Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol between Jews and Christians

In the fi rst half of the twentieth century, stories circulated throughout East Africa that fi remen and policemen had kidnapped Africans, drain-ing blood from them to treat Europeans with blood diseases. 1 Here was the confl uence of African folk traditions with Western medicine and superstition in colonial contexts. Here, too, was a classic instance of the way blood inhabits the imagination as both substance and symbol. For these Africans, the fi remen and the policemen extracted real blood from their victims, blood that could go on to serve an actual medical need. But this blood was also symbolic of the more general extraction of wealth from the African colonies: the blood stood for much more than itself precisely because of its inherent physiological power. Even if these Africans had little concept of the function of blood in terms of Western medicine, seeing it rather as synonymous with sexual fl uids, 2 they still shared the universal human intuition that blood means life and therefore contains extraordinary symbolic power.