Almost a decade after their former president Kamuzu Banda lost power, Malawians are still terrified by rumours of government-sponsored vampires that circulated under his brutal reign and have held the popular imagination ever since.
Many Malawians, especially in the country’s rural south, give credence to reports that teams of so-called ”blood suckers” are murdering poor people on a nightly basis, draining their blood and selling it to international aid agencies in return for food.
Vague in all but the nastiest details, the fantastical stories have become so widespread, and the fear so rampant, that the central-African Presbyterian church (CCAP) has called for an independent commission to investigate the allegations.
”We would like to recommend the immediate creation of an independent commission of inquiry to investigate the allegations of blood sucking,” the CCAP said in a statement.
”This commission should be comprised of members of the clergy, human rights NGOs and medical personnel.”
Last month a member of the ruling United Democratic Front (UDF) was accused of harbouring the vampires and badly beaten by the residents of a shanty town near the southern town of Blantyre.
After the incident, government representative Robert Ngaiyaye was forced to issue a statement declaring there was ”no evidence that there are blood suckers”.
President Bakili Muluzi has accused unnamed opposition
politicians of exploiting the rumours with the aim of bringing down his government, vowing that anyone caught spreading the rumours would be arrested.
”People in the south of Malawi, in the Blantyre region, are adamant that international organisations come and take the blood of poor villagers with government help every night,” said one foreign resident in Malawi who did not wish to be identified.
”They believe in spirits and witchcraft, which is still widely practised in Malawi. Many of the villagers are in such a state of distress that they will believe whatever rumour happens to be going around.”
Under Banda’s 30-year reign, stories began to circulate that his omnipresent security police were selling the blood of murdered poor people to South Africa’s apartheid regime.
”The blood suckers story is not new,” said one young Malawian who identified himself only as Jeremiah. ”It already existed under Banda, as a way for people to explain the things they didn’t understand — poverty, droughts, floods.”
Malawi, a strip lying alongside a massive lake of the same name, discovered by the Scottish explorer David Livingstone at the end of the 19th century, remains one of Africa’s poorest countries.
It was ruled from 1964 by Banda, who set up a much feared political police force, made himself ”life president” in 1971 and banned — among other things — long hair and miniskirts.
All citizens were obliged to be members of Banda’s Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and the government was accused of involvement in the deaths of several opposition leaders.
Opposition to the regime increased throughout the 1980s and developed into violent riots in 1992. Banda eventually agreed to hold a referendum which approved a new multi-party system in 1993, and was beaten by Muluzi’s UDF in elections the following year.
But Malawi’s climate of poverty, superstition and fears stayed on. Hit by recurrent droughts, food shortages and floods and a collapse in the price of tobacco — its main export ‒ the country’s per-capita income of around $180 places it among the poorest on the planet.
Relief organisations on the ground also predict its 30% Aids infection rate — the government puts the figure at 18% — is set to reduce Malawians’ average life expectancy from 40 to 35 over the next 15 years. – Sapa-AFP