The Traffic in Heads: Bodies, Borders and the Articulation of Regional Histories Author(s): Luise White Source: Journal

of Southern African Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, Special Issue for Terry Ranger (Jun., 1997), pp. 325-338 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2637625 Accessed: 06/05/2010 12:09
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Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies, Volume23, Number 2, June 1997

325

The Traffic in Heads: Bodies, Borders and the Articulation of Regional Histories *
LUISE WHITE
(SmithsonianInstitute)

This article is about stories of chiefs' and childrens' heads that circulate in and out of southern Africa. It argues that rather than trivialising or exoticising African experiences, stories about heads that cross political and conceptual boundaries, and how long they stay there, and whose spirit is aggrieved - and where it is aggrieved - while the heads are gone, reveal the physicality with which colonial and postcolonial violence has been experienced by Africans. Considered alongside stories of other travelling body parts such as Saartje Bartman's remains or organ transplants, stories of chiefs' and childrens' heads can link the history of cosmology with that of politics. Official demands for the return of some body parts, and unofficial acquiescence to the loss of other body parts, remind us of the various ways that the contradictions of colonial and postcolonial regimes have been experienced and articulated. The variety of head stories cannot be forged into a neat historical narrative, however; they are in tension with each other, and thus depict the history of the region that produced them.

Introduction
In 1975, Terence Ranger defended his study of dance in East Africa by answering Magubane's critique of Clyde Mitchell's study of the kalela dance in colonial Northern Rhodesia.l of of Magubane objectsto the triviality the topic ... One shouldstudythe real experiences in Africans Zambia... not ephemeral insignificant is and of products it. The real experience a matter colonialinvasion, resistance, accommodation, protest the repression of of of of of and protest. The defence quickly turned to offence, however: 'my own work in the past has stressed resistance, and compulsion, and protest, and in this book I hope to illuminate them from some unexpected angles ratherthan to abandonthem altogether'.2 The idea of a real and true history about which historiansare obliged to write and the idea that there are angles from which it is best adduced needs to be examined, however. Who decides what is the real and true history and on whose behalf is this decision made?
* Earlierversions of this paperwere given at Duke University and a conferenceon the Commercein Organs,held

at the Universityof California,Berkeley, in April 1996. I am gratefulto the participants their comments and for suggestions.William Beinart,BryanCallahan,MargotFinn, Rob Gordon,Ivan Karp,RandallPackard,and Carol Summers provided me with tri-continentalnewspaper clippings and William Beinart, Diana Jeater, Tim Scarnecchia,Ken Vickery and RichardWerbnerprovided me with detailed comments. 1 Bernard Magubane,'A CriticalLook at the IndicesUsed in the Studyof Social Changein CentralAfrica', Current Anthropology12, 4-5 (1971), pp. 419-431. Critiquesof Mitchell are alive and well, see Albert B. K. Matongo, 'PopularCulturein a Colonial Society: AnotherLook at Mbeni and Kalela Dances on the Copperbelt,1930-64', in Samuel N. Chipungu(ed), Guardiansin their Time:Experiencesof Zambiansunder Colonial Rule (London, 1992), pp. 180-217. 2 T. 0. Ranger,Dance and Society in EasternAfrica (Berkeley, 1975), p. 4. 0305-7070/97/020325-14 ? 1997 Journalof SouthernAfrican Studies

326 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

Are.the deeds of kings and politicians real history, or are the deeds of ordinarypeople? If historians study ordinarypeople, do they study the actions with which ordinarypeople impact on kings and politicians, or do they study how ordinarypeople think, imagine, and constructtheir visions of the world? If historiansstudy the popularideas of ordinarypeople, do they then label some ideas important and others trivial, some uplifting and others
grotesque? The year after Dance and Society in Eastern- Africa was published, Ranger

expressed concern over the state of African history. The golden age of enthusiasm and the optimism in the projectof demonstrating possibilities of African history had given way to an age of lead. Although he was quick to locate such a change in the life cycle of new fields in declining economies, he noted that many African scholars had come to see the chronicles of princes and political parties as obscuring the growing poverty and inequality of the continent. Ranger used a phrase that so quickly became a cliche that its fuller form requirescitation: 'Africanhistory has been importantin Africa for reasons of pride because
it could not possibly have been useful for anything else'
.3

Strong words indeed. My concern

here is to reread them in the light of this essay, and concerns about the trivial and the ephemeral. After all, in the late 1990s, when no serious scholar doubts the reality of colonial violence but few serious scholars address the history of postcolonial violence, questionsof historiographic practices,and whose history is recordedin what terms,for what ends, are still of critical importance. This is a paper aboutbody part sales and a regional trafficin children's heads rumoured to take place in contemporaryZimbabwe. Although most of these are Harare township stories, there is another,larger frame of postcolonial head stories circulatingin and out of the 'new' South Africa, of which ANC statements that Saartjie Baartman's remains be returnedfrom the Musee de l'homme in Paris and the search for the Xhosa chief Hinsta's head in Scotland are the best known. This paper suggests that these stories of body parts, hearts,doctors,and bordercrossings are not only a debate aboutthe vulnerabilityof African bodies, but about the vulnerabilityof African borders,and about the language of individual rights that protects bodies and underminesthe borders. It argues that the trivial and the grotesque are importantbecause it is with tales of commonplace insults and uncommon beheadings that people debate the terms and the categories in which change takes place.4 The trafficin heads, like the other trafficsto which the title of this essay refers, reveals little about heads, but much more about the world in which such traffics take place. The trafficin heads is about economics and desire. It is about what people want and what they believe they must go through to obtain it. It is about needs and opportunities,sales and distribution.Nevertheless, this essay is open to charges that it exploits, trivialises and exoticizes Africans. Since stories about children's decapitationare neithertrivial nor exotic to the people who tell them, it is importantto ask where these charges might come from. I suggest that they come from specific moments within African history that have now passed. Early nationalisthistoriographydid not problematiseits goals. As John Lonsdale put it, the first moralpremises of African freedom seemed clear:political freedom and racial equality protected by 'renewed sovereignties' of independent states, protected in turn by scholars producing a history with which those states might legitimately govern.5 But the
3 T. 0. Ranger, 'Towardsa Useable African Past', in Christopher Fyfe (ed), African Studies Since 1945: Essays in Honour of Basil Davidson's Sixtieth Birthday(London, 1976), pp. 17-30. Emphasisin original. 4 StephenWilliam Foster,ThePast is AnotherCountry:Representation, Historical Consciousness,and Resistance in the Blue Ridge (Berkeley, 1988); and L. White, 'Tsetse Visions: Narrativesof Blood and Bugs in Colonial NorthernRhodesia, 1931-9', JournalAfricanHistory, 36 (1995), pp. 219-245. This happensin academiccircles as well, see MartinHall, 'Heads and Tales', Representations,54 (1996), pp. 104-123. 5 John Lonsdale, 'States and Social Processes in Africa:A Historiographical Survey', AfricanStudiesReview, 24, 2-3 (1981), p. 143.

The Trafficin Heads 327

triumphsof the postcolonial African state, such as they were, were not triumphsfor all. There were soon subtle and disparate academic challenges to the nationalist agenda. Startingin the late 1970s women's history, attentionto peasantproductionand its triumphs and failures, and to peasantprotest, and the study of African religion (all incited in varying ways by some compelling Marxist scholarship), all of which were joined to events in Africa, tended to foul the categories in which nationalist historiography,precolonial and colonial, was written. The subsequentretreatfrom academic Marxismin many places, and a heightened sense of audience elsewhere, occasioned a rethinkingof the language and the categories with which the earliercritiqueof nationalisthistoriography was sustained.6Once scrutinized, the language of academic analysis and the language of repression were too close for comfort:the words were differentbut the meanings were the same.7The contested and ambiguousresponses to colonial and postcolonial violence requiredinterrogationwith tools that were also contested and ambiguous. In this context subjects once called exotic have become viable and important. But how are Africaniststo write a history that takes into account the differentmeanings attachedto events and social change? And for whom should they write it? The idea that there is - or once was - a single, unified audience for whom African history should be written has not been allowed to die a naturaldeath.8On the one hand, African historians do worry aboutwhom they write for: scholarswant to respondto criticismsfrom Africa but know their careers are made by colleagues who never set foot on the continent. On the other, they protest too much: neither Africans nor colleagues speak with one voice; in Africa and everywhereelse there are multiple audiences who take multiple meanings from our scholarship, each one bringing different experiences to our texts. But if there are multiple audiences, how do we addressRanger's twenty year old challenge, that historians write useable pasts for all members of African societies, not just those who govern? Are we not then left with the more recent challenge of J.B. Peires, that Africans already have a useable past to which academic historians add nothing but a mass of details?9 I want to argue that these two discrete use-values are not contradictory, should they nor be cast in the time-honouredrhetoric of the-history-Africa-needsor the-history-Africawants. Writing African history may be less a matterof which imagined audience we write for and more a matterof which vocabularieswe write in. When historianslook beyond the established valorization of events toward the meanings and the values with which those events were invested at the time, they can interpret evidence in the categories and constructions within which it was produced. This changes the position from which the history is written;it offers new 'angles' on known pasts and ways to access unknownones. Whathistoriansmight call fantasticcan be partof a real and concretelocal situation.10 What historians omit in order to make a past 'useful' might be what was thought by the actors to be importantat the time. An African history that reports local idioms, local rumours,

6 Bogumil Jewsiewicki, 'African Historical Studies: Academic Knowledge as "Useable Past" and Radical Scholarship',African Studies Review, 32, 3 (1989), pp. 1-76; FrederickCooper, Decolonization and African Society: the Labour Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge,1996). 7 This point does not come from AfricanHistory,but Indian.See RanajitGuha, 'The Proseof Counter-Insurgency', in RanjitGuhaand GayatriChakrovarty Spivak (eds), Selected SubalternStudies (Oxford, 1988), pp. 45-86; and Shahid Amin, Event, MetaphorMemory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-92 (Berkeley, 1995). 8 JanVansina,'Some Perceptionson the Writingof AfricanHistory',Itinerario,16, 1 (1991), pp. 77-91. But Ranger exclusively to cultural notes thatmanyyoung Africanssaw the Africanhistorywrittenfor Africansas 'contributing nationalism';see Ranger, 'Useable Past', pp. 21-24. Radical HistoryReview, 9 J. B. Peires, 'Suicide or Genocide?Xhosa Perceptionsof the NongqawuseCatastrophe', 46-7 (1990), pp. 55-56. 10 Ranger, 'Useable Past', p. 24.

328 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

local representations and local misrepresentations reinsertsthat history into the community that produced it. But can local idioms be understoodin the same terms as those words and ideas that are understoodin 'universal'canons of evidence? Is the temporarystreetwisdom of Harareand Masvingo to be interpretedin the same way as the formal words of elders or princes? Do the same standardsof evidence apply to representationsand misrepresentations alike? If local idioms are specific to time and place, if they are cultural constructions,historians might best be served to interpretthem both as situated and constructedknowledge. To do this, I want to borrow a concept from KarinBarber'swork: that of 'the unofficial'. Barber uses this category to depict the fugitive and fluid vitality of popular culture in Africa, but she defines it, after Bakhtin, by its opposite: popular culture is not official culture.11 What follows might be called the history of the trivial and ephemeral,not because it is unimportant,but because this history is produced outside of official sanction. Official sanction, as we shall see, would make it the real and true history that so many of our colleagues want studied; official sanction can make the grotesque prosaic.12 The everyday comments and gossipings in townships keep the grotesquegrotesque.The stories I cite are not produced by the inarticulateor the invisible. On the contrary,they are produced by reflective people who have so problematisedthe nationalist project that they tell stories about the physicality with which it has been carriedout. My point is not that some voices are official and others are not, but that some narrativesare given official sanction while others,however similarthey might be, can be called trivial and ephemeral.Not only is there an unofficial, regional history13 in body parts but also, as we shall see, an official national history in body parts.14 These stories do not conflict or compete in the sense that they are contendingnarrativesor realities; I am not sure they overlap. But they are in tension with each other, and the tension between these narrativesmay open up a space for a new kind of historiography,a new useable past.

The traffic in heads concerns stories about the murderof children 4nd the transportation of their heads across the South African border.It is a recent story in postcolonial Zimbabwe. Most people say it began in 1991; a few people said it was dying out in mid-1995. It is not the first time that people heard that African body parts were removed, commoditized and sold. Muti is the generic term for drugs and medicine in central and southern Africa. Occasionally muti is made with human tissue, usually for people seeking success in business.15 Muti itself is neutral- whether it is used for good or evil depends on how it is
11 Karin Barber, 'PopularArts in Africa', African Studies Review, 30, 3 (1987), pp. 1-78, esp. pp. 9-12, 34-40. 12 I am hardlythe firstto note the ways thatpostcolonialstatesmake violence ordinary: RichardWerbner,Tears see of the Dead: The Social Biographyof an African Family (Edinburgh,1991); Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence,Memory,and National CosmologyamongHutuRefugeesin Tanzania(Chicago, 1995). Howeverothers disagree. Achille Mbembe in 'ProvisionalNotes on the Postcolony', Africa, 62, 1 (1992), pp. 3-37, argues that not only is postcolonial violence grotesque,but so is postcolonial gentleness. For a useful summaryof debates aboutthe postcolony see RichardWerbner,'MultipleIdentities,PluralArenas', in RichardWerbnerand Terence Ranger (eds), Postcolonial Identities in Africa (London, 1996), pp. 1-25. 13 What follows is a regional ratherthan a local history:this is not a study of idioms, metaphorsor genres in their local context and performance,but rather a regional history researched with assistants and written without knowledge of either Shona or Sindebele. In fact, I was beginning researchon anothertopic when my assistants and I first heard these stories. 14 The point here is thatthese historiesor storiesarebeing told in, or through,or with heads (rather thanthe histories being about heads). 15 Peter Fry, Spirits of Protest: Spirit Mediumsand the Articulationof Consensusamong the Zezeru of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe)(Cambridge,1976), pp. 23-25.

The Trafficin Heads 329

prepared- and opinions about it have more to do with opinions about the efficacy of muti than about the efficacy of body parts for such purposes. The world of muti is a world of medical phenomenology and causation as complex as that of the West, and has been well documented. How muti functions in the 1990s, and how it articulates with western biomedicine, is something that elderly residents of Hararetownships describedjudiciously in their concerns about the strengths and side-effects of such practices. The power of human muti comes precisely from its being human tissue. The strength of a heart, brain, and fingers can be used to impart anotherperson with power and good fortune when used properly.But such uses have their drawbacks:in a world where spirits act - a world in which, accordingto one healer, living humans simply act on spirits' behalf - spirits take revenge against the loss of a kidney or heart. Thus, body parts had to be removed from people specifically murderedfor that purpose or the recently dead; proper burialsreleased spirits from their corporealbodies so that grave robbingproduceda spirit's wrath and useless organs.16 Body parts could be removed, mixed, and given to another human being, but they never lost their bodily integrity:they never ceased to belong to the person into whom they were born, regardlessof whetherthat person was dead or alive. One n'anga (healer) was taken aback by the organ donor form on the back of my Minnesota driver's license. 'Why would someone want to survive using your organs? If someone did this, took my organs, I would come back to haunthis family. If you want to live peacefully, you must not get involved in such things'. In theory, Shona cosmology provided a way to neutralisethe spirits whose body parts were so used: when a heart or brain was taken from a corpse, anotherkind of muti would be throwninto the grave to put the dead 'in a deep sleep' so they would not tormentthose who killed them or used their organs.17 In practice, however, the risks of even considering taking someone else's organ were enormous: a woman whose teenage neighbour died of 'kidney failure' had 'heardthat the doctors asked one of his relatives to donate a kidney'. 'I'm not sure what happened', she explained, 'but two deaths followed each other in that family'.18 This was not a matter of the world of ancestors alone; it was the logic of conception and biological reproduction.Shona bodies are not as individualwith unique and self-containedsubstances so much as they are dividual;their personhoodis relational.Just as a child is conceived in the fluids of both parents, those fluids protect the child from undue and dangerous familiarities with others after he or she is born. The removal of a child's or sister's or brother'sbody part whetherfor muti or transplant exposes a family to the untold danger of new and unwantedfluids, just as the recipient of the body part would be vulnerable to embodied and supernatural sanctions from the dividual from whom the body part was taken.19 Nevertheless, most people agreed that human muti was worth the risks for those who 'loved money'. The use of body partsfor magic has been the subject of sensationalwriting but (and photographs)in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe,20 most people interviewed were matterof fact about it. While it was the 'bogus n'angas' or 'n'angas from Malawi' who encouragedthe use of body parts for wealth and privilege, peoples' objections to muti often had more to do with notions of discipline than with notions of bodily integrity. 'Those
16 MrEdwardMashingaidze,7 July 1995;MrsRudo Gondo, 11 July 1995. All interviewswere conductedby myself, Simba Handiseni and Joseph Seda. 17 Mr EdwardMashingaidze. 18 Mrs Alma Chibisa-Bira,16 July 1995. 19 My thinkinghere has been influencedby RichardWerbner,'CreativeDividualism:Reflections on Mwana ndi Mai', Faculty Opposition,University of Uppsala, 24 May 1996. 20 Two examples should suffice: John Thompson, Crime Scientist, Men of Our Time, vol. 5 (Bulawayo, 1980) especially pp. 23-43, and 'N'anga Confesses Horror:ThirtyChildrenKilled for Ritual Purposes', Parade, July 1994, pp. 11, 47.

330 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies

who buy body parts make troublefor themselves,' one man argued. 'If you use muti to get money you are gambling with death. Make money by working hard only'. This man listed the names of the many businessmenhe had known 'who indulged in muti to get money ... These people died before their time. You can only succeed in business by hardwork'.21 But a few months later in Livingstone, Zambia, there were riots when shop assistants in Asian-ownedbusinesses found 'humanorgans' on the premises and children's corpses were dug up and found to be missing brains and hearts.22 Medicine and muti did overlap, not in ideas about African bodies or what constituted them and how, but because hospitals - which many people thought was the primary characteristic Westernmedicine - providedan importantsource of body parts.Autopsies of and hospitalmorgues were ideal places for unscrupulous professionalsto find body partsfor equally unethical n'angas. Many people knew stories about such thefts. Although several people thought morgue attendantsand orderlies took body parts from corpses, most held doctors and nurses responsible for this traffic: 'It stands to reason that doctors and nurses work together in this thing. Morgue attendantscould not steal the parts because their job is simply to carry bodies to the mortuary'.23 Many believed that body parts were taken during autopsy. One man's story is revealing, in part because of how body parts were concealed:
My grandchildcommitted suicide, she hanged herself ... A post-mortemwas done ... Then,

she was sewn back ... I foundshe was lookingflat,like this newspaper.... they took the If heart,nobodyknows ... how will you be able to see whenit is sewn back?24 As a woman noted, when hospitals 'give you the body for burial you can't open it up to see if all the parts are inside'.25 One man insisted: Thereis no way you can tell. Duringpost-mortem heart,lungsandinnards takenfor the are Afterpost-mortem partsarenotputback.Whoever giventhemto destroy these observation. is can sell them.26 A healer reportedthe questions she had asked a morgue attendantto find out the state of her dead son's body.27 The matterof fact anguish that township residents expressed about mortuarymuti was neither stimulatednor exacerbatedby a mid-1995 scandal in which a morgue attendantat Parirenyatwa Hospital - the teaching hospital - was arrestedfor selling hearts to n'angas. Almost no one spoke of this unless asked. And indeed, why should she be mentionedat all? After all: Bad peoplehave alwayshaduses for deadpeople'.28
21 Mr Luke Mupasa, 6 July 1995. 22 'Riot Rocks Livingstone:HumanHeart Find SparksLooting, RunningBattles', Times of Zambia, 28, October 1995, p. 1; 'Livingstone Riots Rage', Times of Zambia, 30 October 1995, p. 1; 'Victims Exhumed', Times of Zambia, 5 November 1995, p. 1. I am gratefulto Bryan Callahanfor these clippings. 23 Mrs Jane Katsande, 18 July 1995; see also Mrs GertrudeGovera, 16 July 1995. 24 Mr Simon Zichawo, 4 July 1995. Africans were not alone in imagining dreadfulhappeningsduringautopsy.In 1960, Parirenyatwa, firstAfricanphysicianandthe manfor whom the teachinghospitalis named,was carrying the out an autopsywhen a white man burstin and triedto stop him saying: 'No black bastardis going to cut up my mother'. RichardWerbner,personal communication,5 August 1996. 25 Mrs GertrudeGovera. 26 Mr EdwardMashingaidze. 27 Mrs Rowai Saka, 27 July 1995. 28 Mrs GertrudeGovera.Indeed,Africans' use of body partsfor money and Europeans'use of African body parts for the rituals and benefits of imperialprojects are and have been widespreadin many parts of Africa, but are outside the regional scope of this essay. See for example Rik Ceyssens, 'Mutumbula: Mythe de l'Opprime', Cultureset Development,7 (1975), pp. 483-536; KarinBarber,'PopularReactions to the Petro-Niara',Journal of ModernAfrican Studies, 20, 3 (1982), pp. 431-450; Lucy A. Jarosz, 'Agents of Power, Landscapesof Fear: the Vampiresand HeartThieves of Madagascar',Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12 (1994), pp. 421-436; and Misty L. Bastian, '"My Head Was Too Strong!":Body Parts and Money Magic in Nigerian PopularDiscourse', unpublishedessay, 1995.

The Trafficin Heads 331 People have always stolen hearts for muti. People would disappearand be found later without their hearts or index fingers. This was done for money.29
Muti and unscrupulous morgue attendants were facts of African life. The extent to which they were discussed or worried about were the extent to which muti itself was a topic for discussion. The role of Western medicine in facilitating the availability of muti was secondary to anxieties about muti. But the role of Western medicine and hospitals in providing muti was not secondary to anxieties about hospitals. The Parirenyatwa Hospital

scandal, like the newspaper and magazine articles about disappearing patients and missing corpses, simply proved what everyone already knew: people were not safe in hospitals.30

II
The same people who talked about muti also reported another trade in body parts - the international traffic in children's heads that crossed regional borders - without talk of the dead childrens' spirits or avenging ancestors. 'The story doing the rounds today concerns people who are taking human heads to South Africa to exchange for kombis [mini-vans]. All of this is done for the love of money'.31 Privately owned kombis licensed and operated as commuter buses were extremely profitable in the early 1990s. While the sacrifice of children for money is a common trope in postcolonial Africa to explain how people get rich, this story was credible even to people who doubted stories about mnuti.The same man who told us that stories about body parts taken from hospitals were simply made up by 'mischievous people who were out to discredit hospital authorities' had heard of a woman in Beitbridge 'who was asked to bring a dead infant in exchange for four kombis'.32 A healer heard of someone arrested at the Mozambican border with a 'kombi full of heads'.3 More detailed accounts revealed the commonalities between this traffic and muti, but, in the manner of the social life of things, different body parts had different social trajectories: Nowadays, children and teenagers are found far away from home. They take the heads and some innards.... There are some n'angas who buy the heartsto mix with medicine. The heads are used as bait to catch those big fish in the oceans. It is said that those big fish are very fond of human flesh. Once caught, they are cut up to get at the precious stones that are inside.34 One woman had heard a lot about the trade in heads to South Africa and the consequences for the head-takers: It's one of those stories that circulate.I did not witness it but I heard some woman was found with a humanhead. After being found out she committed suicide with an overdose of Norolon tablets. Those who deal in human heads do so to get kombis. These heads are used as bait to catch those big fish, which they say have precious stones in their bellies. Q. So this big fish eats the human head? A. No, the head is used as bait, and after catching the fish, they cut it open to get the precious stones.

29 Mrs Chibisa-Bira. 30 See for example 'Harare Hospital:Grimy,UnsanitaryandCrowded',Parade, May 1991, p. 17; 'CorpseVanishes: hospital staff threatensgrieved mother', People's Voice, 11-17 September 1994, pp. 1,2, and 'Corpse Puzzle Deepens: "Whereis my baby buried?"' People's Voice, 2-8 October 1994, p. 1, 2,; 'Hospital Nurses Harass Patients', Parade, May 1995, p. 37; 'ParliamentProbes Records of "Death Doctors"', Horizon, June 1995, pp. 11-13. Author's fieldnotes, 14 and 21 July 1995. 31 Mr Luke Mupasa. 32 Mr and Mrs ArthurKwaramba,20 July 1995. 33 Mrs Rowai Saka. 34 Mrs Chibisa-Bira.Some people said the precious stones were pearls, others said gold.

332 Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies Q. How do you get the head across the border? A. If you want to cross the borderto South Africa, your bags are searched.Some of these bags have false bottoms, and this is where the heads are put. The heads are wrappedin brownpaper. Some people put the heads in their baskets and baskets are not searchedat the bordersince the authoritiesassumed there was food in the baskets. But nowadays, because of much talk about the heads, they search everything at the border.They also use sniffer dogs ... By the time the head reaches the borderit will have a stench the dogs can smell, and the person with that bag or basket is arrested... If it were not for these dogs, people would be able to take these heads across. Q. How did this business of the heads start? A. This startedrecently, around'91, when kombis began to come in large numbers.Those who brought the kombis would tell their friend how they acquired them and such friends would make an effort to acquiretheir own. Those friends then confided in other friends until the news came out. Q. I thought that all the gold and gems in South Africa came from mines. A. It is not gold, the stones found in these big fish. It is different from gold. If it were gold, that would be found locally.35 A man and his wife, both in their early sixties, had heard that the heads were sold to people who used them as bait for 'big fish ... believed to have gold inside them'. When I asked if gold did not indeed come from mines underground, his wife answered: The mines are owned by rich people, and they keep all the money raised from mining gold. The poor man needs money so he tries by all means to get gold to sell and get money. This can be done either by selling heads or actually catching the fish.36 Not everyone had such strong opinions about the distribution of wealth in the region, however. One man said 'it beats me what those heads are used for in South Africa'.7 These stories explain much: the presence of privately owned kombis that served as mini-buses, local and regional patterns of entrepreneurship, the 'transition' in South Africa. They also serve - as do many narratives in independent Zimbabwe - to make explicit comments about the neglect of children and their vulnerability. But should we read these stories in order to 'explain' what they are about? Such explanations by definition would strip these accounts of their specificity, of spirits and surgeons and sniffer dogs that make them credible to the people who tell them. Explanations serve to make them credible to scholars like ourselves.38 I argue that these heads raise another question, in and of themselves: why don't these children' s spirits come and trouble their killers or the fishermen? Such a question interrogates these stories in their own terms. Moreover, approaching the issue of child abduction and dismemberment in this way reveals notions of bodies and their respective integrities in cosmological and medical terms. Lurking behind western notions of bodily integrity is resurrection. A self-contained body, to which nothing can truly be added or removed permanently, has its parallels in modern medicine, with its concerns about transplants and tissue rejection.39 People outside of this tradition - people without a concept of bodily resurrection - may not favour organ transplants, but their objections and fears are located in different notions of bodies, their completeness and their boundaries. The social lives of childrens' heads and corpses' hearts
Mrs SarahRubvukwa,21 July 1995. Mr and Mrs Katsande, 18 July 1995. Mr CharlesNyamandara,1 August 1995. For two accountsof children's abductionand body parttheft in Latin America that show this, in very different ways, see MichaelTaussig, TheDevil and Commodity Fetishismin LatinAmerica(ChapelHill, 1980) andNathan Returnto Chipaya,translated CarolVolk (Chicago, 1994), pp. 80-8 1. See also Wachtel, Gods and Vampires: by Nancy Scheper-Hughes,Death Without Weeping: Everyday Violence in Brazil (Berkeley, 1992), Chap.6, pp. 216-267. of 39 CarolineWalkerBynum, 'MaterialContinuity,PersonalSurvivalandthe Resurrection the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in its Medieval andModem Contexts', in Fragmentationand Redemption: Essays on Genderand the HumanBody in Medieval Religion (Cambridge,1991), pp. 239-297. 35 36 37 38

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raise questions about what a body is, and what constitutes the disruptionof its essential being. When hearts and heads were removed and transportedacross borders, and there tradedagain and again, how can families keep track of the dangerousfluids to which they are now exposed? Who protects the fluid relations left at home and who protects the body part sold abroad? Is the commodified body part still part of the relational world of cosmology and spirits? What follows is schematic and meant only to be suggestive. Two kinds of Shona spirits addressthe questions of wrongful death and distance:shave and ngozi. Shave are the spirits of strangerswho die amongst the Shona; ngozi are the spirits of those who die wrongful deaths, translated as 'aggrieved spirits' in the 1960s and as 'avenging spirits' by my street-wise research assistants in the mid-1990s. Much of the literatureof the 1960s and 1970s reporteda variety of ngozi, some quite general and some relatively benevolent, but by the postwarera, at least, ngozi were said to be the spiritsof the murdered who tormented the families of the murderers, and sometimes, those who stood by and watched the In murders.40 the 1960s it was well known that ngozi could travel from district to district, but it is not at all clear, to me at least, if they can cross international boundaries.Moreover, the internationalborders of Zimbabwe contain the history of sanctions, of war, and of postcolonial subversion.While Zimbabwe's liberatorshad their bases on the other side of the porous borderswith Botswana,Mozambique,and Zambia,the borderwith South Africa has had a longer and less flexible history of relations of power and white rule of which the traffic in heads is but anotherexample. The South African-Zimbabweanborder is reified as few other African borders are. Ngozi, according to my informants,trouble the people who use the hearts and heads they buy, not those who murder or take body parts from just-dead corpses. It is not entirely clear what, besides murder, releases an ngozi - the removal of the head or heart, or its misuse hundredsof miles away. But ngozi reside with or in the removed body part, not in the body that remains in Zimbabwe or is given to a trustingfamily for burial. One healer explained that the morgue attendantat Parirenyatwa Hospital who stole body parts sold them to South Africa: 'They cannot use them for transplant here, no; if that were to happen,the beneficiarywould invite ngozi to himself and his family'.41 Transplantswere so alien that one woman maintainedthat: local doctorscannotperform transplant If an Africandonatesan organ,he becomessick. ... As for the whiteman,he does not get sick becausethey areusedto it .... Ourblackdoctors have to go out of the country learntransplants.42 to Transplantswere things of the truly exotic world. One healer said that body parts were taken from hospitals to be used in transplants:'in the east, they have a way of doing it'. When my research assistant asked if he meant 'east, like Malawi' he replied, 'no, China, Japan, the east'.4 Moreover, organs were not the only thing that could be transplanted. According to anotherhealer: if someone'sleg is amputated, do not take someoneelse's andtransplant Theybuy it. they after limbs from overseas.These limbs are manufactured blood is also transplanted ....

40 Michael Gelfand, Shona Religion WithSpecial Reference to the Makorekore(Cape Town, 1962), pp. 65-109; Michael Gelfand,An African Religion: The Spirit of Nyajena, Case History of a Karanga People (Cape Town, 1966), pp. 70-72, 91-106; Fry, Spirits of Protest, passim; David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerrillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe (London, 1985), passim; Pamela Reynolds, Traditional Healers and Childhood in Zimbabwe(Athens, Ohio, 1996), pp. 41-68. 41 Mrs Alice Gondo, 11 July 1995. 42 Mrs Chibisa-Bira. 43 Mr EdwardMashingaidze.

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secret.44 thorough ... Andyou neverknowwhobenefits tests fromyourblood,it is thedoctor's traffic in body parts, In such a vision of bodies and their constituentparts, an international transplanted abroad,makes sense: in terms of death and spirits and cosmologies, it is safer and preferableto organs used for transplantsat home. This is not to say that these stories 'explain' a global traffic in organs, nor do they representsuch a traffic. On the contrary,I would argue that these stories are widespread and more credible because there is an international tradein body parts:a global trafficin organs is the context in which a regional traffic in heads makes sense.

III
Making sense is one thing; writing history is another.These accounts of how some people become wealthy and how otherpeople lose their childrendepict both regional tradeand the power and knowledge of body parts far beyond medical knowledge. But is it history? I argue that it is, and that issues of muti and children's heads provide a way to articulateand revise regional histories in the postcolonial era. Stories about muti, hospital mortuaries,and children's heads do more than tell of body parts and their travels, they are physical descriptionsof the reconstitutionof politics and power within the region. Indeed, for many residents of southernand centralAfrica the history of the region was -told in heads long before the present day. San trophy heads were taken to England in the seventeenth century;Msiri's head was cut off in the Belgian conquest of Shaba, and was carriedthroughthe region, and an African head - probablynot Bambatha's- was displayed on a stake after the Bambatharebellion was crushedby the British in 1906.45But heads not taken had an imagined life and meaning as well; these heads were said to be hidden in buildings and monumentsand their whereaboutsin colonial and postcolonial times reveals a potent critique of the sources of power and unity in nation states. In the historicalrecordfound in official documentsand archives, there is no accounting for heads. In popular consciousness in southern Africa, there is. Shortly after Namibia's independence, the Minister of State Security tried to find the whereabouts of Chief Mandume's head. The last king of the KuanyamaOvambo had been killed fighting South Africans and his body was said to be buried in Angola and his head in the Ovambo War Memorial in Windhoek. Although the Minister simply wanted to relocate the head to a Many mausoleum,no evidence of decapitationcould be found by scholars and archivists.46 Zaireans believed that Msiri's head was put in the royal palace in Brussels.47 As I wrote this a Xhosa healer - and a self-proclaimedclaimant to a recently invented Xhosa throne - went to Scotland to recover the head of Hinsta, shot and said to be decapitatedby a memberof the HighlandRegimentin 1835, althoughseveral historiansand army headquartersin London insist that only his ears were removed. The British commission of enquiry into Hinsta's murder exonerated the soldier who shot him but determinedthat his body had been mutilated.Xhosa oral traditionsmaintain that Hinsta's The healer first sought the head body was left headless on the banks of the NqabaraRiver.48 where it was said to be: buried in the regimental museum of the Queen's Own High44 Mrs Rowai Saka. 45 Johannes Fabian, Rememberingthe Present: Popular Painting and the History of Zaire (Berkeley, 1996, pp. 40-43); 'Bushmen's Heads Found in the British Museum', Mail and Guardian, 2-8 February, 1996, pp. 4-5. 46 Robert J. Gordon, 'VernacularLaw and the Future of Human Rights in Namibia', Acta Juridica (1991), p. 86. 47 Fabian,Remembering. 48 'A Headhunterto Banish the Devil', The Independent,8 February1996, sect. 2, p. 2-4.

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landers.49 But during his media-intensivevisit to the museum the healer announcedthat a message from Hinsta's spirit scrawled on a blank television screen the night before - a common means of communication- indicated that the skull could be found in Inverness. Within a week the healer had the skull, only to have it taken from him on his return to South Africa by Xhosa chiefs who wanted 'scientific proof' that the skull was indeed Hinsta's. The healer however wanted to keep the skull to end South Africa's torment as soon as possible: 'until the skull is buried with King Hinsta's body, there will be no peace in South Africa'.50 The healer was very specific about where the spirit was and what its emotions were: Hinsta's spirithas got no head.He is walking around country, all the fighting witheverybody, makingbig trouble. is like a devil.... By bringing He backhis headandburying with his it body we will be closingthe dooron the devil in SouthAfrica.51 But such a bold and embodied reunificationwas not to be. Six months later, a forensic scientist in South Africa announced 'beyond reasonabledoubt that this skull is not that of the late king' but of a middle-aged white woman.52 Claims that African heads and other body parts, buried in European palaces and museums and urgentlyrequiringreburialin Africa, remove those same heads from the neat
categories of scientific memorabilia or proof of savagery, imperial or local.53 Disputes over

corpses - whatever their condition - and how and where they are to be enshrined raise debates about claims over persons, dead and living, and the importance of culture and history in animatingthose claims.54 Zimbabwe's Heroes' Acres, where the freedom fighters are reburied in their home areas, resolve disputes about where the dead shall reside but quicken debates about how (and in Zimbabwe where) the living shall live.55 The poles articulatedby a head's reputedburial in an imperialbuilding and its reburialwith the body from which it came describe a gross nationalism, a symbolic unificationof a social body and a reprimandto those who took the head abroad in the first place. However such a generalisationextracts reburials from their local context and ironic meanings, in which the dead leader may not have been wholly beloved and the leader seeking reburialmay not be wholly honourable.In a story from Ghana,JerryRawlings was told by a 'festishpriest'that he would need the bones of Kwame Nkrumahto make the juju necessary to guaranteeRawlings' victory in the 1992 elections. Nkrumah was buried in Guinea and Rawlings faced the task of how to bring his remains back: in the years after the fall of the USSR, few internationaldonors were willing to build memorials to dead socialist leaders. Finally the Chinese built a monument with red marble and fountains on an empty lot next to the old ParliamentBuilding - and before that the Polo Ground on which Nkrumahhad organised nationalistrallies - and the monument was dedicated, and Nkrumahreburied,in a great spectaclejust before the elections. Prior to that, however, the festishpriest had told Rawlings that the bones were 'too old and too rotten' to make powerful juju, although Rawlings won the election anyway.56The history enshrined in written sources has the same ending but a different account of bodies and burials. When
49 50 51 52 53 'Xhosa Chief Loses Head but Finds the Spirits Willing', The Guardian,22 February1996, p. 8. 'Lost and Found:African King in Scotland?'New YorkTimes, 8 March 1996, p. A4. 'A Headhunterto Banish the Devil', p. 2. 'Skull is not African King's, After All', New YorkTimes, 25 August 1996, p. 11. See Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge,1991), pp. 175-181. 54 D. W. Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo,BuryingSM: The Politics of Knowledgeand the Sociology of Power in Africa (Portsmouth,1992); 'Who Owns the Dead? Science or the Descendants?' Mail and Guardian, 2-8 February1996, pp. 4-5. 55 Mafuranhunzi Gumbo, Guerrilla Snuff (Harare,1995), pp. 3-45. 56 StephanMiescher, personal communication,17 May 1996.

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Nkrumah died he was given a state funeral in Guinea, where he had lived since the Ghanaiancoup of 1966. After repeatednegotiationsbetween the governmentsof Ghanaand Guinea, his body was broughtto Ghana where,it lay in state in Accra before being buried at his birthplace.In 1992 Nkrumah's body was moved to a new memorial in Accra.s7 Any head severed from its owner crosses conceptualas well as political boundaries.In Grahamstown,South Africa, some Xhosa people believed that the head of an old Xhosa chief was buried beneath the huge Anglican cathedralthat dominatedthe city. There was no such skull, an historian of the nineteenthcentury Xhosa reports,but the cathedralwas 'a symbolic statementof the historicaltriumphof settlerdom'.58 My point here is somewhat different, that the metaphoricalis itself the material, and the ideas enshrined in popular consciousness thrive as popular consciousness. The traffic in heads in and out of a now peaceful Mozambiquemust be told in implicit contrastto the accountsof castrationreported by RENAMO's victims.59How a peace process comes to be described in part by different body parts requires more interrogationthan I have done here, but the play of heads and genitals has a wider, regional framework.The returnof women's genitals, at least, is now enshrinedin official consciousness in South Africa. SaartjieBaartman,the HottentotVenus herself, was dissected by the French naturalistCuvier after she died impoverishedin Paris in 1816; her remains were displayed in the Musee de l'homme.60The ANC and Griqua organisationshave recently demandedtheir returnto South Africa: 'What purpose does it serve for her to be stuck away in a dark storeroom?' asked the Secretary of the Griqua National Conference. 'Give her back to us so she can be properlyburied;give her back her 61 dignity and humanity'. According to South Africa's Minister for Arts, Culture, Science and Technology: 'the process of healing and restoring our national dignity and humanity' begun with 'the return of South Africa to the internationalcommunity ... would not be 62 complete while SaartjieBaartman'sremains were still kept in a museum'. The difference between the trafficin heads and the trafficin nineteenthcenturywomen's genitals is in part the difference between officially sanctionednarrativesand their opposite; but it is far less of a difference than it is a tension between different consciousness of body parts and their relationshipto historicalnotions of nationhood,political domination,and regional economies.63

Nowhere is this clearerthan in the history of war and its aftermathin the region, in the lines that blur between trophy head and muti, between mujiba (teenage auxiliaries) and ngozi. Many scholarsof the region have been uneasy with Africans' use of medicine during
57 Adu A. Boahen, Ghana: Evolution and Change in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London, Longman, 1975), pp. 224-226. 58 J. B. Peires, 'Suicide or Genocide?', p. 54. 59 HumanRights Watch, ConspicuousDestruction: War,Famine, and the ReformProcess in Mozambique(New York, 1992), pp. 44-48; K. B. Wilson, 'Cults of Violence and Counter-Violencein Mozambique', Journal of SouthernAfrican Studies, 18, 3 (1992), p. 535. 60 The works that have popularisedSaartjieBaartman'scareer are Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflectionson NaturalHistory (New York, 1985), pp. 291-305, and SanderGilman,Difference and Pathology: Stereotypesof Sexuality,Race and Madness (Ithaca,NY, 1985), pp. 83-88; Londa Schiebinger,Nature's Body. Genderin theMakingof ModernScience (Boston, 1993), pp. 160-172. Baartman dissectedin Parisnot simply was because she died there;Frenchnaturalistswere able to assess race in anatomyin ways their Britishcounterparts could not do, as only convicted murdererswere legally available for dissection in Britain. Cuvier's Scottish contemporary,Robert Knox, had dissected bodies purchasedfrom Burke and Hare, which caused him more notorietythan his racial theories. RobertJ. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridityin Theory,Culture,and Race (London, 1995), pp. 121-122. 61 'ConcernOver "Hottentot Venus"of 1810: Griquaswant to burythe remainsof Khoi woman displayedin France as a freak', The Star [Johannesburg], December 1995, p. 11. 13 62 Press releaseby Dr Ben Ngubane,High Level Discussions to RetrieveSaartjieBaartman'sRemainsfrom France, ANC information < ancdip@wn.apc.org 2 February1996. >, 63 For tensionsbetween consciousness, see TerenceRanger,'TakingHold of the Land:Holy Places andPilgrimages in Twentieth-Century Zimbabwe', Past and Present, 117 (1987), pp. 158-194.

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warfare and combat. Whether local leaders are called social bandits, warlords, or folk heroes their use of muti has often had to be explained or contextualisedby historians.64 But academic anxieties over how to label such men have obscured African beliefs about causality: is a vaccination that makes people invulnerableto bullets a magical or rational way to conduct a military campaign? Do the people so vaccinated disaggregate tactics, strategies and weapons from muti in the way of Western historians?65 they see their Do defeat as the result of superiorweaponryor superiormuti?Muti, after all, effects outcomes, it producesvictory or defeat, or wealth or death. The line between the head taken to display power and the head taken for power is indistinct. While still a student at the University of Dar es Salaam, Y. T. Museveni, who was to become an expert on the political uses of skulls, played off imperial and local categories of invincibility and empiricism:
In a colonial situation,where the master has created the illusion of invincibility by habitually using intimidatorycolonial violence on the people, it is necessary to demonstratethat the enemy can be destroyed... Hence, in Mozambique it has been found necessary to show peasants a fragment of a Portuguese soldier blown up by a mine, or better still the head.66

Such violence was not FRELIMO policy; indeed, FRELIMO's treatment of captured Portuguese soldiers was more generally humanitarian.67 this reason the representation For of the liberator's trophy heads and their power over an imagined peasantryis even more significant:the idea of heads taken is more importantthat the reality of unharmedprisoners of war. The postwar, nationalistnarrativein Zimbabwe demonized mujibas. A wide variety of people, many of them parents, expressed anguish at the deaths ordered by quarrelsome thirteen year olds. One man went so far as to tell Ranger that the guerrillas never killed anyone in Makoni District, only mujibas did.68Whateverthe actual violence of mujibas and by all accounts it was enormous - they themselves were often unarmed,69 and it is possible to read these histories of the liberationstruggleas revisions in which childrenwere scapegoated so that adults could get on with the task of 'reconciliation'.But there are of course many readings of the traffic in children's heads. Such stories may be cruel parodies of the wartime abduction of secondary school students to Zambia and Botswana.70Once again, childrenare said to flood across bordersbut now with adult sanction;such a reading gives a chilling commentaryon the difference between the conduct of war and the conduct

64 For Zimbabwe and its neighbours,this point is made variously in T. 0. Ranger,Revolt in SouthernRhodesia, 1896-7: a Studyin AfricanResistance (London,Heinemann,1967); Allen Isaacmanand Barbara Isaacman,The Traditionof Resistance in Mozambique: Anti-ColonialActivityin the ZambeziValley (London, 1976) and D. N. Beach, Mapondera:Heroism and History in NorthernZimbabwe1840-1904 (Gweru, 1989); Wilson, 'Cults of Violence', pp. 543ff. For a healthyrevision of these argumentssee Steven Feierman,'Healingas Social Criticism in the Time of Colonial Conquest',African Studies, 54, 1 (1995), pp. 73-88. 65 Mutiwas a widespread practicein Zimbabwe'sliberationstruggle,the legitimacyof which had to do with whether or not it was used in wartime.In late 1981 a spiritmediumwas triedfor murderscommittedshortlyafterthe war's end. Several men she had vaccinatedwith the 'leaf of life' testified against her. 'Spiritmedium "toldmurderer he was bullet-proof' ', The Herald, 8 December 1981, p. 1. 66 Y. T. Museveni, 'Fanon'sTheoryon Violence andits Verificationin LiberatedMozambique',in N. Shamuyarira (ed), Essays on the Liberationof SouthernAfrica (Dar es Salaam, 1972), pp. 1-24, quoted in Wilson, 'Cults of Violence', p. 550. 67 Wilson, 'Cults of Violence', pp. 550-551. 68 TerenceRanger,Peasant Consciousnessand GuerrillaWarin Zimbabwe,(London, 1985), pp. 291-292; see also R. S. Roberts, 'The Armed Forces and Chimurenga:Ideology and Historiography',Heritage of Zimbabwe,7 (1987), pp. 31-47; IreneStaunton, Mothersof theRevolution:TheWarExperiences Thirty of Zimbabwean Women (London, 1991), passim. 69 For accountsof teenagers' violence see Lan, Guns and Rain; Kriger,Guerilla War;and Reynolds, Healers and Childhood. For accounts of teenagers' frustrationat being unarmedsee Patricia Hayes and Virginia Tyson, Childrenof History (Harare,1992). 70 Reynolds, Healers and Childhood,pp. 145-151.

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of peace, a reading with which many Zimbabweansmay agree. The traffic in children's heads makes ironic the borders children now cross in the peacetime of liberated southern African states. However grim and horrificthe stories of children'sheads, they are also playful: they are narrated a cost-effective world in which the infant-for-kombi in rate is clearly set, in which no ngozi torment Zimbabweans and no ngozi haunt the women who cross borders with these dreadfulparcels. The traffic in children's heads is an imaginary,ephemeralconstruction in which ordinary people narrate a vision of the past and the present in active contradistinctionto official versions of that past and their present. Its power comes not solely from its grotesquevision, but the fact that it is spoken aloud in ephemeraland trivial stories which people tell, in rumourand gossip, which allow for an unofficial history to be heard.
LUISE WHITE

Woodrow Wilson Center, 1100 Jefferson Drive SW, Washington, DC 20560, USA