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

In this book, vampire stories circulating in East and Central Africa are analyzed as a source for colonial history. Luise White takes these rumors as a genre worthy of study in its own right. Instead of seeing them as African misinterpretations of Western technology, her analysis remains located in the rumors. With this approach the rumors are not "explained away": "The result is not a history of fears and fantasies, but a history of African cultural and intellectual life under colonial rule" (p. 6). Rumors about blood-drinking white people had a wide distribution in East and Central colonial Africa. The author combines archival and oral sources to study the circulation of vampire stories, what formulaic elements constituted this genre, and which details made for local specification. The stories took place in many different locations and were populated by many different characters: prostitutes and firemen in Nairobi, White Fathers and game rangers in Zambia, mine supervisors in Katanga, "a stupefier of several women" in Kampala. And in them a wide range of elements play a role: pits, injections, bandages, bottles, blinded cars. With these various locations, characters, and elements, the rumors about colonial blood-suckers can be helpful in studying changing ideas about work, medicine, space, gender, etc.

In this study of the imaginary, Luise White engages in current debates about history writing, and discusses the nature of proof, truth and evidence, the relations between oral and written sources, concepts like detail, silence, and voice, and the ways in which to historicize rumor and gossip. The book is a wonderful entry into Africa's colonial intellectual history. The nature of the book's theme already makes it an exciting read and White's interpretations even more so. The manner in which the author has synthesized her earlier work with new ideas and interpretations offers the reader a chance to reconsider historical method.

At times the reader is left wondering about the line of argument in the book. Luise White explains that pinning down the rumors to one single meaning fails to acknowledge their polysemic nature: "Finding the 'correct' reason for vampire accusations against White Fathers would privilege certain details over others in a way that I have no evidence that the rumormongers actually did" (p. 188). Yet, where it comes to the meaning of colors in Central-African matrilineal societies, she describes singular and static associations: "red represents life and death, depending on context, while white represents purity and health; black is the color of disease, witchcraft, and death" (pp. 196-7). Is there reason to assume that the meaning of colors follows such neat, structuralist patterns and that these remain stable throughout time? In a somewhat different way, this also holds for White's statements about the relations between time references in the rumors and menstrual blood in colonial Nairobi (pp. 164-6). Such a relationship cannot be proved, nor can it be disproved. In this example, no attempt is made to proceed in line with the author's notion of historical evidence as layers of interpretation which should be studied in relation to other such layers of interpretation (p. 312).

It would have been interesting to read about precolonial pits in central Kenya. This would have been beneficial, not to establish the origin of the vampire rumors, or to level the stories so as to fit one interpretation of continuity, endeavors which White rightly takes to task, but to learn about local change and the manner in which these rumors relate to older intellectual debates. I would also be interested to know, for example, whether women in rural colonial Central Kenya were also said to dig pits, and, if so, in what ways this was different or similar to the activities of urban women. Such remarks of course run counter White's argument to frame the narratives in a broad regional specter and her analysis of...