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This month's focus: A Note from the Chair Bones of Contention Rituals and Spirits Study Abroad with CLAS History Department Faculty/Staff Campaign Dean's Musings Around the College Bookbeat Grants CLASnotes CLASnotes |
Interviewing Vampires
White first encountered African vampire stories while writing a book on prostitution in Nairobi, Kenya. Interested in writing a history using rumors, she began collecting vampire stories in Kenya, Zambia, and Uganda, and examining records in Congo and Tanzania. "I wanted to see how Africans' fears and fantasies about colonial rule could be used to describe wider social and historical processes," she says. Although African vampire stories have evolved to fit changing times and differing locales, the shape of the stories is the same--someone or something takes blood against a person's will and leaves that person for dead. And according to White, the stories often function as descriptions of abuses of power and authority. During the colonial era, for example, whites were said to employ Africans to bring them blood. A more recent twist in vampire lore posits that vampires steal blood for re-sale to wealthy nations and individuals on the international black market. The meaning of blood and its importance in the body plays a crucial role in vampire stories. "[Long ago], many societies told stories about bad people who consume flesh or drink blood," White says. "Back then, for peoples without a concept of circulation, the idea of sucking blood might have been gross, but it didn't carry notions of fatality." Some Africans still interpret vampire reports in terms of these older ideas. "In fact," says White, "most of the people that I'm writing about use blood as a way to talk about other important fluids...sexual fluids and those body functions you don't talk about in polite society." But Africans comprehend and employ vampire stories in more than one way. In addition to incorporating the old ideas, present-day accounts of vampirism--like Count Dracula tales familiar to Americans--also reflect contemporary ideas and concerns about the body, including the circulation of blood. "Here, vampires are a symbol of evil, a separate race that feeds on the blood of others, with modern notions of blood (coming out of 17th and 18th century advances in science) factored in," says White. "So these stories straddle the realms of the supernatural and the scientific." Unlike Dracula, however, contemporary African vampires are not imagined as creatures from the grave. Instead, those accused of vampirism are often associated with particular professions. In Nairobi, for example, firemen are accused of sucking blood, while in Zambia game rangers suffer that reputation. In some places even Catholic priests, whose sacraments include references to blood and body, are suspected of vampirism. As one would expect, "vampire" is a hard label to live down. Although a Ugandan policeman White spoke with took pleasure in dubiously suggesting that he had abducted people to have their blood sucked, most of those accused of being vampires abhor their reputations. Firemen in particular lamented that children often ran screaming away from them. While researching in Kampala, Uganda, White recounted a Kenyan story about prostitutes accused of digging holes in their rooms in order to trap their customers for vampire firemen. Although this foreign story shared nothing in common with Ugandan vampire accounts, the local audience was willing to entertain the possibility that it was valid, and several people in Kampala suggested to White that she do research on that matter. "[Vampirism] is anything but lore to the people who talk about it," she says. "It's a subject requiring investigation and research and thorough rethinking." But White also stresses that not every listener, or even every teller, takes vampire stories literally. "It's not so much a question of belief vs. non-belief, but rather what the stories offer through the telling," she explains. "Because these stories are told orally, they are continually re-evaluated and re-negotiated. The whole point of Speaking with Vampires is that African people tell vampire stories because it's a very accurate way to talk about tensions and contradictions in social relationships. Social imaginings are a powerful way to discuss what ails them." -- John Elderkin
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Conducting an interview with a vampire might sound like pure Hollywood, but it's all in a day's work for Luise White. A professor of African history, White conducted field research on vampirism in Africa for her new book Speaking With Vampires: Rumor and History in East and Central Africa (Studies on the History of Society and Culture), which will be published by the University of California Press early next year.