presentation to the Senior Seminar, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge,

4 February 2005

[1: title slide]

Diabolical delusions and hysterical narratives in a

postmodern state

Martin T. Walsh
Department of Social Anthropology
University of Cambridge

[2: quote from The Economist]

In 1995 an extraordinary mass hysteria swept across Zanzibar. I happened to be

living there at the time and came away with the ethnographic scraps that you’ll be
hearing shortly. For most of the past decade these notes have been boxed away while
I did other stuff, though I did bring them out a few years ago when internet access
provided new material as well as a chance to explore some of the comparative
literature. Now that I’ve been back in Cambridge for more than a year I’m running
out of excuses not to write some of this up. This is my first attempt. My basic aim is
to provide an overview of the events of 1995 and what I know about them, and to
highlight some of the things that I think are interesting about this particular case.

The problem I set out with in 1995 was how to explain these unusual events. I soon
realised that almost everyone in the affected areas of Zanzibar was asking much the
same question. And initially at least, they came up with a variety of explanations. So
my second problem became how to explain these explanations and understand their
role in the unfolding of events. The garbled account in The Economist that you see
here represents a recent development of the explanation that has taken hold among
foreign journalists and other commentators. It presents “the occult” as a mirror of
anxiety and perhaps even a predictor of political terror (the article winds up in the
next paragraph by referring to Zanzibari links with Al-Quaeda and the threat of
terrorist attack in this tourist mecca). These are topical themes - they have to be for
The Economist - and I’ll return to them later.

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[3: hysterical book covers]

My third problem - at least when I began thinking about these things - was to relate
events on Zanzibar - and their explanation - to the wider literature on mass hysteria
and related phenomena. I’ll make some connections today but not as many as I
perhaps could, and I’ve become wary of attempts to establish typologies of these
collective events or standard templates of explanation. In this talk I’ll use the words
‘hysteria’ and ‘panic’ in a loose and largely colloquial way. Ditto ‘narrative’ and
‘discourse’, though I guess that I can’t and probably don’t want to cast off all of the
intellectual baggage that comes with them.

Anyway, let me take you there.

[4: Zanzibar historical milestones]

First some background information. Zanzibar is a semi-autonomous state within the

United Republic of Tanzania. It comprises two main islands - Unguja and Pemba -
and a number of smaller islets in the Indian Ocean. The capital, Zanzibar town, is
located on Unguja, the largest island.

Zanzibar has been through a series of colonialisms, Portuguese, Omani Arab, and
British. The British abolished slavery but retained the sultanate that had built its
success on the back of slave trading and slave labour. When the British departed they
handed power over to an Arab-dominated government which was overthrown the
following month in a bloody revolution, the defining event of Zanzibar’s modern
history. Zanzibar became a quasi-socialist state ruled by President (and to some
dictator) Abeid Amani Karume and his Afro-Shirazi Party, originally named for the
islands’ mixed indigenous and ex-mainland (including ex-slave) population.

Shortly after the Revolution Karume agreed to the union of Zanzibar with Nyerere’s
Tanganyika, establishing what some Zanzibaris see as another colonialism. But
Karume and his immediate successors retained a tight grip on the internal affairs of
Zanzibar. The islands remained largely closed to outsiders (including foreign
researchers) until economic liberalisation began take effect and the government

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started to welcome significant numbers of western aid workers and tourists in the
1990s. Zanzibar’s economic and political transition has, however, been a troubled
one and the islands remain deeply divided between supporters of CCM, the
“Revolutionary Party” that has ruled all of Tanzania since the one-party era and CUF,
the Civic United Front, which dominates Pemban politics and is now the nation’s
main opposition party.

The Economist and other published sources make muddled reference to different
episodes of diabolical terror and mass hysteria in post-Revolutionary Zanzibar. As far
as I know there have only been three, and the mother of recent spiritual plagues took
place in 1995, in the run-up to Tanzania’s first multi-party elections, which were held
in October of that year.

[5: Popobawa chronology, 1995]

In the first week of Ramadhan, the month of daytime fasting, men and women in and
around the southern Pemban port town of Mkoani began to complain of nocturnal
spiritual assaults. The culprit was subsequently identified as a sheitani, evil spirit, and
given the name Popobawa, a label which people remembered from a similar panic in
the years following the Revolution.

A typical assault involved somebody waking up in the night to find themselves being
attacked by an amorphous or shape-shifting intruder, which was most frequently
described as “pressing” or “crushing” their chest and ribs, and of suffocating them
until they had difficulty in breathing and passed out. Other unusual events might
precede or accompany or perhaps replace this standard experience: including strange
sights, sounds, smells and other sensations. (One of my favourites is the man who
woke up with a start to the sound of an alarm bell, looked to one side and saw a tiny
dog with a rotating green light on its head. He then watched in silence, struck
completely dumb, while this dog itself began to revolve, turning faster and faster,
getting bigger and bigger as it did so, and the light on its head becoming brighter and
brighter. This whirling illuminated growing dog subsequently turned into a human
giant so tall that his head and shoulders were invisible.) Sometimes the victims were
children, subjected to the kinds of abuse that we might associate ourselves with a

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poltergeist. In general all of the victims experienced extreme terror, and were often
frozen speechless when they were assaulted.

Their plight might be recognised by their sleeping partners, who might also be
attacked in turn. This happened to people who didn’t ordinarily have possessing
spirits as well as those who did. (Zanzibar is in the middle of a spirit possession
‘complex’ that spreads from Somalia in the north to northern Madagascar in the
south). However, household members and neighbours who did have possessing
spirits were liable to go into trance when Popobawa was about and when they did so
their spirits would identify and challenge Popobawa and cry out to alert others of his
presence. The general scene was often one of pandemonium breaking out until
Popobawa moved on. The spirit or spirits (mapopobawa) might attack many homes
simultaneously, in the same or different parts of the town or countryside.

The attacks spread across Pemba and people began spending the nights outside of
their houses, trying to stay awake huddled around open fires. At first, because it was
Ramadhan, people were unable to resort to waganga, local doctors, to divine their
troubles or help protect them. In some cases - and I’m not sure whether this was
during or after Ramadhan - individual communities were believed to have
successfully repelled Popobawa because they possessed superior guardian spirits.
Occasionally people took matters into their own hands, and local mobs beat up
suspected manifestations of Popobawa - usually unkempt and inarticulate men with
mental health problems who were found wandering about at night.

After two months the panic was dying down on Pemba. By then it had spread to
Zanzibar town on the main island of Unguja. Here both the assaults and the popular
response took a more violent turn. Popobawa began to sodomise his male and female
victims, and several alleged Popobawas were killed by angry mobs. The most
notorious of these incidents took place in Zanzibar town. The body of the victim was
displayed for all to see in the government hospital and his parents were interviewed
on state television to verify that he was a mainlander who had come to Zanzibar to
seek treatment for a mental health problem. The crowds of people that filed past his
body were generally unconvinced by this explanation: the government had no doubt

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substituted Popobawa with a real corpse and persuaded the alleged parents to say it
was their son’s.

Within a couple of weeks of this incident Popobawa - or all 70 of them on some

counts - had moved north out of town, and eventually the attacks fizzled out without
spreading to villages on the south and east of the island. They did, however, spread to
at least one quarter in Dar es Salaam (where many Zanzibaris live), and perhaps also
to Tanga and Mombasa, though I couldn’t confirm this at the time. On Pemba the
episode lasted about two months, before ravaging Zanzibar town and north-west
Unguja for a third month . The terror ended on the islands almost six months before
the October 1995 elections took place.

[6: home in Limbani]

At the time of these events I was living in Pemba, at Limbani on the outskirts of the
northern town of Wete. However, when Popobawa was working his way up the
island I was away travelling, and didn’t hear about it until I was heading back after
the end of Ramadhan. My first impression was of the intensity of talk about
Popobawa. This was, after all, the main means by which Popobawa narratives spread:
there were then no newspapers on Pemba and, as far as I’m aware, no mention of
Popobawa on state radio until the first killing in Zanzibar town.

In keeping with the finest standards of our profession, I was fast asleep on the night
that Limbani suffered its greatest crisis. I learned afterwards that the whole
community had been in an uproar, and that Popobawa had even come calling on me.
One of my watchmen, Salim, told me how in the middle of the night he’d been
confronted by the sight of a quivering white dog at the open entrance to the compound.
It ran off but Salim’s suspicions were raised. Shortly afterwards another strange
animal, unknown to Salim, appeared in the same place, and shook in the same odd
way before departing. The third and last visitor was a diminutive man, a dwarf who
trembled like his predecessors. When Salim made to move towards this hobbit it
danced and hopped around the Land Rovers parked in the garden before making off.
This was too much for Salim and he too bolted off into the night, making a beeline for
the nearby main road and the houses on the other side of it. In his somewhat sheepish

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account of these events he told me that he’d run off to check that his own wife and
children were alright. My neighbours, who were up and outside their own house at
the time, later confirmed that Salim had indeed sprinted across the road in the dead of
night. Their first reaction was to panic, thinking that the fleeing Salim was Popobawa.

[7: Jamila’s notebook]

I interpreted this as a wake-up call and resolved to find out more. My principal
source of information was another neighbour, a married woman in her early 30s, who
asked not to be identified because of the political content of this and subsequent work
that we did together. In less than a fortnight in April 1995 Jamila filled a series of
exercise books with Popobawa incidents and related commentary based on her own
interviews with workmates, friends and relatives in Wete. I’m using this as the basis
of my presentation today, though I’ve also woven in material from other interviews
and sources on both islands, including information gathered since. Jamila’s
compilation was by far the most comprehensive, though it clearly gives a Wete point
of view and there is understandably less detail on incidents in Zanzibar town and
elsewhere on Unguja.

One of the many striking features of Jamila’s meta-narrative is her account of how
explanations for what was happening during the 1995 episode developed over time,
and I’ll run through these now.

[8: Mkoani map]

The Swahili name Popobawa (p’opo-bawa) translates literally as ‘wing-bat’ or

‘winged bat’, said to be a reference to the ominous outline or dark shadow cast by this
evil spirit at night. People trace the name (and in some cases the spirit) back to an
earlier episode of panic that took place in the south of Pemba following the 1964
Revolution. This Popobawa sodomised both men and women, terrorising Mkoani and
its environs for a month or more, until, on some accounts, Karume himself came to
the island and challenged the spirit to come to him at night (it didn’t). Otherwise
there is little agreement on the details of this episode including its dating during
Karume’s rule.

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Jamila gave the year as 1965. A neighbour told her that as many as ten people were
then being assaulted every night in Mkoani. Diviners attributed this to an evil spirit
(sheitani) but the placatory offerings that they recommended had no effect. Then one
diviner declared that the real culprit was not a kind of spirit (jini or sheitani) but a
person using ‘medicines’ to perform sorcery. Some people accepted this
interpretation but others ridiculed it. The government intervened and a group of
elders appointed by the President determined that the cause of the problem was a man
of Makonde (Mozambican) origin who had resorted to sorcery to take revenge on
Pemba for being forced to divorce his estranged Pemban wife. He was caught and
brought before Karume before being paraded around Pemba on a lorry and then
gaoled for life.

To Jamila and another informant, the only significance of this first Popobawa panic
was that it provided an analogy and therefore a name for whatever it was that was
assaulting the residents of Mkoani in 1995. The two modes of assault were quite
different: whereas the earlier Popobawa sodomised his male and female victims, the
Popobawa that attacked Pembans in 1995 merely crushed and frightened them,
penetrating their bedrooms but not their bodies. (Although some informants from
Unguja doubted this asexual account of Pembans recent suffering, suspecting that
they were too coy to reveal that they had been anally raped).

This labelling of Popobawa in 1995 didn’t explain why it was happening and who or
what was behind it. According to Jamila people in southern Pemba considered a
number of possibilities. The most alluring explanation to emerge was that Popobawa
was the work of a spurned witch-finder known as Tekelo. Tekelo had plied his trade
on the mainland since at least the early ‘80s, moving from community to community
with a team of assistants and rooting out witches in classic fashion. In the early ‘90s
he came across to Zanzibar and was invited to Pemba by the inhabitants of Chokocho,
a village in the south. However, his visit to the island, widely reputed to be a
powerful centre of witchcraft and wizardry, was not entirely successful. In Pemba
alleged witches are generally not accused openly or subjected to any sanctions:
they’re just the subject of gossip and a mixture of fear and admiration for their powers.
So, seeing their grandmothers turned out of their homes and humiliated in public was

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too much for some communities and they sent Tekelo packing without paying his fees.
Others were dismayed that when he left Pemba there was no apparent reduction in the
total sum of illness and misfortune, and they too branded him a charlatan. When
Popobawa went on the rampage people speculated that the devil had been sent from
the mainland by Tekelo, either in revenge for his own humiliation or as a ruse to
create more work for himself on Pemba.

[9: Chake Chake map]

This explanation didn’t follow Popobawa as the hysteria travelled northwards. In the
central town of Chake Chake a different theory was revealed as follows. During a
spiritual assault on a married couple one of their neighbours went into a possession
trance and her spirit struggled violently with the phantom intruder until he fled. The
good spirit then called for a local medium and explained to him what the cause of the
island’s current miseries really was. A couple of years before a whale had been found
beached on the shore and people came from far and wide to cut out portions of its
flesh and blubber. Meanwhile a woman in Chake Chake went into trance and her
spirit declared that this whale was in fact the child of a larger spirit, warning people
not to eat it or else. Needless to say a lot of people took no notice. Returning now to
the 1995: the good spirit that had just repelled a spiritual intruder identified the earlier
transgression against the whale’s mother as the cause of contemporary attacks that
people were labelling Popobawa. And it went on to suggest that people should take
special offerings of food down to the shore to placate the dead whale’s spirit-mother.

This revelation rejected any identification with the original Popobawa because he’d
sodomised his victims whereas the phantom of 1995 didn’t. But the whale’s revenge
was never more than another localised explanation.

[10: Wete map]

In Jamila’s narrative - and the accounts of everyone else I asked on Pemba - the real
explanation for Popobawa didn’t emerge until the hysteria had reached Wete in the
north. During one of many mini-hysterias in the town the possessing spirit of a local
woman announced that the culprits were certain unnamed politicians, members of the

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ruling party (CCM), who had brought 70 spirits to the island to harass people and
distract them from talking about and becoming involved in politics. Wete and the
surrounding district was the stronghold of the opposition CUF party, supported by the
great majority of Pembans and at that time engaged in a bitter struggle with the CCM-
controlled administration to be allowed to operate freely and prepare for the coming
national elections. Indeed when the Wete District Commissioner heard that people
were speculating about the identity of the CCM politicians alluded to by the spirit, he
locked nine people up and charged them with insulting government leaders. People
refused the DC’s suggestion that they recruit a local doctor to prepare medicines to
counteract Popobawa, and thereafter the number of nocturnal assaults in and around
the town increased.

On the night of the 12th of March there was a big event in Limbani, with multiple
assaults and a frenzy of spirit possession that saw the possessed running wildly
through the village and down into the surrounding rice valleys. (This was the night
that Salim fled from my home compound). The immediate cause of this was
afterwards thought to have been the actions of a group of local youths who were
prominent among the victims of assault that night. They had hurled insults at a
passing vehicle whose erratic movements back and forth over the previous three days
had led villagers to suspect that it was being used to transport nocturnal assailants.
(The youths had actually cried out “There go the bats (mipopo), there they go! God
will curse you!”). This vehicle belonged to a CCM MP, and after Limbani’s worst
night speculation grew in Wete that another vehicle, belonging to a CCM member of
the House of Representatives, was also being used to spread Popobawa along the road
in this way. According to Jamila the idea that CCM politicians were responsible for
this whole affair then spread throughout the island.

A collective response was organised in Wete. Residents of the town contributed to a

fund to pay for the services of local doctors, who were called out to capture the evil
spirits as soon as people became aware of their presence in a home or neighbourhood.
Special prayers were also read in the Friday mosque and a variety of other prayers and
ritual offerings were organised by the elders of Wete. Consequently numerous
Popobawas were trapped and in some cases interrogated with the help of possessing
spirits. On a number of occasions the evil spirits identified themselves as having been

9
sent by Pemba’s leading CCM politician, who was Zanzibar’s Chief Minister, and
thereafter in many people’s eyes the chief cause of Popobawa. He was alleged to
have brought Popobawa from the mainland, and the wide extent of the political
conspiracy appeared to be confirmed when some of the trapped spirits declared that
they had come from ex-President Nyerere’s home village in northern Tanzania.

[11: Zanzibar town map]

When reports came back to Pemba that Popobawa had begun to sodomise his victims
in Zanzibar town, some people interpreted this as just revenge on the CCM-
supporting population that had sent the evil spirits to them in the first place. The
spirits had been expelled from Pemba and were now turning against their owners.

Otherwise the theory that Popobawa had begun as a CCM conspiracy spread
everywhere that there was strong support for CUF, and that meant throughout Pemba
and also across to Zanzibar town and north-west Unguja, where there were many
Pembans living as well as other supporters of CUF (ditto particular neighbourhoods in
Dar es Salaam and Tanga on the mainland). Although this became the explanation for
Popobawa in most Pemban narratives, it wasn’t the only one. In the heart of
Zanzibar’s Stone Town, a notorious focus of CUF activism, it was widely believed
that the multiple Popobawas were the spirits that had possessed Karume during his
lifetime, and that they had come to remind people of their existence and chastise them
for neglect. Their sodomising of mainly male victims was linked to persistent
rumours about the late Karume’s sexual prowess: it was averred that he was endowed
with a larger than average penis and that women who slept with him (there were said
to be many of them) would no longer desire other men.

Despite the fact that Zanzibar town was the seat of government, the administration
and other CCM supporters there failed to counter the Popobawa narratives that
worked against them, including the widespread belief that they had spirited away the
first Popobawa that people had killed. With the help of religious leaders and the state-
controlled media the government tried to curb the spread of the panic and the
outbreaks of mob violence that went with it. It’s possible that this did play a part in

10
shortening the career and minimising the impact of Popobawa on Unguja. But neither
the government nor conservative Muslim clerics there came up with a counter-
narrative that could match the power of the conspiracy theory from Pemba.

In Wete and elsewhere on Pemba it was easy to believe that CCM’s campaign of
spiritual assault had ended because people and their companion spirits had recognised
it for what it really was and taken appropriate counter-steps. For some time
afterwards I myself was beguiled by an agnostic version of the same thesis, and
suspected that the hysteria had indeed ended on Pemba once people came up with a
convincing and widely-agreed explanation for it - as though the conspiracy theory
functioned like a kind of scaled-up collective ‘talking cure’. But I’m not so sure now,
and find it equally possible that the panic metaphorically burned itself out as it spread
from community to community and quarter to quarter, exhausting the pool of
potential victims and witnesses in each one as it passed through (that is, the pool of
people susceptible, for whatever reasons, to having or reporting the appropriate
experiences).

The narratives of Popobawa were explained in terms of existing discourses that could
be convincingly related to them, that could swallow them up and be nourished by
them in turn. Most of these explanations were localised, restricted to and reflecting
particular histories in particular areas: Popobawa as a witch-finder’s trick or revenge;
a spirit-whale’s revenge; or the anger of Karume’s neglected and oversexed spirits.
On Pemba and among Pembans everywhere it was ultimately folded up into the
political discourse that was then dominating Pemban life, one that could now explain
their spiritual and moral suffering as well as their economic and other woes.

Appropriately enough, this explanation seems to have emerged through the intended
and unintended participation of a large number of ordinary men and women: among
them victims, witnesses, both male and female spirits, local doctor-diviners and other
interpreters and narrators, an apparently democratic genealogy that underlay Jamila’s
composite narrative and now informs mine. The role of women and their possessing
spirits is especially noticeable, though the gender of these spirits as well as of other
actors in Popobawa narratives is often erased by the lack of male/female gender
markers in Swahili, the language of their telling. As it first unfolded on Pemba this

11
was a people’s panic which resisted official attempts to control it and was not
consciously engineered by opposition politicians, though CUF supporters were later
able to make good use of a conspiracy theory that stigmatised CCM and bolstered
their own political narrative.

This kind of manipulation was much more evident following the 1995 episode and
especially in the run-up to the general elections in 2000. By this time the idea that
Popobawa was a political phenomenon linked to election campaigns had become
firmly established. It was widely rumoured that Tanzania’s President Mkapa had
been forced to abandon campaigning and flee Zanzibar after spending a painful night
in the company of a number of vengeful spirits. And photocopies of a newspaper
cartoon that showed half-clad CCM members in desperate flight from Popobawa were
widely distributed at CUF rallies. Otherwise the implicit prophecy that Popobawa
would return during these elections was barely fulfilled. A few incidents were
reported from east-central Pemba, but that was about it. This is not, however, how the
international media treated Popobawa’s links to political prophecy, as we’ll see
shortly.

[12: Guardian quote]

I’ve managed to get this far without using the words ‘globalisation’ and ‘modernity’
or ‘modernities’. The politicised Popobawa of mid-1995 was readily incorporated
into offshore meta-narratives, and I’ll quickly take you through some chronologically-
ordered slides to show you how this has happened.

An article by Chris McGreal in The Guardian in October 1995 set the ball rolling.
Among other things this reported the connection that some people were then making
between the appearance of Popobawa and periods of political tension. But this
statement and many of the details in the article were progressively mangled and
converted into more appealing narratives as it was copied by other journalists and
writers.

[13: ‘Buggered by Batman’]

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This was especially so as the internet grew in importance. Popobawa stories took off
big-time after the 2000 elections.

[14: French website]

[15: X-Project website]

As well as being a subject for the news and ethnocentric political comment,
Popobawa was also admitted into the global pantheon of occult beings, and many of
the websites that have Borgesian lists of strange and mythical creatures now include
passages about the hybrid Popobawa shown in this fanciful artist’s image (which is
based on McGreal’s description of how it was drawn in a Zanzibar market).

[16: ‘Sodomizing poltergeist’]

When you move down to more personal sites and blogs, salaciousness comes to the
fore. The last of the sites here, with its reference to “the popobawa bumsex index to
political stress” bring us back round to where I started this paper, the article in the The
Economist.

[17: The Economist]

These external appropriations of Popobawa have taken place at some remove from
local constructions. They speak to our own organising narratives, whether they be
about politics, the occult, sex, or a combination of all three. As far as I know these
haven’t impacted significantly on everyday Zanzibari discourses about Popobawa,
though it’s quite possible that they will.

Let me move now into a quite different frame for explaining Popobawa.

[18: sleep paralysis images]

As you may know, there’s usually a biomedical explanation lurking somewhere in the
vicinity of reconstructions of mass hysteria. In the case of Popobawa, and in

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particular the experiences of many of his victims, this is sleep paralysis (SP). If the
surveys are right - and most of them have been conducted with university students -
then 25-30% or more of the people in this room will have experienced mild sleep
paralysis at least once in their adult lives, though far fewer may have suffered (or
enjoyed) the intense hallucinations that can accompany SP.

SP happens in the twilight between sleeping and waking, and, as the name suggests,
typically involves a feeling of complete bodily paralysis, including a perceived
inability to cry out, even though the sufferer may be lucid and aware of people and
objects around them. This is often accompanied by the terrifying sensation that
someone or something evil is pressing down on your chest. A relatively small
number of sufferers have the vivid hallucinations that I mentioned, sometimes
elaborated into nightmare-like sequences which can include OBEs and other alarming
phenomena. (If anyone wants to follow this up I recommend starting with Al
Cheyne’s site; also a recent article in the journal Folklore by Owen Davies on the role
of SP in European witchcraft accusations).

SP was first brought to the attention of the wider academic community as a possible
explanation for folk traditions of supernatural assault by David Hufford and others in
the 1980s, and it has since been invoked to explain everything ranging from the lamia
of classical mythology, the incubi and succubi of more recent history, and
contemporary reports of alien encounters, abduction and invasive experimentation.
Although I’ve since had - or thought I had - ordinary SP just once, I wasn’t aware of
SP and the literature on it until an anthropologist working for the Discovery Channel
sounded me out on the possibility of including a segment on Popobawa in a
documentary about alien abduction.

As it turns out, SP fits Popobawa experiences even better than it does alien abduction.
Joe Nickell, writing in Skeptical Briefs (Newsletter, not underwear), was the first to
make this connection after reading the Guardian article. Many of the narratives of
assault collected by Jamila exhibit the phenomenology of classic SP, notably the
general bodily paralysis and crushing pressure on the ribs that many victims
complained of. A strong case can be made for the possible role of SP even without
extending the argument to other experiences that could be interpreted as SP-linked

14
hallucinations. Although I wasn’t aware of its significance at the time, my watchman
Salim one day told me that the unpleasant experience described by many of
Popobawa’s victims also occurs in a kind of nightmare called and personified as
jinamizi. Descriptions of this make it clear that it’s the local term for SP.

Better still, it’s known that SP is more likely to occur when subjects are anxious
and/or their sleep patterns are disturbed; indeed disturbing them in the laboratory is a
common way of inducing SP. The collapse of the clove economy in the early 1990s,
most deeply felt in the south-west of Pemba and Mkoani district, left many
households in dire economic straits, and people’s anxieties were further exacerbated
by the worsening political situation as CUF and CCM waged an increasingly violent
campaign against one another in advance of the first multi-party elections. Ramadhan
is an especially stressful time for many people, in part because of its own economic
demands, and sleep patterns are disturbed anyway because of the physical demands of
fasting and the need to break sleep in order to eat.

Perhaps then Ramadhan was readymade for an increased incidence of SP, even more
so once the fear generated by the interpretation of SP as diabolical assault had itself
kicked in. Unfortunately this can be no more than supposition based on
circumstantial evidence. And although some data exist on cross-cultural variations in
the incidence of SP, there’s next to nothing on how the incidence in a single
community might change in response to external events. Nonetheless, there are cases
of mass hysteria in the literature that resemble Popobawa in that they also suggest a
significant role for SP. One of these is that of another evil intruder, the Phantom
Anaesthetist of Mattoon, Illinois.

[19: contrasting mass hysteria cases]

However you stretch it though, SP can’t easily explain all of the phenomenologies
associated with Popobawa, including the frequent “possession hysteria” and incidents
like Salim’s close encounter with Popobawa. My own interpretation of Salim’s
experience is that he was most likely reinterpreting mundane events (like the
appearance of a white dog) to match his fear of encountering Popobawa. My
favourite example of this in the literature is the Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic

15
of 1954, in which many people attributed the glass bubbles and other imperfections
that they saw on their car windscreens to atomic fallout from hydrogen bomb tests. I
don’t mean to suggest that all of Popobawa can be explained as mass delusion, but I
do think we can ask what anxieties or other influences might have shaped the
experiences that victims, witnesses, the spirits of the possessed, and others reported.
One way of looking at this is as a search for the sources of particular images and plots
in different Popobawa narratives and meta-narratives.

Already I can see several kinds of social and historical narrative, particular discourses,
that seem to have influenced and brought their own anxieties and desires into personal
narratives of Popobawa. I’ve yet to explore these in the kind of detail that I’d like to,
and there may be more, not to mention a better way of describing them and how they
overlap and intertwine.

[20: Zanzibar Ghost Stories]

First there are other narratives of unusual and often frightening phenomena and events,
those that we ourselves would classify as “occult” and that the western-influenced
author of Zanzibar Ghost Stories has also recognised. This, incidentally, is the only
Zanzibari source I’ve seen or heard that uses the name “Dracula” in referring to
Popobawa. The local term for cinematic vampires (nyonya-damu, literally “blood-
sucker”) is otherwise never used in this context. However, there have been cinemas
on both islands for many years, and Zanzibar had one of the first television stations in
Africa, which still broadcasts to the town and shows pirated videos borrowed (I
assume) from local stores. So it’s quite possible that images from horror films crept
unannounced into Popobawa experiences and the narratives of them. Scenes and
themes from folktales and stories about strange happenings clearly do recur in
Popobawa; and I’ve shown here one of those that does (about a child mysteriously
transported outside of the house at night).

[21: homosexuality in Zanzibar]

A second obvious category is discourses about homosexuality, especially those that

centre on Zanzibar town, where the 1995 Popobawa turned to sodomise his mainly

16
male victims. If the enactment of legislation is anything to go by, then homophobia is
growing in Zanzibar, at least in some of the corridors of power both political and
religious. This evident anxiety about homosexuality both male and female is
especially marked in a town in which flamboyant gay men are welcome to participate
and flaunt themselves in women’s taarab dances and where a small number of well-
known cross-dressers can - or until recently could - walk the streets at night and meet
with you and me in bars. These local celebrations of difference have a long history
that links them to similar practices in Oman. I won’t speculate now on exactly how
and why discourses about homosexuality have penetrated Popobawa, but this is
clearly an important influence and one which is both separate from and connected to
the more overtly political discourses that I’ll come to shortly.

It must also be significant in this context that Popobawa has become the subject of
jokes and other kinds of humour and verbal mischief. Despite (or perhaps because of)
the fear that Popobawa generated in 1995, his name was already then being
domesticated in this way, as McGreal’s early Guardian article makes clear. Many of
the jokes play upon the sexual content of Popobawa narratives - “Have you heard the
one about the hanithi, the passive male homosexual, who ran out into the street
complaining that he’d been sleeping in the nude all week but still hadn’t been visited
by Popobawa?” Some playful usages turn more subtly on the idea of Popobawa as an
unwanted intruder or invasive agent, similar to our own use of “bugger” and “bugger
up”. (There’s an internet chatroom restricted to expatriate and other Zanzibaris in
which guests are referred to as Popobawa). All this is consistent with the way in
which Zanzibaris usually joke and talk about sex with people they know well,
including people of the opposite sex. But I also think that it suggests a demotic
scepticism about the original hysterical narratives of Popobawa, and one that
undermines their overt politicisation.

[22: domestic slaves]

My third major source for Popobawa narratives are historical memories of suffering.
David Parkin has already speculated on this aspect of Popobawa in a paper published
last year in a collection edited by John Clammer and others called Figured Worlds:
Ontological Obstacles in Intercultural Relations. Parkin uses the events of 1995 to

17
frame his discussion of “Provenances in the Making of Zanzibari Politics”, this being
the subtitle of his paper. He asks, and I quote:

“What are such extensive spirit movements about? If spirits are sometimes
mnemonics recalling the past, does Popobawa recreate the fears and terror of the
oppression and brutality suffered by the people of Zanzibar during and since
slavery, a subject normally too delicate to be mentioned? If we regard the
Popobawa movement as part of the political election in Zanzibar and not just as
an accidental prelude to it, then it can indeed be regarded as a continuing
trajectory of communal violence that continues into the present.
During the 1995 election campaign, a surfeit of past events was worked into
rhetorical promises of a better future, bringing together old fears and new
possibilities. Would there be another massacre, not just of political parties
against each other but of ‘racial’ groups or kabila? This fear was presented not
as a forumlaic political argument, but as what we translate as imagined suffering
and terror, a kind of emotional pre-emptive strike, clearing the spiritual ground
before the argument of political campaign began. It as if people knew that
issues of power are not settled by rational debate but by past and present
resentments of privation and oppression.” (2004: 115-116)

I don’t agree with the statement that Zanzibaris normally find their historical
sufferings “too delicate to be mentioned”. The problem rather has been that since the
Revolution there have been some topics that government has forbidden open
discussion of, in particular the events of the Revolution itself. And this relates, of
course, to people’s readiness to see Popobawa as another means by which the
government was trying to silence them. More importantly, though, I disagree with the
implication that Popobawa was in some sense an integral and inevitable component of
the intense politicking of 1995. Elsewhere Parkin refers to Popobawa as “a spirit that
has a habit of sweeping across large areas of the Zanzibar islands of Unguja… and
Pemba at times of political crisis” (2004: 114). My argument rather is that Popobawa
was progressively politicised in 1995, but didn’t start out as an explicitly party
political animal. However, I do agree with Parkin’s argument that historical
memories of suffering have infused understandings of Popobawa, and argue that this

18
has happened both directly and indirectly as different narrators have consciously or
unconsciously made use of these earlier narratives in producing their own.

[23: Okello’s book and Makonde]

Parkin draws particular attention to the role of memories of slavery and the deep
ethnic divisions that stem from this period and continue to mark Zanzibaris’ different
perceptions of themselves and others. I think that an equal and perhaps stronger case
can be made for the role of memories of the Revolution of 1964, because this was the
event which more than any other crystallised previous conflicts and continues to
dominate the political landscape of Zanzibar.

Indeed some Popobawa narratives do seem to echo the terrors that the Revolution
brought. I’ve already mentioned that in Jamila’s account the violent Popobawa
episode that followed shortly after the Revolution was eventually blamed on a
Makonde man. The Makonde were originally slaves and immigrant labourers from
Mozambique and to many Zanzibaris they are represented as archetypal savages, non-
believers marked by deep facial scarification and the wearing of large lip-plugs. In
the early days of the Revolution a number of Makonde were employed to do the dirty
work of the Revolution’s unexpected leader, the self-styled Field Marshal Okello.
Okello’s Makonde henchmen spent some time on Pemba, where they are said to have
terrorised the inhabitants of Mkoani and the south in particular. Is it a coincidence
that the first Popobawa, a brutalising spirit that also ravaged Mkoani, was blamed on a
Makonde? (Or blamed at least in Jamila’s narrative - so far I haven’t been able to
find archival or other confirmation of the story of his arrest and punishment). There
are too many ifs and buts here, but nonetheless a possible link with the political terror,
if not just everyday representations of savagery.

[24: Zanzibar Revolution massacre]

Another possible connection can be drawn with the widely reported story that during
the 1995 hysteria the inhabitants of the village of Vitongoji on Pemba were beaten
with sticks by a phantom assailant despite the fact that they were awake and sitting up
outside their houses. The first few years of the Revolution are known to Pembans as

19
“siku za bakora”, “the days of the stick”, a reference to the frequent beatings that they
received and the public humiliations, imprisonment, torture and unexplained
disappearances that occurred at the time. Vitongoji was the location of an army camp
that was established in 1964, one of three designed to help quell opposition to the
Revolution. Soldiers based there reported being beaten by invisible sticks as well as
suffering numerous other kinds of spiritual assault. These were blamed on the fact
that the camp had been built adjacent to a traditional witches’ meeting-place, where
the local spirits had already been angered by the construction of a new school. The
caning and other unpleasant experiences were their revenge. Were then the 1995
beatings themselves revenge for these earlier phantom assaults on the military? Or
did they represent a memory of the violence and beatings that Pembans had really
suffered in the 1960s? Again, we have no way of being certain, but the evidence is
suggestive.

Let me then try to wind up. Contemporary anxieties may or may not help to generate
sleep paralysis and other experiences that lend themselves to “occult” interpretation.
But historical and other social memories, phobias, terrors, and related anxieties most
likely do influence the content of hysterical narratives, and in the case of Popobawa
some of these - but by no means all - prefigured their subsequent explanation in
narrow political terms. Whatever imaginary flapping or flickering shadow of a bat’s
wing, or diabolical delusion, conjured up Popobawa in 1995, later narratives suggest
that the hysteria was not at first explained with reference to party politics. But it
surely reflected and refracted political and other discourses more generally as
individual nightmares were converted - through the memories and voices of victims,
the spirits of the possessed and their various interpreters - into a frightening - but
perhaps never-to-be-repeated-in-quite-the-same-way - episode in Zanzibar’s
collective political nightmare.

[25: Zanzibar Leopard]

However, this isn’t every Zanzibari’s narrative of terror and is treated quite differently
when many of them now talk and tell jokes about Popobawa. On both islands there
are other narratives of oppression by what we - but not me - might call “the occult”;
narratives that have been woven in and out of moral and political discourse for much

20
longer. These include elaborate narratives about witchcraft and zombies that Pemba
in particular has been famous for since at least the period of Omani Arab hegemony,
and conceivably before. And the villages of south and east Unguja, where Popobawa
failed to penetrate in 1995, have their own folk devil, an endemic but probably now
extinct subspecies of leopard that is the instrument of witches and whose persecution
peaked in a government-sanctioned campaign of witch-finding and leopard-killing
that followed the 1964 Revolution…

[26: advertisement for forthcoming seminars]

…and, as you can see, that’s something else that I’m working on.

21
Slide 1 Diabolical
delusions and
hysterical
narratives in a
postmodern
state
Martin Walsh

Zanzibar
Slide 2 Terror, tourism and odd beliefs
Superstition as a political barometer
The Economist, 13 December 2003

FEW readers of The Economist, one would imagine, have seen a one-eyed dwarf
with bat-like wings, pointed ears and sharpened talons. Even fewer are likely to
have been sodomised by one. Many of the people of Zanzibar, however, sincerely
believe in Popobawa, an incubus who supposedly rapes men who doubt his
existence. Isolated sightings are reported every year. Locals say that Popobawa
appears accompanied by a puff of smoke, usually on Pemba, the smaller of the
spice islands that make up this semi-autonomous part of Tanzania.
At times of stress, Popobawa seems to go on a rampage. So many people report
seeing him that ordinary life in some villages stops. Men sleep arm-in-arm
outside their houses, in the belief that not being in bed makes them less
vulnerable. There were said to be numerous attacks before and after Zanzibar's
president was assassinated in 1972, and again in 2000 and 2001, coinciding with
a rigged and violent election.
Popobawa may be mythical, but reports of sightings give a useful insight into the
Zanzibari mood. The incubus was seen in November, prompting a local
spiritualist to predict that “bad men will do bad things here next year [and] people
will die.”
It is possible. Tensions have been simmering in Zanzibar since the police killed
39 opposition supporters in early 2001. The island's mostly poor and Muslim
population feels marginalised. Secessionist mutterings are growing louder...

Slide 3

22
Slide 4 Some milestones:
mid-19thC: heyday of Omani Arab rule
1890: British Protectorate declared
1897: slavery abolished

1963: Independence (10 Dec.)

1964: Zanzibar Revolution (12 Jan.)
1964: Union with Tanganyika (26 Apr.)
19??: original Popobawa (Pemba)
1972: Karume assassinated (7 Apr.)

1984: economic liberalisation begun

Population of Zanzibar:
1998: 640,685 (Pemba: 264,812)
2002: 984,625 (Pemba: 362,166)
1992: multiparty politics introduced
1995: mass Popobawa (Feb.-May)
1995: general election (22 Oct.)
1999: Commonwealth agreement (9 June)
2000: 2nd multiparty election (29 Oct.)
2000-01: ‘election’ Popobawa (Pemba)
2001: mass protests and violence (27 Jan.)
2001: CCM-CUF agreement (10 Oct.)
2005: 3rd multiparty election (Oct.)

Slide 5 Popobawa chronology, 1995

Pemba
2 Feb: holy month of Ramadhan begins
? 1st week of Feb: Popobawa attacks in Mkoani
3 Mar: Idd ul Fitr begins, fast ends
12 Mar: night of crisis in Limbani, Wete
29 Mar: only sporadic incidents

Unguja
3 Apr: ‘PB’ killed at night in Zanzibar town
4 Apr: body of ‘PB’ exhibited in town hospital
6 Apr: mob takes ‘PB’ to police in Mazizini
c.14 Apr: PB moves out of Zanzibar town
28 Apr: another ‘PB’ killed in Nungwi
2 May: the last dated report (possibly relating to
the Nungwi incident)

Dar es Salaam, undated incidents following those on Unguja

Tanga, Mombasa, unconfirmed reports of incidents

Slide 6

23
Slide 7 re Limbani, night of 12 March 1995

Slide 8 1. An earlier
manifestation of
Popobawa in Mkoani

2. Popobawa terrorises
a pregnant woman in
Mkoani

3. Popobawa terrorises
a doubter in Mkoani

4. Popobawa terrorises
a sceptical visitor
from Unguja

5. Different theories
about Popobawa in
Mkoani

6. Popobawa crushes a
helpless child in
Mkoani

Slide 9 7. A giant Popobawa in Chake Chake 15. Popobawa terrorises a CCM

8. Popobawa as a whale’s revenge
9. Popobawa administers a good
hiding in Vitongoji
10. Popobawa tricks a wife in Birikau
supporter in Pandani
16. Popobawa terrorises children
sleeping alone in Limbani
17. Popobawa is kept out of
Shumba Mjini

11. An innocent man is beaten up in 18. Popobawa fails to cross to

Miti Ulaya, Wete Kojani island

12.Children precipitate an attack in

Taifu

13. A pious woman is embarrased

14. Popobawa attacks a Kangagani

woman in broad daylight

24
Slide 10 19. Popobawa attacks another child
in Limbani

20. A man is attacked while bathing

and CCM is accused by a
possessed woman in Kizimbani,
Wete

21. Popobawa is recognised by his

foul odour at Weni

22. CCM politicians are accused in

Limbani and their involvement is
confirmed

23. Another child is attacked in

Limbani and CCM is further
implicated

24. A final and fatal incident:

Popobawa kills a man in Chake
Chake

Slide 11 25. Popobawa arrives on Unguja with a

vengeance

26. Popobawa kills a child on Unguja

27. A lunatic is killed by a mob in Zanzibar

28. The government responds but to no

avail

29. A young man fights off Popobawa

30. Popobawa is bottled up in Vikokotoni

31. A mysterious stranger is killed by a

mob in Bumbwini

32. Popobawa terrorises a co-wife in

Kwahani

Slide 12 Chris McGreal, ‘Zanzibar Diary’, The Guardian, 2 October

1995, p.11
MJAKA Hamad is a quietly spoken peasant farmer not given
to overstatement. So as he firmly and deliberately tells of his
ordeal, even some of the sceptics crowded around him begin
to wonder is such a man could imagine such a thing.
At first, Hamad said, he thought it was a dream. But
the stifling force pushing him deeper into his mattress
dragged him from his sleep, and then he fought with a fury
for he knew the reputation of Zanzibar’s infamous
“popobawa”.
Only a few Zanzibaris claim to have seen the beast.
Sketched impressions scattered through the market portray it
as a dwarf with a single, large eye in its forehead, small
pointed ears, bat wings and talons extended as it hovers over
a prostrate prey. But even those islanders who have never
seen it can tell you what it does. The popobawa is notorious
for swooping into houses at night and raping men…

25
 May 1996 19 July 2001
Slide 13

Slide 14 22 July 2001

Slide 15 26 July 2001

26
Slide 16

20 April 2004

Slide 17 The Economist, 13 December 2003

Slide 18 December 1995

1982

Sleep Paralysis and Associated

Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Experiences
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/S_P.html

27
Slide 19 The 'Phantom Anesthetist' of
Mattoon: A Field Study of Mass
Hysteria
Donald M. Johnson
The Journal of Abnormal and Social
Psychology, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Jan. 1945)
The story of the "phantom anesthetist"
begins in Mattoon, Illinois, on the first
night of September, 1944, when a woman
reported to the police that someone had
opened her bedroom window and sprayed
her with a sickish sweet-smelling gas
which partially paralyzed her legs and
made her ill. Soon other cases with similar
symptoms were reported, and the police
organized a full-scale effort to catch the
elusive "gasser." Some of the Mattoon
citizens armed themselves with shotguns
and sat on their doorsteps to wait for him;
some even claimed that they caught a
glimpse of him and heard him pumping his
spray gun. As the numbers of cases
increased--as many as seven in one night-
-and the facilities of the local police…
Slide 20
2000
Slide 21 14 April 2004
The Seattle Windshield Pitting
Epidemic: A Famous Mass Delusion
of the Twentieth Century
by Robert Bartholomew
The episode of phantom windshield pitting
began on March 23, 1954, when press
accounts began to appear in newspapers in
Seattle. The stories reported damage to
automobile windshields in a city 80 miles to
the north. Police initially suspected vandals,
but as the number of cases spread, it soon
became evident that this was not a viable
explanation. As the days passed, reports of
damaged windshields moved closer to
Seattle. By nightfall on April 14th when the
mysterious agent had first reached the city,
until April 15th, police had logged 242
telephone calls from concerned residents
across Seattle, telling of tiny pit marks on
vehicles numbering over 3,000. In some
cases, entire parking lots were reported to
have been struck.
The most common report of damage
involved claims by astonished witnesses…
Haberlandt 1899
28
Slide 22

Domestic slaves c.1890 (Zanzibar National Archives)

Slide 23

1967

1973

Slide 24

29
Slide 25

Zanzibar Leopard, Panthera pardus adersi, stuffed (Zanzibar Museum)

Slide 26

ADVERTISEMENT: forthcoming presentations

Tues. 8 February:
The Zanzibar Leopard: Wild, Domesticated and Hybridized
Political Ecology of Development Research Group, Department of Geography,
University of Cambridge
Weds. 20 April:
Science and Rumour: Conflicting Discourses and the
Disappearing Leopards of Zanzibar
School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia

30