Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (review)

How do we write a cultural and social history of the imagination of those who have not so conveniently provided us with written documentation of their world views? This is the question that animates this fascinating study. White wants to know why it is that so many people in East and Central Africa believe in vampires, and why these beliefs emerged primarily in the colonial period. During this time many people came to the conclusion that police, firemen and other state functionaries, including whites, captured people and sucked their blood. An entire language of vampirism emerged, growing out of an earlier set of beliefs and practices concerning witchcraft. This discourse had a wonderful malleability that formed part of people’s rich imagining of their world.

White divides her work into three parts. She begins with the general theoretical problems of writing about things and people who did not exist. The colonial period produced an extraordinarily rich culture of gossip and rumor, stories of the fantastic that present the historian with several challenges. White provides a deft discussion of these challenges and the complex character of vampire stories. Gossip, for example, offers ways of understanding the intimate concerns people had about themselves and others. Rumor, however, can “reveal an intellectual world of fears and fantasies, ideas and claims that have not been studied before” (p.86).

The remainder of the book essentially consists of a series of case studies. White explores how people experienced colonial medicine and epidemiology, the culture of migrant labor, property and gender in colonial Nairobi, and the transnational movement and transformation of vampire ideas over a considerable expanse of East and Central Africa. There is much extraordinarily rich material here that, combined, provides important insight into the productions of African culture and consciousness in the colonial period.

Much of Speaking with Vampires ultimately constitutes itself as a kind of manual of how to read the information on vampires without reducing it to a single explanatory schema. White wants to emphasize the open-endedness of vampire stories as people listened to them, made them their own, and participated in a culture of rumor and gossip that embodied an astoundingly complex array of fears and anxieties. White has much to say that is helpful to historians of Africa and to cultural historians. At times, however, her discussion becomes repetitive, even indulgent. Many of White’s points could have been made more clearly and more concisely. More seriously, White fails to provide a cultural analysis of colonial state formation. Many of the vampire stories relate to the state or, more precisely, to the state’s extractions. White is clearly very aware of this. But so absorbed is she with the stories themselves, and the proper ways to “read” them, that she never provides any sustained analysis of state formation. In failing to do so, White has missed a golden opportunity to provide an extended discussion of the intimate histories of state formation and African culture.