Blood

Like much of western understandings of Africa, the meaning of blood in Africa (as opposed to African blood) was related to states or, at the very least, political systems. According to some, blood was said to be the blood of sacrifices in the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century kingdoms, say Ashanti or Buganda, but it was also the blood of the feud. Unlawful deaths were compensated by bloodwealth, usually in the form of cattle. But such a general and statist emphasis on blood obscured a clearer understanding of the meaning of blood in African daily life, as well as the meaning of the various fluids that comprised blood.

In most African societies, blood is the substance that signified and transferred life. Blood was mutable. Blood in one’s veins was kind of fluid, but blood outside the body was transformed and gendered by the circumstances under which it was discharged. Bloodshed in hunting or war had one name; the blood of menstruation had another. When blood was expelled with...