medical doctor Michael Gelfand was particularly well positioned to comment on the role of a mganga, having been trained in biomedicine and then focusing on African medicine. He wrote:
European society has no one quite like the nganga [mganga], an individual to whom people turn in every kind of difficulty. He is a doctor in sickness, a priest in religious matters, a lawyer in legal issues, a policeman in the detection and prevention of crime, a possessor of magical preparations which can increase crops and instill special skills and talents into his clients. He fills a great need in society, his presence gives assurance to the whole community.41
Ludwig Krapf’s 1882 Swahili dictionary defines a mganga as “a medicine man who uses magic.”42 Maureen Malowany finds the definition significant because Krapf “was able to recognize both aspects of African medical practice: the diagnosing and treating of environment-caused diseases and the equally potent treatment of spiritually caused illness.”43 Among the Zaramo, the mganga’s role “is to heal, and they combine all methods of therapy in fulfilling that role, be they herbal, communal, religious or magical.”44 People going to a traditional mganga know their “case will be considered more completely than would be possible at a government hospital” and that a healer would typically treat the patient as part of a larger social and cultural whole.45
As healers and witches are understood to rely on the same skills, once researchers were compared with healers, it was not such a stretch to compare them to witches. There are many overlaps with the perceived behavior of witches and the observed behavior of researchers. Witch doctors often work at night and want blood; their uses for blood are socially unacceptable and they profit from working with highly personalized substances. Researchers also worked at night, collecting blood samples by going door to door or collecting night-biting mosquitoes by walking around in the bush. For both witches and researchers, blood was valued above all other substances and its use was shrouded in secrecy.46 People hesitated to make this comparison directly to me. However, in explaining the actions, beliefs, and fears of others, words related to witchcraft often arose. Residents would hide from giving blood since they were afraid it would be used to kuroga or kurogwa (bewitch) them or would be used for uchawi (witchcraft).47 There were also veiled references to how “those beliefs” (imani hizohizo) caused people to suspect the researchers.48
Researchers Are Researchers
While comparisons were drawn between researchers and witches and healers, researchers were also viewed as a homogenous group of people: they all arrived in cars, wore uniforms, were assisted by Africans, asked questions, ventured into the bush, used specialized and foreign tools, were educated, often spoke English, and could be overly curious in ways that offended local sensibilities.49 As a group, these researchers were busy collecting blood samples, either gathering villagers in the middle of the night or going house to house. Other researchers gathered everyone in a public space and asked people to partially disrobe so their skin could be evaluated for signs of leprosy. Still others had little interest in people and chose to focus on insects or cattle, venturing into swamps to collect mosquitoes or smearing livestock with liquid medicine. Although there were clearly many differences, those differences were not seen as especially consequential. The work was considered to be essentially the same.
This collapsing of all different types of researchers into a generic group was partially a result of the large amounts of research being done in certain parts of the region. Many colonial-era medical research projects employed dozens of specialists: entomologists, parasitologists, medical doctors, nutrition specialists, and nurses, in addition to a bevy of assistants and translators. The large number of researchers per project was compounded by the sheer quantity of projects starting, stopping, merging, and overlapping.50 In early 1955, the district officer in Taveta, Kenya, had to explain to the leaders of the ill-fated Aptitude Testing Project why local reception was so chilly.51 He recounted the history of their participation in different government-sponsored research, public health, and agriculture projects over the prior ten years. As he could personally attest, the WaTaveta people had already labored to implement irrigation schemes, given thousands of blood samples for parasitological examinations, and participated in multiple agricultural surveys. The multitude of projects going on in the region was not unusual. In the Pare region of Tanzania, just across the border, a government official praised the WaPare in 1952 as being very cooperative when it came to research and government campaigns. He noted that “They all fought for [plague] inoculation; the Banana Wilt campaign has caused no trouble and the filariasis sampling was done with no lack of volunteers.”52 On Pate Island in 1956, human blood sampling was occurring just a week before a livestock survey, and the government official noted, “it would be bad psychology to deal with both surveys simultaneously.”53
In each of these cases, the officials made distinctions between the different departments conducting research in the areas. But, for rural East Africans, there was likely no such distinction, as more and more researchers entered their villages and homes with questionnaires, needles, and tubes to collect all sorts of samples and information. Just as researchers were conflated into a generic set of expeRTS,So were their tools. Rubber tubes often appear as a “formulaic element” in many of the previously documented stories of blood theft—long, flexible tubes used to suck the blood of a person.54 Older women who lived in Nairobi reported that, in the 1920s, men would enter their houses as they slept, “carrying ‘a sort of sucking rubber tube.’”55 But rubber tubes were rarely—if ever—used for blood taking. For most medical research projects, only a tiny bit of blood for a slide is needed, and that drop of blood is taken by pricking the finger. (See figure 2.1 of a child being finger pricked and tubes sitting in the foreground.) For a more substantial blood draw, a needle was inserted directly into the vein of the arm, and blood was collected in a vial.
FIGURE 2.1. “Collecting blood in capillary tube for the C.M.R.” Source: East African Institute for Medical Research Report, 1958–59. Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland.
Although medical researchers didn’t use tubes, entomologists did. More than likely, the rubber tubes appearing in many of these stories are the aspiration tubes used by entomologists for mosquito collection. During human landing catches (when a person waits for a mosquito to land on him so it can be collected and analyzed—ideally, before it bites), scientists use these long rubber tubes to suck the mosquito into a holding chamber before blowing it back into a netted trap to carry back to the laboratory for analysis. Thus, it is often entomologists who are seen creeping around at night in the “bush” (porini) to observe or destroy mosquito breeding sites, moving in and out of houses to set up and collect mosquito traps, and carrying around tubes that they suck on—all behaviors often attributed to blood-stealing medical researchers.
Researchers Are Government
In the same way that researchers were indistinguishable from each other, they were also considered an indistinguishable part of the larger government. Researchers appeared the same as other government officials in many important ways: they arrived in places bearing stamped and sealed letters of permission from government agencies, they received the chief’s assistance, and behaved like other state employees. The perceived link between researchers and the government was captured with the phrase ajili ya serikali—because of, or on account of, the government. When people used that phrase, it implied that research happened because the government made it happen, allowed it to happen, or forced it to happen—which is a relatively accurate statement. A majority of research projects were funded with government money. Any big project in East Africa had to have government permission, and researchers relied heavily on local chiefs in order to complete their research. Starting in the late 1940s, when the
