Obayifo- The Crop Blighting Vampire

South Africa is a country of stark contrast, the beautiful modern cities shares its space with tribal societies that still practice rituals and believe in legends thousands of years old, and vampire creatures are one of the darker legends. The vampire creatures of Africa, and certainly strange but no less deadly than other vampire creatures. If you should find yourself in Africa, fear the night.

The obayifo is sometimes described as a creature in its own right, and yet more properly the word refers to a broader body of beliefs and practices, often called witchcraft.

Obayifo is a kind of human vampire whose chief delight is to suck the blood of children, whereby the latter pine and die. Men and women possessed of this power and credited with violent powers, being able to quit their bodies and travel great distances in the night to its victims in the form of a big ball of light. Others say that this creature stayed in human form, but that a bright green light emitted from its bottom and armpits. Besides sucking the blood of their victims, they are supposed to be able to extract the sap and juices of crops. Cases of coco blight are ascribed to the work of the obayifo.

An obayifo in everyday life is supposed to be known by having sharp, shifty eyes, that are never at rest, also by showing an undue interest in food, and always talking about it, especially meat, and hanging about when cooking is going on, all of which habits are therefore purposely avoided. These witches are supposed to be very common.

On the other hand, Modjaben Dowuona, a West African representative at the First International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 1934 spoke more broadly on the subject of obayifo, and made it clear that obayifo represented a range of activities by certain people, not just a folk monster.

“There are in the main two forms in which witchcraft is practiced. The first takes the form of a power to do harm to other people, especially children, without any physical contact or concrete act of poisoning. Death due to poisoning is considered separate from that believed to be due to witchcraft, though in practice it is not always distinguished from it. The tendency is to ascribe to witchcraft any death which cannot be accounted for on other grounds. It seems that this non-physical way of killing was first directed against children, as is evidenced from the Twi word for witchcraft, ‘Bayi’ meaning literally ‘taking away or removing children.’ It is interesting to find that a corrupt form of the word, namely ‘obeah’ appears in the West Indies, though there it is associated with the worship of various cults.”

Quoted in Psychic Phenomena Of Jamaica by Joseph J. Williams, S.J. (1934)

So by this interpretation, it is ‘witch lore’ – the obayifo is a willing, living human being – and not vampire lore as Europeans would know it.

“In Africa there are any number of folkloric or legendary creatures that subsist on the blood of the living, but these are not truly the undead.”

John L. Vellutini, Editor of the Journal of Vampirology, Interview 2016