The vampire narrative, concerned as it is with dominance, submission, power, and exploitation, is the perfect conduit for investigating racial politics over 200 years of literary and cultural history.
There is a long tradition of black vampires that goes back centuries. These stories subvert the vampire mythos traditionally dominated by white men of high social status.
Black vampires have always done something different than their European counterparts. They usually don’t sparkle, and they rarely isolate.
They gather and carry ancestral memories. Their horror is communal and rooted in survival rather than just individual consumption.
In the hands of Black creators, the vampire archetype becomes more than a predator; it is an archivist of pain, a sensual being forged-but never fully defined-by relentless violence. It symbolizes what it means to exist forever in a world that was never built to see you-and to demand to be seen anyway.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
This is why the current resurgence of the Black vampire-on screen and in fiction-feels less like a trend and more like a reclamation.
They show us that transformation can be both a curse and freedom. That becoming something else-something feared, something powerful-sometimes seems like the only way to survive.
In Octavia Butler’s controversial 2005 science fiction novel Fledgling, we meet Shori, a genetically altered Black vampire who is 53 years old in an 11-year-old’s body. After surviving a massacre, she must rebuild her identity-piecing together who she is while challenging everything we think we know about family, power, and consent.
These aren’t just stories of violence and death. They’re stories of rebirth, of self-invention, of legacy.
They also allow for play, which is rarely afforded to stories about Black suffering. There’s eroticism here. Glamour. Subversion.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
The Black vampire doesn’t just survive the system but flips it inside out. They wear velvet and smoke cigars, like Blacula in his signature cape and midnight charm. They seduce with eyes that have seen centuries, heavy with the aftereffects of enduring, like Louis in Interview with the Vampire. They say no to death on someone else’s terms, like Gilda, who chooses care over violence and reshapes what power can look like.
Vampire stories, especially those told by Black creators, offer a kind of temporary relief. They give us permission to be angry, to be extravagant, to be immortal.
They also ask hard questions, like: What does it mean to carry generational trauma in your body? What happens when your pain becomes your power? Who do you become when you’re no longer trying to survive?
Black Representation in Vampire Stories from The Vampire Diaries to Interview with the Vampire
Origins in Folklore
African American vampire beliefs can generally be traced to those of Africa, often via Haiti or other colonies in the Caribbean.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
Once in America though, particularly in the southern states, vampire legends (and not those of vampiric witches) became somewhat more common.
A story from Tennessee tells of an old woman whose health constantly improved while that of the children living nearby declined due to her sucking their blood while they slept.
The fifollet or feu-follet was a type of vampire from Louisiana, and was a will-o-the-wisp derived from incubi and succubi. It was the soul of a dead person who had been sent back to Earth by God to do penance for their sins, but instead decided to attack the living.
They would generally only make a nuisance of themselves, but occasionally sucked blood, most often from children. A variant of this tale has the fifollet as the undead soul of a child who died before they could be baptised.
Owing to the relative rarity of African American vampire legends compared to other groups in the United States, there have been relatively few African American vampires in modern pop culture.
Today’s bold assertion - there never was an African vampire. Africa is hardly short of powerful and worrying myths, or tales of blood-drinking, psychic draining and the like, but… vampires?
To put it another way, Africa never held that figure beloved of many horror readers and romanticists - the cursed or afflicted human being who dies, rises from the grave as one of the undead, and goes for the jugular, drinking blood for sustenance.
Those who like to interconnect beliefs from different cultures are often tempted to include the ‘African vampire’, as it makes a nice extra chapter - or serves as a way to tempt people into examining folklore which for once isn’t European-centred.
Almost twenty years after the publication of Stoker’s Dracula, R. Sutherland Rattray published his Ashanti Proverbs - The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People. “a monster of human shape, which living far in the depths of the forest, is only occasionally met by hunters.
It sits on tree tops, and its legs dangle down to the ground and have hooks for feet which pick up any one who comes within reach. It has iron teeth.
Similarly, according to A Dictionary of World Mythology, “the hairy Sasabonsam has large blood-shot eyes, long legs, and feet pointing both ways.
During the photography of a sasabonsam sculpture in Ghana, J. B. Danquah was told by an Ashanti youth present in the crowd that a sasabonsam had once been killed by a man named Agya Wuo and brought to his town, where it had been observed by a number of people.
According to the youth, Agya Wuo had come across the sasabonsam sleeping in a tree hollow in a dense forest, and fatally injured it after it “emitted a cry like that of a bat but deeper”. He took the body back to his village, where it died after making “ho, ho” noises, then on to the bungalow of District Commissioner L. W.
When questioned about the incident by Danquah, Wood “seemed uncertain whether he had indeed photographed such a creature,” and cautiously said that “he may have taken the snap and the film, when developed, may have shown nothing!”.
Whatever the truth, you will note that the monster in question is neither human in origin nor undead.
“(This 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 volitant powers, being able to quit their bodies and travel great distances in the night.
Besides sucking the blood of their victims, they are supposed to be able to extract the sap and juices of crops.
“These witches are supposed to be very common, and a man never knows but that his friend or even his wife may be one. When prowling at night they are supposed to emit a phosphorescent light.
“There are in the main two forms in which witchcraft is practised. 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.
In the wild, the adze takes the form of a firefly, though it will transform into human shape upon capture.
When in human form, the adze has the power to possess humans. People, male or female, possessed by an adze are viewed as witches (“abasom” in the Ewe language).
The adze’s influence would negatively affect the people who lived around their host. A person is suspected of being possessed in a variety of situations, including: women with brothers (especially if their brother’s children fared better than their own), old people (if the young suddenly started dying and the old stayed alive) and the poor (if they envied the rich).
In firefly form, the adze would pass through closed doors at night and suck blood from people as they slept. The victim would fall sick and die.
Tales of the creature and its effects were probably an attempt to describe the potentially deadly effects of mosquitoes and malaria.
The Ramanga is not that well recorded, but it is mentioned occasionally as a ‘vampire-like’ being. Quite what a Ramanga is remains unclear - we’ve so far found no period source material for it.
Some say that it represents a person who takes on ritual roles for important tribal figures, such as drinking blood and eating nail clippings; others that it is a creature which does the same thing but for its own appetites.
At the start of this post, we mentioned new urban myths and colonial-era fears.
According to Tim Allen, an expert at the London School of Economics who has written on violence related to vampire stories in Uganda, large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa share broad and ancient-if shifting-beliefs in witchcraft and blood’s esoteric powers.
Vampire tales proper seem to be a recent permutation on these beliefs.
‘In colonial Zambia in the 1930, Africans claimed their blood was taken and their bodies left for dead to make cough drops for Europeans,’ she told me.
“I call this transnational genre of African stories vampire stories, not because I want to insert a lively African oral genre into a European one, but because I want to use a widespread term that adequately conveys the mobility, the internationalism, and the economics of these colonial bloodsuckers.
So, we stick to our statement that there never was an African vampire in folklore terms (if you can prove us wrong, we’d be delighted to hear from you!).
This is not in itself a problem for writers and readers - much vampire literature is fairly divorced from its Balkans folkloric origins anyway.
So as far as the African vampire in contemporary fiction is concerned, anything goes. There’s even no particular reason why there can’t be a predatory upper caste Kenyan who is secretly a dracula, wears a cape, and goes out to seduce and exsanguinate the young women of Mombasa - or a Cape Town vampire queen, etc.
Or writers can abandon the term ‘vampire’ altogether when writing African-set stories, and focus on the nature of sickness, psychic draining and post-mortem survival in new ways - perhaps echoing aspects of obayifo and other practices.
