Genres, Voices, and Evidence
This chapter argues that oral African vampire rumors can be read alongside medical writings about triumphant drugs and vanquished superstitions to illuminate the context in which Western biomedicine was practiced. This chapter is not about the clash of beliefs or of technologies; it is about how technologies were believed to work, and how much power was invested in their application. It is about cures that were rubbed on the skin, or inhaled; it is about needles and scalpels that penetrated beneath the skin.
The sources I use overlap only somewhat. Missionary writings from early colonial Uganda, primarily published in the Church Missionary Societyâs journals, and writings by doctors and officials about medical practice in East and Central Africa provide a chronological framework that is somewhat longer than that of vampire rumors in the same region. Colonial doctors positioned themselves firmly within imperial science, and their writings describe many of the tools and technologies that figure in the vampire stories.[1] These medical writings and these oral vampire stories are not âaboutâ the same events and experiences in any firm chronological sense. They are about the same procedures and technologies. I am not reconstructing a sequence of events and responses to them, but the vocabulary in which medical care was both negotiated and undermined. What follows is a juxtaposition of texts to get them to interrogate each other, to show how different ways of talking about colonial medicine reveals the extent of its control. This chapter, perhaps more than any other, relies on the combination of oral material and written accounts. This is not just because African anxieties about the blood taken in medical encounters are so commonplace in colonial medical writings, but because medical writing and vampire stories are so often about the same things.
The use of the oral and the written together, rather than as different visions, raises another question altogether: how to write history, especially colonial history? Some recent African history, some of it by me, has argued for the great reliability of oral evidence for twentieth-century Africa. Who after all was more qualified to describe colonialism than those who lived through it or under it? The words of the colonized simply describe their world with far greater detail and accuracy than any colonizer could. The voices of women, moreover, are all but absent from the colonial record; only with their own words could we reconstruct their lives. But few historians, and I include myself again, have actually relied exclusively on oral sources. Time and time again, we have used documentary material to flesh out, contextualize, and even explain the words of our informants to provide a more reliable, representative, accurate history. I have, for example, argued that a 1940s prostituteâs description of male violence does not so much describe male violence as boast that a clever woman could negotiate urban life. I still think I am right, based on what I know about Nairobi prostitution and that particular informant, but nevertheless, this kind of insight comes from contextualizing testimony rather than from âletting Africans speak for themselves.â [2] Most historians of colonial Africa have seen the oral and the written as two different sources with which to support their arguments. Where oral and written accounts agreed, it was proof positive. Where oral and written sources contradicted each other, this was not a problem to be resolved; instead, it proved that Africans and colonialists had vastly different opinions and memories. But simply by including the âAfrican voiceââa term still used without ironyâhistorians could claim that their work represented Africansâ views of their experiences, even when, as was so often the case, those voices were placed in a narrative derived from colonial documents and shaped by the authorâs mediation.
How accurate a history, even a history of vampires, can emerge from a combination of African and colonialist voices? Doesnât the power and authority of European words invade every aspect of speech and narration? In recent years there have been a few striking colonial histories that have mediated different voices. The roughest edges of cultural contactâwith Christian Maroons, for example, or black South African women in secondary schoolsâhave been described with great power by articulating the differences between voices.[3] But separate voices make for separate pasts, each perhaps more self-contained and reified than may have been the case in actuality. Even the most effectively controlled colonial terrain was too contested, and too compromised, to allow for the disembedding of any clear âvoice,â colonized or colonizing. Indeed, the process of disembedding obscures the way in which voices reinvented themselves and borrowed words and images from the world around them even as it changed.[4] Ann Stoler has argued that in colonial history, the issue is not the separate voices, but the fragmentation and exclusion with which voices are generated. âWe are not only piecing together fragmented stories but working from a cultural landscape in which our âbest sourcesâ were dependent on a range of verbal and visual evidence that tapped different kinds of knowledge.â [5] This chapter argues that the differences between the voices may not require rigid segregation: the voices I cite share intense ideas about the same tools and technologies. It is my goal to âlistenâ to these voices as different kinds of storytelling, to get them to speak about each other to tell stories about colonialism.
This chapter is not so much about comparing oral and written sources as it is about reading both sets of sources as genres. Genre does not have an either/or status but is a strategy of writing and speakingâsomeone goes in and out of genre to recollect, to comment, to get a point across. In the case of colonial medicine, genre is a particularly useful concept, because it accesses all the fantasies, paraphernalia, and technologies with which medical power was presented and represented. Talk of vampire stories in fact often cued talk of drugs and needles.[6] The description of Western biomedicine contained in vampire accusations is substantially different from that found in doctorsâ and nursesâ published words on the same subject, of course. What is important is that the domains of difference are the same: on the subjects of injections, anesthesia, and hospitals, Africans and medical writers both had strong opinions, but those opinions diverged totally. To use both sets of narratives to produce two narratives, or contending visions, would ignore all the ways in which the subjects of these narratives were the same. Besides, this evidence cannot be separated into discrete units; the oral invades the written too much for that. Instead, I want to suggest that they refract, that they provide ways in which to read each other, and that the formulas and the fantasies in each are in fact representations of the nature of medical care, curative therapies, and control. In both oral and written sources, the voices I quote are not presented as contextualized testimony, but as genres, formulaic stories structured by set elements and conventions. If I were to assert the authority and authenticity of the voice in this essay, I would obscure the phrases, images, attitudes, and even memories that are formulaic, that, however true and however reconstructed, are recounted as genre.
