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Revenants · Spectral creatures and night demons

Popobawa – the Night Demon of Zanzibar

When
April 1995 date from records made at the time
Where
Zanzibar Town, Unguja Island, Tanzania
Verdict
Disputed

In 1995 panic swept Zanzibar: families spent the night around fires, afraid of the “bat wing” – a demon that attacks people in their sleep.

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-6.16°, 39.19° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

Popobawa – Swahili for “bat wing” – is a malevolent spirit (shetani) people on Pemba had talked about since the 1960s. It changes shape, comes at night, is sometimes heralded by a smell of sulfur, and is most feared for sexually assaulting sleeping men and women. The victim must then tell others about the attack, or the demon will return. The biggest wave of fear came in 1995, when panic spread from Pemba to Unguja and on to Dar es Salaam. Henriette Jansen, a Dutch woman working at the health ministry, described how on 4 April hundreds of people gathered outside the hospital in Zanzibar Town: word had spread that “Popobawa is dead” – a mob had beaten to death a man taken for the demon. He turned out to be a mentally ill man from the mainland who had come for treatment. Families slept outdoors around fires, and in May terrified pupils ran out of a school. At least one more person mistaken for Popobawa was killed during the panic.

Witnesses

Residents of Pemba and Unguja; Henriette Jansen's account in “Tanzanian Affairs” (1996); articles by Joe Nickell (1995) and BBC reports (2001, 2007). The phenomenon has been studied by the anthropologists David Parkin, Martin Walsh and Katrina Daly Thompson.

Explanations and hypotheses

Popobawa stories return in waves, usually at times of political tension – the 1995 panic came just before the first multi-party elections in decades, and the BBC called the demon “the election genie.” Some saw it as the vengeful ghost of the assassinated president Abeid Karume, others as the work of politicians. Joe Nickell compared the descriptions of attacks with sleep paralysis: a feeling of being pressed down, unable to move, with vivid hallucinations. The anthropologist Katrina Daly Thompson, however, criticized reducing the phenomenon to “African superstition”; in her view, Popobawa talk is a way to discuss sexuality, violence, the memory of slavery and politics. Doctors at Zanzibar's main hospital said they had never treated a victim of the demon – the victims of the lynchings, however, were real.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

  1. Henriette Jansen, Popobawa is Dead! (Tanzanian Affairs, 1996)
  2. Katrina Daly Thompson, Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings (Indiana University Press, 2017)
  3. Joe Nickell, The Skeptic-raping Demon of Zanzibar (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, 1995)
  4. BBC News – Sex attacks blamed on bat demon (2007)

More: Wikipedia (en)