Gossip and Authority
When I was a girl I was taught not to gossip by a school game: we would sit in a circle and someone would whisper a phrase into the ear of the person sitting next to her. By the time the phrase was returned to the first speaker, it was totally deformedâhilarious proof that hearsay distorted facts. I had already published a book based extensively on oral interviews when I realized how insidious this game was, that it rested on two extremely authoritarian principles: that information should be transmitted passively, and that no one has the right to alter or amend received statements.
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Map 2. The Belgian Congo and Northern Rhodesia[
Full Size]
Real life and real gossip and rumormongering are substantially different, however. The purpose of gossiping, rumormongering, and even talking is not to deliver information but to discuss it. Stories transmitted without regard for official versions, stories that are amended and corrected and altered with every retelling, are indeed rumors, but they are also a means by which people debate the issues and concerns embodied in those stories. In a historiography based on such stories, then, there is no one true or accurate version. It is precisely the fact of many variants that is crucial to our understanding the meaning of these stories. Each one, taken on its own, may be interesting and suitable for analysis, but taken together, they form a debate, public discussions and arguments about the issues with which ordinary people are concerned. And, more important, these stories were taken together: they were neither told in isolation nor recounted without contradiction or correction. There was no single established version; there was no single accurate account. Instead, these stories were told, exchanged, criticized, refined, and laughed atâthey were part of public knowledge, a way to argue and complain and worry. Taken together, the stories I shall discuss articulated why Africans should have been concerned about the motives and activities of certain groups, whether firemen, tsetse-fly pickets, game scouts, or Catholic priests.
This chapter explores why one congregation of Catholic missionaries was accused of drinking Africansâ blood. It is not a conventional historical narrative. Not only will it lack a beginning, middle, and an end, it will not attempt to tell a coherent story. If vampire accusations have multiple meanings, one chapter in this book should have multiple endings. What follows are three sets of evidenceâsome historiography, the accusations, and the economics of the missionsâand four separate interpretations of the accusations. My goal is not to explain these particular vampire accusations, but to contextualize them, and show how they might be interpreted to form a debate about the priestsâ ritual and daily practices. My concerns are not about popular culture as most twentieth-century African historians understand itâmusic, oral literature, and street wisdoms of various sortsâbut about popular debates about ideas: the meaning of sacrifice, food, and blood, and tensions over work and its remuneration.[1] These questions were engendered in the most formal of settingsâin schools, during Communion, and in the workplaceâbut they were debated in a popular form, rumor and gossip.
