Guess this is kiswahili, and a loan word from the Arabic/Persian? Which would mean there are quite possibly older words in other, local unwritten languages. I can’t remember the words I heard about vampire-like spirits of the night in West Africa, but it certainly has nothing to do with mummies. Vodun and several other religions have a lot of mummified stuff in their practice, but they have own words for this, and the spirits which feed on humans at night do have very old local names…
Mumiani is Kiswahili and presumably via either Arabic of Persian in origin, although like the word mummy, it seems to get traded around a lot. The other terms are Swahili as well–which, I think, argues for the over all recentness of this set of ideas.
I know that West African traditions do use a lot of preserved Animal parts (as do East and Central African traditions). There is also the use of human relics. But I think these are different.
My own sense is that mumiani is related to the mummy medicines which can be attested to from China (in translations of Islamic pharmacopeia), through the Middle East (I was never able to nail this part down completely), to Europe and even North American settlements before the Revolution.
Luise White noted that mumiani rumors were metaphors of a new kind of “embodied extraction” and so perfect for the colonial period. I have argued, as well, as this period is right around the time that Western colonial medical science starts demanding various kinds of tissue samples of African subjects.
Certainly ideas about forces that prey upon us are common in all cultures. None of this gets us closer, though, to what is happening in Malawi. The form of the rumor is part of complex of rumors that go back at least 100 years, which are very distinct from western notions of vampires. This is my point.
Riots associated with claims that “blood-suckers,” which might be a better translation than vampires even though it has its own unfortunate associations, have been noted in both colonial Tanganyika and independent Tanzania. There was a similar disturbance in either Zambia or Malawi around an election, I think, in the early 2000s. I have seem the term “mumiani” used a few times in the records of the Tanzanian parliament as term used denounce supposed economic exploitation. So I would guess the situation in Malawi is rather like that.
Anyway, that is probably more than anyone on this bbs ever wanted on the subject.
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While I presume you are right, thanks for that. This is why the BBS is a rather nice place to visit from time to time. You’ll get more from it than you expected.
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