In Defense of the False

ABSTRACT Taking stories that have been commonplace in East and Central Africa for over a century of Africans who worked for whites to capture other Africans to take their blood as my starting point, I argue that fake and false are not necessarily wrongs to be identified or problems to be corrected. Instead stories like these are concrete and frequently analytical expressions of Africans’ experiences. They may be presented in narrative genres that signal the possibility of fiction, they may come and go over a period of years, but they are spread over a large area by people who think these stories are worth repeating, people who think they sound plausible. They are fake in the way that fake medicine and fake currency are fake, but that is not to say such stories fill the void left by the scarcity of real medicine and real currency. Instead, they coexist with other, often official stories, but these provide a description of life and work and hospital visits that reveal hidden motives and horrendous practices.