerless over European political
agendas. An anti-Federation pamphlet
circulated through Northern Rhodesia in late 1952 reported that "on 28th
October the 'House of Laws' in London had decided to put poisoned sugar on sale
for Africans, commencing on February 8...1953." The poisoned sugar would cause stillbirths in women and would
make men impotent. "The sugar
would be recognized by the letters LPS on the packets."[28] Sugar
consumption dropped almost entirely on the Copperbelt, reported Hortense
Powdermaker, who had begun her fieldwork in the mining town of Luansyha a few
weeks’ before. The versions of the
poisoned sugar stories she heard did not mention the exact date when the
adulterated sugar would go on sale or that the poisoned packets could be identified
by a careful inspection of their labels.
Indeed, she did not think the poisoned sugar stories were a rumor at
all, but an example of how "the
rational fear of Federation moved into the realm of the supernatural..." Powdermaker assumed that these poisoned
sugar stories were an accusation of witchcraft, and the poisonings witches did.[29]
My point is not that Powdermaker was
wrong. I do however want to point out
that she drew a straight line between witchcraft and political rumors
circulating on the Copperbelt at a moment of intense political apprehension,
and that she drew that line with poisoning.
I don’t [30] want to trivialize Powdermaker’s insights, but she
does come close to suggesting that the belief that witches poison unsuspecting
people and the belief that whites in England poison unsuspecting people are the
same. She doesn’t look to banyama
stories–which her informants might have been wary of talking about with her or
her assistants–or broader idioms about drugs and poisons, labor, and colonial
plots; instead, she simply translates these complicated sugar rumors into the
supernatural as if any extraordinary
expression of fear and anticipation of harm was witchcraft.
Such
a recoding of local belief forfeits the rich history of banyama stories and
ideas about poisons and commodities and their place in the imaginary of central
African labor regimes.
At the same time, however,
Powdermaker implicitly suggests something we need to think very carefully
about: how do witch beliefs change? I
think we would do well to reverse her statement so that instead of suggesting
that “fear of Federation moved into the realm of the supernatural” we can ask
if the supernatural expands to describe new social and political
processes. Put this way, the Comaroffs’
collection of occult phenomena from South Africa in 1999 may be the place to
start: how do technologies and tasks that were once natural–animals doing the
things humans normally do, men selling body parts–become supernatural? And if witches and cannibals and baboons
with shopping bags are occult phenomena in 1999, did they all become occult by
the same processes and trajectories?
Did ancestors and spirits who now communicate on blank television
screens ever use radio to express their wishes?
If the occult isn’t a constant,
unchanging phenomena, how does it change, what does it take on and what does it
release? I think these are critical
research questions for the study of the supernatural. When new elites and new political agendas and affiliations move
from city to countryside and back again, which spirits and ancestors do they
bring with them?[31] When West
African chiefs need more hearts and body parts in the 1930s than in any
previous decade, does this suggest a crisis in the power of local authorities
or a crisis in the efficacy of body parts?[32] We need a
history of the spirit world. Both Edna
Bay and I have tried to look at how political dislocation–slavery and conquest
and war–have changed the world of the ancestors, and made one kind of spirit
more common than others.[33] We need to
look at how the last twenty years of warfare in many places have altered the
composition of the spirit world, and how notions of death and nature have
changed as a result.[34] Finally, we
need to look at the spirit world from the point of view of those bewitched and
possessed. Adam Ashforth’s Madumo[35] is exemplary in this regard, in part because it
raises questions about the various locations of witch beliefs in South African
society. No reasonable young townsmen
would allow a healer to make incisions on his face, for example. When the vanity of young townsmen determines
how healers can cure witchcraft, how is the actual witchcraft affected?
Again, I cannot say too forcefully that this is a very exciting time for Africanist research in Africa. But I think it can be even more exiciting and more rewarding if we link Friuli to Soweto as it has not yet been, and take the close chronology of occult beliefs that Europeanists–working with materials obtained through interrogation–and refract those careful chronologies through the experiences of those bewitched, those accused of witchcraft, and those who heal the afflicted.
[1] Luise White, Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Bekeley, University of California Press, 2000).
[2] Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, “Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the South African Postcolony,” American Ethnologist 26, 2 (1999), pp. 279-303.
[3] R. Po-chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988), passim., pp. 21-22; the answer the judges sought was that Jews needed Christian blood for circumcision. Under torture, Jews claimed to have only heard of ritual murder from Christians, R. Po-chia Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992), p. 37.
[4] Carlo Ginzburg, Nightbattles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi (New York, Penguin, 1983), passim. and "The Inquisitor as Anthropologist," Clues, Myths and the Historical Method, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 160.
[5] Martin Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Portsmouth, NH, Heinemann, 1998 [1983]), pp. 87-93.
[6] Quoted in Chanock, p. 101.
[7] Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1988), p. 5.
[8] Gabor Klaniczay, "The Decline of Witches and the Rise of Vampires under the Eighteenth Century Hapsburg Monarchies," The Uses of Supernatural Power: The Transformation of Popular Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, translated by Susan Singerman (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 168-88. Prosecution of witches in contemporary Africa, by contrast, strengthens ideas about witchcraft as the state and particularly the judiciary joins popular debates about witchcraft in all their ambiguity, see Geschiere, Modernity of Witchcraft, pp. 169-97.
[9] Glover, Vampires and Liberals, pp. 136-52.
[10] Judith R. Walkowtiz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992); Colin Holmes, "The Ritual Murder Accusation in Britain," in Alan Dundes, ed., The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) pp. 110-13; David Glover, Vampires and Liberals, pp. 35-55.
[11] Zaina Kachui, Pumwani, Nairobi, Kenya, 14 June 1976.
[12] Yonasani Kaggwa, Katwe, Kampala, Uganda, 27 August 1990.
[13] George W. Ggingo, Kasubi, Uganda, 15 August 1990.
[14]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/SWC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama. Gervas Clay, interview, Taunton, Somerset, 26 August 1991.
[15] Mrs. Betty Clay, reading from her diary for 13 December 1943, interview with author, Taunton, Somerset, 26 August 1991.
[16] Clay, Memorandum concerning 'banyama' and 'mafyeka'.
[17] Betty Clay; Gervas Clay, Memorandum concerning 'banyama' and 'mafyeka.'
[18] R. S. Jeffreys to Fallows, Provincial Office, Kasama, 15 April 1944. NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama., italics in original. Bemba Christians however reported that killing by strangulation, ukutweka, was the way "seriously ill" chiefs had been killed in the past. Chiefs feared this, and were relieved when missionaries condemned it. Stephen Bwalya, Custom and Habits of the Bemba, typescript, Mpika, 1936, Rhodes House, Oxford RH Mss. Afr. 3.1214.
[19] Geoffrey Howe, PCNP, Kasama, Confidential Memo to All DCs, 24 April 1944, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama.
[20] Elizabeth Colson, who first began research in Southern Province in 1946, recalls being asked to report on banyama when she first arrived; she did not hear the term banyama until a decade later, personal communication 7, 8 August 1997.
[21] G. Howe, PCNP to Chief Secretary, Lusaka, 27 March 1944, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs; Banyama. H. F. Cartmel-Robinson, Ag. CS to PCWP, 20 May 1944; G. Howe to DC Kawambwa, 15 June 1944, Survey of Helminthic Diseases, NAZ/SEC1/1/1072. I am grateful to Bryan Callahan for the notes on this file.
[22] The Capricorn African Society was lauded by many Europeans, see especially Doris Lessing, Going Home (New York, Harper, 1996 [1968]), pp. 98-100.
[23] Fraenkel, Wayaleshi, pp. 196-99; Thomas Fox-Pitt to Secretary, Capricorn Society, Lusaka, 26 September 1956.
[24] S. E. Wilmer, "Northern Rhodesian African Opposition to the Federation," BA thesis, Oxford University, 1973, quoted in Musambachime, Impact of Rumor, p. 212. "Vampire men" was the English gloss for banyama that appears in documentary sources after 1931; whether this was an English term used by African politicians in the late 1950s or an official translation I cannot tell.
[25] Fraenkel, Wayaleshi, p. 202.
[26] Fraenkel, Wayaleshi, pp. 202-7.
[27] "Five Years for African who Threatened to Kill Broadcasters," Central African Post [Lusaka] January 27, 1953; Musambachime, "Impact of Rumor," p. 204n; Fraenkel, Wayaleshi, p. 203.
[28] Peter Fraenkel, Wayaleshi (London, Wiedenfeld and Nicholson, 1959), p. 196.
[29] Hortense Powdermaker, Copper Town: the Human Situation in Africa (New York, Harper and Row, 1962), p. 64.
[30] See Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1997).
[31] Enda Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Culture and Power in Precolonial Dahomey (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1997) and Luise White, “The Traffic in Heads: Bodies, Borders, and the Articulation of Regional Histories,” JSAS 23, 2 (1997), pp. 325-38.
[32] See Edna Bay, “Kpojito” JAH 1995, has footnote about Herskovits’ research assistant’s uncle being charged with human sacrifice; Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (New York, New York University Press, 1999).
[34] See Sharon Hutchinson, Neur Dilemnas: Coping with Money, War and the State (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997); Mafuranhunzi Gumbo [Inus Daneel], Guerilla Snuff (Harare, Baobab Books, 1995), White, “Traffic in Heads.”
[35] Adam Ashforth, Madumo: A Man Bewitched (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000).