Moving back up the table, mtafiti continues to be a word of choice when talking about researchers. Still, although relatively benign, it too hints that an acceptable activity has been carried out on the wrong scale: searching is fine, but searching too insistently is frowned upon. One man explained, “A researcher [mtafiti] is an important person because he indeed is the one who discovers everything [anayegundua kila kitu].”33 This supports the dictionary definitions of who a mtafiti is, yet there is a hint of excess since a researcher knows not just about disease, or bugs, but about “everything.” Even when one of the most neutral words, mtafiti, is used, the subtext of prying and invasiveness remains. There is one other word I heard used to describe researchers, and it is the only term that was positive: mtaalam, which can be translated as “expert” or “specialist.” Mtaalam (or mtaalamu) is connected to the term elimu, which is “knowledge or learning.” Someone who is referred to as mtaalam is educated, learned, and well-informed; he is a scholar or sage.34 When researchers were referred to in this way, it was less of a direct description of their work and more of a general commentary on their education and expert knowledge.
Healers and Harmers
There were two competing narratives about researchers that emerged, each focusing on very different aspects of their work. In the stories told by Mama Nzito and others, the focus was on blood theft and the murder of innocent Africans. Researchers were powerful experts who were sanctioned by the government and feared by locals. They were unsavory characters bent on making money, even if it meant sacrificing human life. In contrast, another set of stories—which appeared in nearly every interview, frequently alongside or intertwined with the first, malignant narrative—described benevolent researchers.35 In their positive descriptions of researchers, East Africans noted the similarity between researchers and doctors: they both gave out medicine and helped the sick recover.36 These behaviors meant research was described as kitu kizuri—a good thing.37 These starkly different characterizations of medical researchers were put forth by most of my interviewees, who saw no inherent contradiction between researchers as potential murderers and researchers as benevolent distributors of drugs. Researchers could be involved with both curing and killing. This willingness to maintain two contrasting impressions of researchers is likely tied to the fact that one of the figures a researcher might be compared with—a mganga—is commonly thought of as a powerful individual who can both harm and heal. As a variety of ethnographies from across East Africa have shown: “In the eyes of ordinary people both good and bad aspects of the doctor can be found in the same person. The mganga has power to protect and harm. . . . The common epitaph is ‘How can s/he cure witchcraft, if s/he is not an expert in it!’”38
The Zaramo of coastal Tanzania recognized that, “in practice, a mchawi [witch] may also be a mganga,” and, on the coast, both uchawi (black magic) and uganga (white magic) “may be practiced by the same individual.”39 Thus, the very ability to heal requires knowledge of how to harm. In some cases, a mganga is considered an actual witch, since “although he seems to be using his powers to help others, one cannot be sure about all his activities.”40 Only by understanding what causes illness (or, how to cause illness) can cures be discovered. And while a good mganga should always use his power in a positive way, there is always the potential for that ability to be abused. The mganga is treated, therefore, with a mixture of respect, caution, and fear—not so different from the way researchers were viewed.
For most of East Africa, the Swahili word mganga (or its analogue in other Bantu languages) is a broad term that can reference the healing performed through magic, the use of herbs or other medicines, bone setting, or divination. The Rhodesian medical doctor Michael Gelfand was particularly well positioned to comment on the role of a mganga, having been trained in biomedicine and then focusing on African medicine. He wrote:
European society has no one quite like the nganga [mganga], an individual to whom people turn in every kind of difficulty. He is a doctor in sickness, a priest in religious matters, a lawyer in legal issues, a policeman in the detection and prevention of crime, a possessor of magical preparations which can increase crops and instill special skills and talents into his clients. He fills a great need in society, his presence gives assurance to the whole community.41
Ludwig Krapf’s 1882 Swahili dictionary defines a mganga as “a medicine man who uses magic.”42 Maureen Malowany finds the definition significant because Krapf “was able to recognize both aspects of African medical practice: the diagnosing and treating of environment-caused diseases and the equally potent treatment of spiritually caused illness.”43 Among the Zaramo, the mganga’s role “is to heal, and they combine all methods of therapy in fulfilling that role, be they herbal, communal, religious or magical.”44 People going to a traditional mganga know their “case will be considered more completely than would be possible at a government hospital” and that a healer would typically treat the patient as part of a larger social and cultural whole.45
As healers and witches are understood to rely on the same skills, once researchers were compared with healers, it was not such a stretch to compare them to witches. There are many overlaps with the perceived behavior of witches and the observed behavior of researchers. Witch doctors often work at night and want blood; their uses for blood are socially unacceptable and they profit from working with highly personalized substances. Researchers also worked at night, collecting blood samples by going door to door or collecting night-biting mosquitoes by walking around in the bush. For both witches and researchers, blood was valued above all other substances and its use was shrouded in secrecy.46 People hesitated to make this comparison directly to me. However, in explaining the actions, beliefs, and fears of others, words related to witchcraft often arose. Residents would hide from giving blood since they were afraid it would be used to kuroga or kurogwa (bewitch) them or would be used for uchawi (witchcraft).47 There were also veiled references to how “those beliefs” (imani hizohizo) caused people to suspect the researchers.48
Researchers Are Researchers
While comparisons were drawn between researchers and witches and healers, researchers were also viewed as a homogenous group of people: they all arrived in cars, wore uniforms, were assisted by Africans, asked questions, ventured into the bush, used specialized and foreign tools, were educated, often spoke English, and could be overly curious in ways that offended local sensibilities.49 As a group, these researchers were busy collecting blood samples, either gathering villagers in the middle of the night or going house to house. Other researchers gathered everyone in a public space and asked people to partially disrobe so their skin could be evaluated for signs of leprosy. Still others had little interest in people and chose to focus on insects or cattle, venturing into swamps to collect mosquitoes or smearing livestock with liquid medicine. Although there were clearly many differences, those differences were not seen as especially consequential. The work was considered to be essentially the same.
This collapsing of all different types of researchers into a generic group was partially a result of the large amounts of research being done in certain parts of the region. Many colonial-era medical research projects employed dozens of specialists: entomologists, parasitologists, medical doctors, nutrition specialists, and nurses, in addition to a bevy of assistants and translators. The large number of researchers per project was compounded by the sheer quantity of projects starting, stopping, merging, and overlapping.50 In early 1955, the district officer in Taveta, Kenya, had to explain to the leaders of the ill-fated Aptitude Testing Project why local reception was so chilly.51 He recounted the history of their participation in different government-sponsored research, public health, and agriculture projects over the prior ten years. As he could personally attest, the WaTaveta people had already labored to implement irrigation schemes, given thousands of blood samples for parasitological examinations, and participated in multiple agricultural surveys.