Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Studies on the History of Society & Culture)

Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Studies on the History of Society & Culture)

by Luise White (Author)

Synopsis

During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets. In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked. Luise White presents and interprets vampire stories from East and Central Africa as a way of understanding the world as the storytellers did. Using gossip and rumor as historical sources in their own right, she assesses the place of such evidence, oral and written, in historical reconstruction. White conducted more than 130 interviews for this book and did research in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In addition to presenting powerful, vivid stories that Africans told to describe colonial power, the book presents an original epistemological inquiry into the nature of historical truth and memory, and into their relationship to the writing of history.

$32.92

Quantity

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 368
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 10 May 2000

ISBN 10: 0520217047
ISBN 13: 9780520217041

Media Reviews
Stories of the fantastic thrive on the edges of the discourses of the real, and White's call for a history of the supernatural is timely. Aside from beginning one here, the riches of African historiography and historical epistemology through which she navigates make this book a necessary and utterly pleasurable read. -- African Affairs
Author Bio
Luise White is Associate Professor of History at the University of Florida. Her previous book, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (1990), won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association.