Do you remember Popobawa? He (or it) first hit the headlines in 1995, back when laughing at foreigners was still allowed, causing much hilarity in Western media. Popobawa was supposed to be a bat-winged sex-demon or djinni of some unspeakably hideous kind who had abruptly manifested on the island of Zanzibar, off the east coast of Africa, where he kept on popping up in people’s bedrooms in the middle of the night and forcibly bumming them half to death.
The general local explanation for the social panic was that 1995 was the year of Zanzibar’s first free, multi-party elections, the incubus-like entity reputedly being in the pay of the ruling CCM Party, who planned to use the creature to distract voters from bothering to go to the ballot-box to chuck them out. Social media being as yet unknown, the Zanzibarians still had to spread these careless whispers by word of mouth, leading to widespread public disorder and riots, in which foreigners were frequently targeted. A minority ethnic group, the Makonde, originally slaves and cheap labourers brought in from the African mainland by the island’s old rulers, were slandered as being the alien conjurors responsible for summoning Popobawa, with the result that several were killed by baying mobs.
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