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Tsetse Visions: Narratives of Blood and Bugs in Colonial Northern Rhodesia, 1931–9

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Luise White
Luise White
Affiliation:
National Humanities Center, North Carolina
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Extract

This article looks at different kinds of historical sources – colonial science and African rumours – and argues that both can be used to reconstruct the history of changing colonial policies, and African responses to them, for tsetse and game control in the Northern Province of Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s. These sources and the arguments I have developed from them can be read as separate and distinct historical narratives, but nevertheless each articulates a specific relationship between African farmers, shifting cultivation and wild animals. Each history discloses a vision of how best to control a dreaded disease, and each history describes a separate and distinct landscape in which Africans, insects and wild animals might best live together. Moreover, each source reveals the close links between African ideas about the forcible extraction of vital fluids and European ideas about sleeping sickness, insect vectors and deforestation.

Type
Ecology, Experienced and Imagined
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , July 1995 , pp. 219 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 David Anderson, Mark Auslander, William Beinart, Jim Giblin, Patrick Harries, Shepard Krech III, Stuart Marks, Joseph Miller, Henrietta Moore, Debra Spitulnik, Edward Steinhart and Megan Vaughan slashed and burned their way through unruly drafts, and seminars at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Northwestern University, the University of the Western Cape and the University of the Witwatersrand provided close and critical readings. The research on which this essay is based was funded by the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wellcome Trust and the University of Minnesota.

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57 J. Moffat Thompson, Ag. DC Abercorn, 27 June 1923, Destruction of Native Crops by Elephants. Arming Africans was apparently out of the question, since there were not enough working guns for the twenty or thirty affected villages, and there was always the risk that Africans would only wound elephants which would then go to other gardens, NC, Luwingu to DC Kasama, 14 April 1924, NAZ/RC/959, Protection of Crops from Elephants.

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74 Pitman, , Report, iii, 61–5, 85Google Scholar; Secretary for Native Affairs, Lusaka, Minute, 16 March 1935, NAZ/SEC1/1008. I am grateful to Stuart Marks for this reference.

75 While I do not want to force an African category – a specific occupation whose job it is to capture Africans and take their blood – into a more general western one, I do want to use a term that suggests the involvement of popular culture in blood accusations. My use of ‘vampire’ does not replace a Central African Bantu word for ‘blood drinker’ or ‘blood taker’; it is a generalization that I use to elaborate on the word banyama. It should be remembered that even the most literary of vampires were East and Central European men – a group against which blood accusations had long been levelled. Vampire stories in their modern form are in fact stories about racial differences, as well: vampires were not simply undead humans but a separate race that fed and reproduced differently from humans; see Stevenson, John Allen, ‘A vampire in the mirror: the sexuality of Dracula’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, CIII (1988), 139–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Arata, Stephen D., ‘The occidental tourist: Dracula and the anxiety of reverse colonization’, Victorian Studies, xxxiii (1990), 621–45.Google Scholar

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79 Willis, , ‘Report on banyama’, 1931.Google Scholar According to Richards, horns were a generic term for charms; see Richards, Audrey I., ‘Movement of witchfinders’, 448–51.Google Scholar Some of the wanderings of banyama and vulnerability of banyama victims may have alluded to menstruation and menarche, which Bemba often describe as ukutaba (‘to be moved away from daily life’), ukuya ku mpepo (‘to go to the coldness of the forest’) and ukuba mu butanda (‘to live outside the village’); see Hinfelaar, , ‘Religious change’, 4–5.Google Scholar

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82 Farge, Arlette and Revel, Jacques, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution, trans. Mieville, Claudia (Cambridge, 1991)Google Scholar; White, , ‘Cars out of place’, 38–41Google Scholar, and ‘Vampire priests’.

83 E. E. Hutchins, DO Morogoro, ‘Mumiani’ or ‘Chinjachinja’, TNA Film No. MF 15, Morogoro District, v. 1, Sheets 25–6, Aug. 1931, but inserted in file marked 1938. I am grateful to Thaddeus Sunseri for this reference.

84 Fr. H. de Vries Morogoro, , ‘Superstition in Africa’, Holy Ghost Messenger, xxxii (1936), 67–9.Google Scholar I am grateful to Peter Pels for these notes.

85 Anthony, David, ‘Culture and society in a town in transition: a people's history of Dar es Salaam, 1865–1939’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 1983), 141–3.Google Scholar

86 Williams, A. T. to Ag. Chief Secretary for Agriculture, Livingstone, 4 08 1932Google Scholar; Director, Animal Health, Livingstone, to Chief Secretary, Livingstone, 6 Oct. 1931, NAZ/SEC3/525 v. 1, Tsetse Fly Control 1926–36.

87 PCNP to Chief Secretary, Lusaka, 25 June 1935, NAZ/SEC3/525, v. 1, Tsetse Fly Control 1926–36.

88 Minutes, Abercorn Planters Association, 13 Oct. 1932, NAZ/SEC3/525, v. 1, Tsetse Fly Control 1932–6.

89 Abercorn District AR, 1935–37, NAZ/SEC2/1303; Minutes, Abercorn Coffee Growers Association, 7 Jan. 1935, and meetings of PCNP and ACGA deputation, 25 Jan. 1935, NAZ/SEC3/525, v. 1, Tsetse Fly Control, 1932–6.

90 C. F. M. Swynnerton, Director, Dept of Tsetse Research, Tanganyika Territory, ‘A late dry season investigation of the tsetse problem in the north of the Abercorn District’, 29 Oct. 1935, NAZ/SEC3/525, v. 1. Swynnerton published a summary of these ideas in ‘How forestry may assist towards the control of the tsetse flies’, in Troup, R. S. (ed.), Colonial Forest Administration (Oxford, 1940), 339–42.Google Scholar

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92 Allan, , African Husbandman, 133.Google Scholar Mambwe hoed gardens tended to support greater population densities than citemene, a fact officials rarely acknowledged in their figures; Moore, and Vaughan, , Cutting Down Trees, 44–5.Google Scholar

93 S. R. Downing, PC Abercorn, tour report no. 1, 1939, NAZ/SEC2/820, Abercorn Tour Reports 1933–9.

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101 A. Scott, MO Abercorn to DMS, Lusaka, 30 March 1936, re: trypanosomas in Abercorn District; DC Abercorn to PCNP Kasama, 14 April 1936, NAZ/SEC3/523, v. 1, Sleeping Sickness in Northern Rhodesia, 1929–39.

102 B. D. Burtt, Report to DC Abercorn, 4 May 1936, NAZ/SEC3/523, v. 1.

103 C. R. B. Draper, Supervisor in Tsetse Control, Abercorn, to DO, Abercorn, 9 Dec. 1936; A.F.B. Glennie, DC Abercorn to PCNP, Kasama, Tsetse Fly Measures in Abercorn, 2 June 1936, NAZ/SEC3/526, v. 2, Tsetse Fly Control, Abercorn.

104 C. R. B. Draper, Supervisor in Tsetse Control, Abercorn, to DO, Abercorn, 12 Nov. 1936, NAZ/SEC3/526, v. 2, Tsetse Fly Control, Abercorn.

105 See NAZ/SEC3/525, v. 3, Tsetse Fly Control, 1936–8. By June 1937 fly pickets were posted to the west of Kasama town; R. B. S. Smith, MO Kasama to Director Medical Services, Lusaka, 29 June 1937, NAZ/SEC3/527 v. 3, Trypanosomiasis: Tsetse Fly Control.

106 NPAR, Native Affairs, 1937, NAZ/SEC2/1297; Abercorn Annual Report 1935–7, NAZ/SEC2/1303.

107 A. F. B. Glennie, DC Abercorn to PCNP, Kasama, 3 Dec. 1937, Native Customs, etc., ‘Report on vampires at Kasama’, 1937–8, NAZ/SEC2/1240; see also NPAR, Native Affairs, 1937.

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110 G. Kennedy Jenkins, cadet, tour report 6, 1938, NAZ/SEC2/837, Mpika Tour Reports 1938–40, extracted in NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama.

111 White, , ‘Vampire priests’.Google Scholar

112 A visiting parasitologist, whose research included taking blood and skin samples, was forbidden to go to ‘any area of northern province for some considerable time to come’; G. Howe, PCNP, Kasama, to Chief Secretary, Lusaka, 27 March 1944, NAZ/SEC2/429, Native Affairs: Banyama.

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