Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings

By Katrina Daly Thompson

“Bravely takes on . . . not the legendary shapeshifting creature spoken about sporadically on the Swahili coast of Tanzania, but rather popobawa discourse.” —The Journal of Modern African Studies

Since the 1960s, people on the islands off the coast of Tanzania have talked about being attacked by a mysterious creature called Popobawa, a shapeshifter often described as having an enormous penis. Popobawa’s recurring attacks have become a popular subject for stories, conversation, gossip, and humor that has spread far beyond East Africa. Katrina Daly Thompson shows that talk about Popobawa becomes a tool that Swahili speakers use for various creative purposes such as subverting gender segregation, advertising homosexuality, or discussing female sexuality. By situating Popobawa discourse within the social and cultural world of the Swahili Coast as well as the wider world of global popular culture, Thompson demonstrates that uses of this legend are more diverse and complex than previously thought and provides insight into how women and men communicate in a place where taboo, prohibition, and restraint remain powerful cultural forces.

“While Popobawa surely belong to one of the most interesting African legends, Katrina Daly Thompson, instead of asking where the story originated, asks about how people talk about this trickster and what these conversations really mean.” —Claudia Boehme, University of Trier

“A well-researched and well-documented addition to the body of knowledge on local legends and their global manifestations.” —Journal of Folklore Research

“Thompson’s movement between local and global discourses demonstrates the importance of a phenomenon that could otherwise be viewed as exotic ethnographic trivia, while her theoretical orientation makes the text as relevant to linguistic anthropologists as to African studies scholars.” —African Studies Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 6, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253024619

Katrina Daly Thompson

Katrina Daly Thompson is associate professor in the Department of African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She specializes in African languages and identities, with a focus on ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

Book preview

POPOBAWA

POPOBAWA

Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings

Katrina Daly Thompson

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

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1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

© 2017 by Katrina Daly Thompson

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Thompson, Katrina Daly, 1975- author.

Title: Popobawa : Tanzanian talk, global misreadings / Katrina Daly Thompson.

Description: Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016042295 (print) | LCCN 2016043138 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253024497 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253024565 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253024619 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Sex customs—Tanzania—Zanzibar—Attitudes. | Tanzanians—Sexual behavior—Attitudes. | Animals, Mythical—Tanzania—Zanzibar. | Demonology—Tanzania—Zanzibar. | Public opinion—Tanzania—Zanzibar. | Swahili language—Discourse analysis. | Zanzibar—Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC GN484.3 .T56 2014 (print) | LCC GN484.3 (ebook) | DDC 306.709678/1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016042295

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introducing Popobawa

1  Contextualizing Popobawa

2  Voicing Expertise and Authority

3  Talk and Believe: How to Prevent a Popobawa Attack in Two Easy Steps

4  The Butt of a Joke

5  Queering Popobawa

6  Women as Sexual and Discursive Agents

7  Batman in Africa

8  Global Metanarratives

(In)Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

THE RESEARCH ON which this book is based was partially funded by several different sources: a grant from the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, another from the Dean of the Humanities division there; and funds from the Graduate School and the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Parts of this book were presented at the Moral Panics of Sexuality conference at Arizona State University in October 2011, at the African Studies Program’s Africa at Noon lecture series at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in October 2013, as part of Wendy Belcher’s lecture series at Princeton University, Vampires and Zombies, the Better to Theorize You With, in April 2014, and at the Towards African Cultural Studies conference put on by my home department, African Languages and Literature (now the Department of African Cultural Studies) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in May 2015. I am grateful to those in attendance at those talks for insightful questions that helped me to clarify my argument.

An earlier version of chapter five was previously published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; it is included here by permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press. Chapter six appeared in a different version in Discourse & Society and is published here with permission from Sage. Parts of chapter seven were published in Critical Discourse Studies; they are included here with permission of Taylor & Francis.

I thank former graduate students at UCLA and UW–Madison, Willis Okech, Michelle Oberman, Olga Ivanova, and Beatrice Mkenda, for assistance with transcription and other aspects of the research. Martin Kaminer and Joseph Nagy helped me think through the obligation to retell narrative frame discussed in chapter three. Ivy Mills offered useful comments on an early draft of one chapter, as did Claudia Böhme on several chapters as well as the overall structure of the book. Martin Walsh not only offered feedback on the book but also generously shared the Popobawa stories Jamila collected for him in 1995 and has been responsive to every question I’ve thrown his way. Sarah Cypher at the Threepenny Editor gave me invaluable editorial advice, and Dee Mortensen has been wonderful to work with at Indiana.

Most thanks of all go to my favorite writer—purveyor of ideas, puns, encouragement, and plenty Popobawa humor—my husband, my love, Tony.

POPOBAWA

Introducing Popobawa

Texts haunt each other.

—Karin Barber, Anthropology of Texts, Persons, and Publics

On a warm June night in Los Angeles, just after UCLA’s spring quarter had ended, I was at a party hosted by one of my graduate students. We were speaking Swahili and drinking Tuskers over Swahili food we’d all brought to share when a young woman from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (the wife of one of my students), told me a story that has haunted me for a decade.

Have you heard of Popobawa? she asked. Her voice was full of laughter. This giant bat-like creature, she said, is known to slip into people’s homes at night, paralyzing men and raping them. After he rapes a man, Popobawa tells him, You must tell ten people what I have done to you or I will make you my wife. Men use conversational narratives, phone calls, text messages, and radio broadcasts, she said, to spread the word that they have been sodomized. These stories are then taken up and circulated by both men and women through various genres of legendry, the range of expressions that gravitate around [legends that take the form of] narratives, including belief, rumor, ritual, and commentary and debate about the event that the narrative recounts, which is often expository rather than narrative.¹

In the decade that has passed since I first heard of Popobawa, I have had countless conversations about Popobawa and collected other versions of this legend and related legendry in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. I have also gathered print versions published and illustrated in Tanzanian popular magazines and books, a feature film for sale or rent in DVD shops and kiosks, as well as references to and images of Popobawa published on the Internet by people all over the world. Popobawa attacks are shrouded by mystery and speculation, which makes them a popular subject for conversation, rumor, and gossip, widespread among male and female Swahili-speakers of all ages, education levels, and class backgrounds. The Popobawa legend exhibits a great deal of diversity across time—from 1965 to the present—and space—from Pemba to Unguja, from Dar es Salaam on the east coast to the rest of Tanzania, and beyond Tanzania’s borders through global media. What may have begun as narrating real experiences of sleep paralysis has assimilated features of witchcraft, Islamic djinn lore, Western vampire legends and popular cinema, ancestral spirits, love spirits, homophobia, trickster stories, and joking relationships. Talk and texts about the Popobawa legend (metadiscourse) also abound, both within Tanzania and beyond, via media with global reach, such as Wikipedia and Facebook. In fact, Popobawa is my Facebook friend.

Prior to talking with Tanzanians about Popobawa, I expected to find the meaning behind the legend. Given the version of the legend I had initially heard, I suspected that it had something to do with Tanzanian fears about imported or increasing homosexuality and/or about the spread of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). I associated the name Batwing with vampire legends. An interview that director Alan Ball gave on Terry Gross’s radio show Fresh Air got me thinking about the connections between vampirism, illicit sexuality, and sexually transmitted diseases—some of the main themes in Ball’s HBO series True Blood.² Also, the Popobawa legend shares a number of features with supernatural legends and conspiracy theories in other parts of Africa, which are frequently used to explain human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission and AIDS deaths.³ What I found, however, was that homosexual sodomy was not always the major theme in the Popobawa narratives I collected; in fact, even when Popobawa does sodomize his victims, he attacks both men and women. Moreover, contrary to my suspicion that there might be a link between the spread of HIV and the Popobawa legend, none of the Tanzanians I spoke with shared this theory.⁴ While Popobawa as a figure for coastal fears about imported sexual practices or the spread of HIV cannot be ruled out, they should not be read as the dominant meaning of the legend.

In fact, I argue that Popobawa has no single dominant meaning. Because Popobawa is so tricky and because Swahili-speakers use the legend to talk about sex and other taboo topics without being seen as improper, the legend is used in different ways by different people. Indeed, Popobawa discourse is a repository of multiple meanings. These meanings have changed since people first began to talk about him in the 1960s and continue to change. These meanings also depend on the subject position of the narrator as well as on his or her relationship to the alleged victim(s) or to the listener. I agree with anthropologist Michael Taussig, who argues that zombies and spirits are as dynamic and as ever-changing as the network of social relations that encompasses the believers, and their meaning mediates those changes.⁵ In some tellings, Popobawa may serve as a symbol, particularly in the more well-developed narratives such as those that have appeared in print or on video. In other contexts, Popobawa talk serves as a pragmatic conversational resource that allows speakers to perform a number of different tasks, such as critiquing homosexuality, poverty, and the government, or expressing envy, greed, and the problems of family ties. Moreover, as I suggested above and will elaborate on in later chapters, Swahili-speakers sometimes use the ambivalence of local language ideologies to transgress taboos—using Popobawa subversively to critique gender segregation, advertise homosexuality, or discuss female sexual agency. Therefore, Popobawa discourse is much more complex than it appears on the surface.

In Tanzania, demons, djinn, and spirits like Popobawa have their own cultures that involve gendered ways of dressing, markers of ethnicity, and sometimes even their own languages. Thus, they are not subject to Tanzanian social norms. Their actions occur in the human world, sometimes in human or other physical form, but are attributed to the spirit world; thus they absolve those humans involved from censure for the transgression of social norms.⁶ For example, Alison Purpura shows how marriage between Zanzibari women and spirits allows women control over their sexuality by freeing them from the obligation to marry human men.⁷

As a linguistic ethnographer, I am interested in how discourse (talk and texts) about spirits like Popobawa can serve transgressive and critical purposes similar to the ways that spirit possession can be used to transgress cultural norms and even, on a grander scale, serve as an embodied critique of colonial, national, or global hegemonies.⁸ A minority of Tanzanians have experienced spirit possession or had sex with a spirit themselves, but the topic is a conversational resource available to all.⁹ For example, writing about the Indian Ocean island of Lamotte, anthropologist Michael Lambek shows that communication through and about spirit possession frames marital discourse, often serving the interests of Muslim women by allowing them to speak with the authority of men.¹⁰ Talk about the occult illustrates that the transgression of discursive norms created by possession extends beyond the limited time frame in which a spirit is said to be present. Just as supernatural beliefs can be used to condone gender expressions that would otherwise be seen as deviant (e.g., refusing to marry), talk about the supernatural can be used to positively evaluate gender transgression. Such talk does not necessarily imply belief in the supernatural, though. Because my focus is on talk rather than on belief, I include Popobawa talk and texts produced by skeptics as well as believers. Popobawa talk is a prime example of discourse that allows Swahili-speakers, particularly women and queer men, to transgress gender norms, which opens up spaces to reveal aspects of their sexuality considered taboo; such talk also allows transgression of linguistic taboos that circumscribe speech about sexuality.

Viewing talk about the occult as central to Swahili culture creates a number of avenues through which to explore the Popobawa legend: indirect speech, evaluation, and performativity. All of these terms are drawn from pragmatics, the study of how meaning is created through context. I consider Popobawa discourse as a form of indirect speech, a strategy for avoiding or reducing risks associated with saying certain things directly, and as a rich source for other examples of linguistic indirectness.¹¹ Direct speech, in general, is devalued by many Swahilispeakers, whereas euphemism and metaphor are highly valued. For example, writing about Swahili language ideologies in Mombasa, Kenya, Susan Hirsch explains that skilled use of Kiswahili ndani (inner Swahili)—"aphorisms (jina or methali), slang terms, archaisms, obscure metaphors, and riddles (mafumbo)—is a marker of Swahili identity, an important factor in constructing an Mswahili sana (literally, ‘a very Swahili Swahili’): a cultural sophisticate and expert in local language and culture."¹²

The topic of sexuality, in particular, lends itself especially well to—in fact, demands the use of—slang, metaphors, and riddles. Because Popobawa discourse often includes references to sodomy, it offers an extensive corpus of Swahili euphemisms. Although many decontextualized examples of Kiswahili ndani have been published in compilations of Swahili proverbs and kanga names (aphorisms printed on fabric worn as a wrap), very little research has examined such language use embedded in conversations and other longer samples of discourse.¹³ On the coast, talk about sexual desire is normatively taboo; talk about homosexual desire and female sexual agency is even more so. Not only do Swahili-speakers use Kiswahili ndani to talk about sexuality through metaphor and euphemism, but some speakers—women and queer men—also use Popobawa talk itself as indirect speech to bring non-normative sexuality into conversation while reducing the risks associated with transgressing linguistic and gender taboos.

In addition to offering numerous contextualized examples of indirect speech, Popobawa discourse offers the opportunity to study evaluation. Like gossip and personal narratives, Popobawa discourse often contains an evaluative component through which the speaker or writer indicates his or her perceptions of what is good or bad, desirable or undesirable.¹⁴ When participating in Popobawa talk, Swahili-speakers and Western commentators alike often construct evaluative beliefs about Popobawa himself, other categories of supernatural figures, the victims of supernatural assault, or the actions of any of these. While some evaluations are personal to the speaker, others represent socially shared beliefs (e.g., those common to Muslims, educated people, Zanzibaris, Tanzanians, Swahili-speakers, and so on) based in ideologies.¹⁵ I am particularly interested in religious, language, and gender ideologies. Depending on the speaker, evaluative beliefs might express negative attitudes toward particular sexual acts (e.g., anal eroticism) or toward the supernatural more generally, or positive attitudes toward prayer, reading the Qur’an, or science. Approaching such beliefs through a study of discourse (rather than, for example, through cognition or religion) shows how beliefs and attitudes often ascribed to a timeless and abstract Swahili culture in fact exhibit discrete and specific variation tied to the nature of the action that is being performed through discourse¹⁶; in other words, such an approach reveals what people do with talk and texts about Popobawa.

One accomplishment of such talk is the moment-to-moment process of identity construction accomplished when speakers treat particular aspects of their own or others’ identities as significant. Another way to put this is to say that peoples’ identities are performative, which, as applied linguist Alistair Pennycook writes, is not to say merely that they are performed but rather that they are produced in the performance.¹⁷ Moreover, Popobawa’s identity and people’s belief (or lack thereof) in him are also performative: it is through talk and texts that Popobawa is created. The Swahili have a proverb: Lisemwalo lipo; ikiwa halipo, lipo nyuma linakuja (What is talked about exists; if it doesn’t exist, it’s not far behind [and] on its way).¹⁸ For some Swahili-speakers, talk about Popobawa is evidence for his existence, which is thus taken for granted. Put another way, belief in Popobawa exists simply because of stories one has heard from others. The notion of performativity also links evaluation and taboo with identity. Pennycook suggests the following: In order to have a suitable notion of performativity … we need, on the one hand, to avoid the pull towards performance as open-ended free display (we perform whatever identities we want to) and, on the other, the pull towards oversedimentation (we can only perform what has been prescripted): to some extent, the performative is always along lines that have already been laid down, and yet performativity can also be about refashioning futures.¹⁹ Seen in this way, Popobawa discourse offers a useful linguistic corpus through which to examine the refashioning of Swahili futures with respect to Swahili-speakers’ identities, particularly in relation to gender, sexuality, and Islam. In many cultures, people are granted values through what they refrain from doing; the practice of taboos establishes who they are. Because of my interest in discourse, I extend this to what they refrain from saying.²⁰ If upholding Swahili linguistic taboos establishes individuals as very Swahili Swahilis or good Muslims, then transgressing these taboos alters notions of what it means to be Swahili and Muslim, thus potentially creating new identities. Exploring this unique form of talk allows us to see how people use language in creative ways within the constraints of their culture, sometimes establishing and upholding identity boundaries and at other times transgressing or shifting them.

Setting

Popobawa is a tricky, ambiguous figure, who appears in different genres of talk and text, takes on different forms, and is labeled in different ways and used for different purposes. This, in turn, makes talking and writing about him tricky as well. To help you get your bearings before plunging into my exploration of this ambiguous figure, I introduce Tanzania’s Swahili Coast (focusing on Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar Town), the occult beliefs and terms that underlie talk about Popobawa, and the role of language in relation to these.

Although you can find information about and images of Popobawa online, to really understand this ambiguous figure, you need to immerse yourself in talk and texts about him produced on the coast and islands of Tanzania, home to Swahili Muslims and others who speak Swahili as a second language.

News of Popobawa has spread throughout the country, but attacks are said to occur mostly in the port city of Dar es Salaam and the islands of Zanzibar. Dar es Salaam is Tanzania’s largest city, with an official population of almost five million people. Located on the coast, where it was developed by the Sultan of Zanzibar in the 1860s, today Dar es Salaam is Tanzania’s economic center. Home to embassies, an international airport, and a central business district with many global companies, it is nevertheless surrounded by a mass of urban poor and a thriving informal economy.²¹ Zanzibar is the island archipelago northeast of Dar es Salaam in the Indian Ocean.

Tanzania is a very religious country, with the majority practicing either Christianity or Islam; many people also incorporate aspects of African traditional religions into their belief systems. Official estimates suggest that Muslims, Christians, and practitioners of traditional beliefs are equal in number. My own observations and other scholarship suggest that Christians are more numerous on the mainland, while Muslims are more numerous in Zanzibar.²²

Archaeologists estimate that Islam reached the Swahili Coast (stretching from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique) as far back as the ninth century.²³ In Zanzibar today, 95 percent of residents are Muslim. Although historically Swahili Islam was quite syncretic and there were significant Sufi orders throughout the coast, today reformist Islam is on the rise in Zanzibar and other parts of the coast.²⁴ Reformists first gained a foothold among Zanzibar’s educated Ibadi elite in the late nineteenth century. More recently, Saudi funding has made conservative interpretations of Islam popular among people of limited economic means, including the Sunni majority.²⁵

Most Swahili Muslims believe in the existence of djinn and sheitan (Arabic for demons), both of which are mentioned in the Qur’an and hadith (stories of the Prophet Muhammad). In Swahili, djinn are called jini, while demons are called (ma)shetani (also [ma]sheitani) or pepo (spirits). These occult beings are also referred to (euphemistically, I believe) as wadudu (insects).²⁶ Jini and mashetani along with malaika (angels) belong to the category of invisible creatures (viumbe visivyoonekana). Although people’s interpretations of these terms vary depending on their level of Islamic education, the most common definitions people shared with me were that jini are like human beings in that they have free will and can do either good or bad in the world, while malaika can do only good and mashetani can do only bad.²⁷ Most Zanzibari Muslims I have met interpret qur’anic references to shetani and jini literally, believing in both spirit possession and physical manifestation of djinns. Many people claim to have experienced or witnessed one or both. Some people distinguish between the terms shetani and jini, while others use them interchangeably, having syncretized pre-Islamic beliefs in spirits with Islamic beliefs and Arabic terminology.²⁸

Similarly, for Christians, jini, mashetani, and pepo have become syncretized with biblical depictions of Satan. The Christians I spoke with said they believed in these forces, although they often associated these with witchcraft (uchawi) rather than with mainstream religious beliefs. Research suggests that we should not make too strong a distinction between Tanzanian Muslims and Christians when it comes to belief in occult forces. For example, writing about Pentecostal Christians in Dar es Salaam, anthropologist Hansjorg Dilger argues that their conception of these evil forces echo and elaborate those found on the Islamic Swahili coast, having their origin in both indigenous religions and in Islam.²⁹ This makes sense because Arabic is the source of most institutional religious vocabulary in Swahili, even for words used in the Bible and in ordinary talk about Christianity.³⁰ Dilger offers some examples of pepo that his Pentecostal interlocuters talked about:

Some pepo are represented by specific animals, cats, for example, and manifest themselves through a possessed person with hissing sounds and cat-like cries. Others are the spirits of ethnic groups or of malevolent ancestors struggling to gain control over their saved descendants and plague them with illness and affliction. Some are the pepo of strangers—often men—who enter the dreams of women at night and want to have sex with them. Another important category consists of those pepo embodying a type of behaviour considered immoral, such as the spirit of adultery and fornication. Finally, there are the pepo who embody different types of disease, such as the spirit of epilepsy or of cancer.³¹

Most Tanzanian Muslims and many Christians believe that people can be possessed by mashetani and pepo, which must be expelled through recitation of the Qur’an or Bible, through prayer, and/or through treatment by a traditional healer (mganga). Again, the lines between different religions are not rigid. Katharina Wilkens, writing about the Catholic Marian Faith Healing Ministry (MFHM) in Tanzania, found that its members all know about and many have tried various forms of Christian, Muslim and traditional methods of healing besides biomedicine.³² Among coastal Muslims, some people who become possessed join possession cults in which they regularly communicate with their possessory spirits in a group setting—an activity frowned upon by more orthodox (i.e., essentialist and, more recently, reformist) Muslims.³³ However, my findings suggest, in line with Linda Giles and others, that in spite of the condemnation of orthodox sheikhs and municipal officials, spirit possession and other spirit practices are not opposed to Islam in the mind of many people but indeed form a single integrated system of belief with it.³⁴ Dilger shows that this is the case for Pentecostals as well, who differ from coastal Muslims only in their reaction to spirits: rather than integrating spirits into one’s life through membership in a spirit cult, they treat spirits as evil forces that must be removed from one’s body through prayer and the laying on of hands.³⁵

Alongside Tanzanians who believe in spirit possession and the threat of demons are a growing number of skeptics, mostly among the educated elite. One finds such skepticism in government discourse such as that of the Mongela Commission on witchcraft, set up by the ruling party, Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM; the Revolutionary Party), in 1988. The commission says it aims to bring socioeconomic progress to areas where people accused of witchcraft have been murdered, thereby reducing ushirikina (superstition in Standard Swahili; worshipping something other than God for Swahili-speaking Muslims, shirk) and imani potofu (wrong beliefs).³⁶ In everyday discourse, both of these terms are used solely to describe others’ beliefs—never one’s own—so there is a wide variety of practices that might be called ushirikina by some. Even those who do not believe in spirits may talk about others’ beliefs in ways that discursively construct their own identities as, for example, modern Tanzanians or orthodox Muslims. The language used to discuss (others’) occult beliefs tells us something about ideologies, power relations, and identities—in other words, the way that language use is linked to the particular worldviews of particular social groups and to social power.³⁷

One reason to approach an occult figure like Popobawa through discourse about him is that doing so allows the inclusion of multiple viewpoints and illustrates his inherent ambiguity. Swahili is the medium of Popobawa discourse (and most other public discourse) within Tanzania. Most Zanzibaris speak Swahili as a first language, while most people in Dar es Salaam speak it either as a first language or as a second language but with near-native proficiency. The Tanzanians I spoke with about Popobawa all used Swahili with me in our interviews. The published texts I collected in Tanzania are also in Swahili, while sources I collected online are mostly in English, though I have also found some in Italian.

Swahili is a Bantu language whose first-language speakers live along the coast of East Africa, from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique. Because of centuries of interaction between coastal Africans and Arabs, Swahili has acquired a large number of Arabic words, with about 30 percent of Standard Swahili’s lexicon borrowed from Arabic and larger percentages in the coastal dialects spoken mostly by Muslims. Beyond the Swahili Coast, Swahili is spoken mostly as a second language by other East Africans. In Tanzania, it is both a national and official language that everyone begins learning in school if not earlier. There are at least 120 other languages spoken as mother tongues in Tanzania, but Swahili functions as a lingua franca, Arabic serves important religious and identity purposes for Muslims, and English is growing in importance as a language associated with education and aspiration.

Language ideologies play an important role in determining what can and cannot be said in these languages. Distinctions between public and private speech, which are overlaid with gender ideologies, are important to coastal Muslims and, to some extent, to other Swahili-speakers. Appropriate speech is location- and context specific. Cultural notions of private and public spaces dictate when women may speak, as well as when men and women may interact with one another. Popobawa talk transgresses these distinctions both because it demands to be spoken and because some of the strategies used to prevent attack (such as spending the night outside in groups) lead to the breakdown of gender segregation. Talk about Popobawa also allows Swahili-speakers to assess such ideologies, either by offering critiques of them or by lamenting cultural changes. Such ambivalent uses of Popobawa discourse speak to the multiple meanings of the legend.

Popobawa as a Shapeshifter

One reason that Popobawa talk can be used in so many ways is that Popobawa himself takes different forms. Uncertainty about Popobawa’s physical features adds to the mystery that surrounds him. Some say he looks like a human being, a tall man—sometimes a giant—with broad shoulders. Others say he looks like a large bat. Sometimes he is hairy and with claws. Other times, he has no body and is able to enter homes even when the windows and doors are locked. In the feature film Popobawa, he is a tall man with dark skin, dreads, and wide, bulging eyes. In artists’ renderings, he often has one large eye in the center of his forehead. Some people mention his nudity. Many say he has an enormous penis. Although his physical features vary, his abnormally large penis—a sexuality marked by excess—and the ability to shapeshift are all features he shares with folkloric tricksters.

Popobawa’s reputation as a sodomist is linked to his physical features, which according to many accounts include an enormous erect penis, sometimes with tremendous physical power. In this respect, he is similar to familiars in Zimbabwe and to devil imagery in South America.³⁸ Cross-culturally, most tricksters are male, evident in references to their physical features, especially the penis.³⁹ In fact, his penis is one of Trickster’s biological incongruities, often his signature feature, depicted as excessively large and troublesome, even having agency of its own. George Kamberelis argues that in the North American Winnebago Trickster cycle, Although his penis is one of Trickster’s more prominent features, it is unlikely that it represents his exclusively male sexuality. Indeed, Trickster’s sometimes female genitals seem to function in the same ways as his male genitals, to disrupt the status quo and to redistribute power more equally, for example. Thus, Trickster’s penis seems more an index of transformative potential than a phallus.⁴⁰ In Swahili discourse about Popobawa, his penis is similarly ambiguous, not so much representing male sexuality as disrupting the status quo, but in this case by feminizing his male victims. He redistributes not power but rather vulnerability, forcing men to share women’s fears of being raped. In cases where Popobawa is controlled by a female witch (mchawi) or traditional healer (mganga), as in the feature-length Tanzanian horror film Popobawa, it is a woman who disrupts the status quo, seizing the power to victimize others sexually through the use of a phallus.⁴¹

Of course, Popobawa’s penis is