Authors: Daniel Diehl
Further west, the Dakota tribes were cannibals, but limited the practice to the bodies of fallen enemies who had performed particularly well in battle. Their hearts and livers – believed to be the seat of wisdom and courage respectively – were eaten by the victorious warriors who had engaged in the fight. The Dakota were very particular that only the bravest of their enemy made it to the table. To consume the body of a coward would have been disgusting. Along the north-west border of the USA, the Thingit, Tsinshuan and Heilsuk practised cannibalism, but only as a part of tribal magic. Other Native American tribes, particularly those in what is now Canada, often forced their prisoners to eat strips of their own flesh before being killed and butchered, as a means of inflicting one final humiliation.
The close association – for good or bad – of the white and native cultures brought about an inevitable degree of cultural cross-pollination. When the family of famous mountain man, Jeremiah Johnson, was wiped out by a Crow Indian war party, he
went on a one-man revenge spree. Over several years, Johnson claimed to have killed 247 Crow and eaten every one of their livers. No matter how many braves and warriors were sent against him, Johnson killed them, leaving their liverless bodies as a calling card. Eventually, the Crow agreed to a truce. They would stop hunting Johnson if he would stop eating Crow.
If Europeans discovered numerous tribes of cannibals in the USA, their experiences in South America were equally disturbing; and because these encounters came hard on the heels of the discovery of Caribbean and Aztec societies, the belief that all Native Americans must eat each other disastrously influenced relations with more peaceful civilisations. A case in point is the encounter between Spanish Conquistador Francisco Pizarro and the Inca people of Peru in 1532–3, only twelve years after the conquest of the Aztecs by Cortez.
In a typically brutal and unnecessary attack, Pizarro and his soldiers destroyed the Inca capital, killed the cream of the imperial troops and took King Atahualpa captive. Atahualpa was told in no uncertain terms that he would bow to the power of Spain and adopt the religion of his conquerors. Despite being in obvious peril of his life, Atahualpa said he bowed to no man and told the Spanish exactly what he thought of their religion. His people, he said, only sacrificed their enemies to their gods and certainly did not eat people. The Spanish, on the other hand, killed their own God, drank his blood and baked his body into little biscuits which they sacrificed to themselves. He found the entire practice unspeakable. The Spanish were outraged and had Atahualpa publicly strangled on 15 August 1533.
The first objective account of South American cannibalism comes to us from a German sailor, Hans Staden, who was shipwrecked on the Brazilian coast only a few years after Pizarro’s encounter with the Inca. According to Staden, the local tribe, the Tumpinamba, had taken a prisoner during a battle with a rival tribe. The prisoner was dragged into the village where
he was subjected to the taunts and jeers of the local women, but was allowed to retaliate in kind, even being provided with overripe fruit and pottery to throw at his tormentors. Eventually, the tribal executioner appeared with a war-club and, after another exchange of insults, feints and parries, he proceeded to batter out the prisoner’s brains, to the cheers of the crowd. The victim’s blood was collected in ceremonial jars and immediately drunk by the old women and children of the tribe. According to Staden, ‘Mothers would smear their nipples with the blood so that even babies could have a taste of it’. The body was then cut into quarters, roasted and eaten. Curiously, as barbaric as this sounds, it was purely ceremonial and only inflicted on a single representative of the enemy.
Although the example above took place nearly five centuries ago, the practice of cannibalism in South America, particularly along Brazil’s Amazon basin, survived well into the twentieth century. The Cubeo tribe routinely made war for the specific purpose of eating captured enemies. In battles where more captives were taken than could be eaten at a single celebration, the excess meat was dried and saved for later. Those who were destined for immediate consumption were subject to a particularly horrible fate; their penis and scrotum were cut out, and worn over the genitals of the victorious warriors while they performed a celebratory dance. After the dance, as many enemy as were deemed appropriate to the size of the crowd were roasted and eaten. But it appears that not only the enemy found his way to the Cubeo table. When the mood struck them, they would dig up their own dead, who had been cremated before burial, grind up their bones, mix the powder with the local beer and drink it.
Other tribes along the Amazon who practised cannibalism but generally limited it to captive enemy warriors were the Tarianas, Tucanos, Tupi-Cuarani, Tupinamba, Panche and Paucura. The Paucura, who seemed to be gourmets, kept their prisoners caged
for some time before consigning them to the pot or gridiron, fattening them up on fresh fruit and vegetables to improve the flavour of the meat. The Panche, who ate their enemies like the other tribes listed above, also ate their own firstborn in a gruesome fertility rite. Obviously, this kind of thing can get out of hand; the Tupi-Cuarani began practising cannibalism as a post-battle ritual, but decided they liked the taste of human meat so much that it became a routine affair. The same was true of the Cashibos who lived on the Brazilian/Peruvian border. They started eating their deceased parents as a sign of respect but eventually extended the practice to what can only be considered big game hunting. Cashibo hunting parties would lure hunters from other tribes into ambush by imitating the sound of birds and animals, turning the rival hunters into the hunted.
Some South American tribes were far more selective, and respectful, about who they ate. The Cocomas only ate their deceased relatives and friends, not only consuming their flesh but, like the Cubeo, grinding up their bones, mixing the powder with beer and drinking it. The Cocomas insisted it was a solemn gesture and that it was a far better fate to end up inside a warm friend than to be buried in the cold ground.
If images of fierce Amazonian tribes and bloodthirsty Aztecs have become an accepted part of history, the cannibalistic activities of certain African tribes have entered the realm of legend. Until relatively modern times, if you heard the word cannibal, the image your mind would most likely conjure up would not be Anthony Hopkins as the campy Hannibal Lecter, but a fierce, fat African chieftain watching gleefully while his henchmen tossed an English explorer – pith helmet and all – into a boiling cauldron. Like so much about cannibalism, it is an image based on half-truths twisted entirely out of shape.
Africa is a huge continent and vast areas of it have never experienced cannibalism, even though some Europeans bent on land acquisition and colonisation accused perfectly innocent
tribes of the practice. Explorers such as Dr David Livingstone, and others equally famous, never once recorded an encounter with a cannibal. Those who did were probably exploring either the Congo or adjoining Cameroon, along Africa’s western coast, both of which were hotbeds of man eating. Even those tribes that did indulge in the practice were often so particular as to the nature of their flesh eating that special cooking implements and pots were reserved for the purpose. Naturally, even those Africans who lived far from cannibalistic tribes were aware of the practice long before the white man set foot on their continent and this, like the encounter between Inca King Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro, led to some awkward assumptions.
When Scottish explorer Mungo Park visited Africa between 1795 and 1797 it was almost inevitable that he encountered gangs of chained slaves awaiting shipment to the Americas. One of the things that struck him most was the slaves’ firm belief that they were going to be eaten by their new masters in that faraway world. Park did his best to dissuade them of the idea, but discovered the reason for their fear was all too real. When slaves were sold to many West African tribes the cooking pot was, indeed, their ultimate destination.
Half a century later, French-American explorer Paul DuChaillu witnessed first-hand the reasons behind the queries that had been posed to Park. DuChaillu was in the territory of the Fang people in the Cameroon when, in his own words, ‘I perceived some bloody remains which looked to me to be human, but I passed on, incredulous. Presently we passed a woman who solved all doubt. She carried with her a piece of the thigh of a human body, just as we would go to market and carry thence a roast or steak. In fact, symptoms of cannibalism stare me in the face wherever I go . . .’ According to DuChaillu, when a Fang tribesman died, his or her body was simply sent to a nearby village to be chopped up and sold at the local market.
There seemed no ceremonial purpose to the practice beyond a convenient way to dispose of dead bodies. When there were not enough natural deaths to supply the demand for human flesh, slaves were purchased from outsiders and dispatched, like cattle, to the marketplace. The practice was so commonplace, and the locals so blasé about it, that when DuChaillu met the king of the Apingi people, his majesty presented him with a trussed-up slave, saying, ‘Kill him for your evening meal; he is tender and fat, and you must be hungry.’
If the Cameroon was crawling with cannibals, its next-door neighbour, the Congo, was even more so. Even the most famous Congolese tribe, the Ubangi – once noted for their massive, ornamental lip plates – routinely ate the meat of slaves. We do not know which tribe, or tribes, in the Congo began the practice, but it seems that it was an idea whose time had come, and it quickly spread from one tribe to another, each giving it their own peculiar twist. Although no tribe claimed to eat raw flesh, some insisted that thigh steaks were best, others preferred arms, while some claimed that hands made the juiciest snacks.
German explorer Georg Schweinfurth toured the Congo and its environs almost constantly between 1869 and 1888 encountering, and recording, an endless stream of cannibalistic practices. Among the Azande the practice was so common that signs of it were everywhere. From trees hung shrivelled hands and feet, and skulls from past meals were displayed on stakes outside the huts. The Azande told Schweinfurth that almost no one was considered too good, or too bad, to be eaten, if the occasion arose. Enemies captured or killed in war inevitably went to the kitchen, as did any Azande who died unless their relatives went to extraordinary lengths to protect the body. On one occasion, Schweinfurth saw a one-day-old infant who had been left in the glaring African sun to die so it could be prepared for the evening meal. When Schweinfurth went off to explore the river Uele he encountered the Monbuttu tribe who, he
insisted, were even more dedicated to devouring their neighbours than the Azande. Although the Monbuttu kept herds of cattle sufficient to supply their dietary needs, they still preferred human flesh, taking special pleasure in eating captured enemies. When an enemy warrior was taken in battle, Schweinfurth said, they were herded, ‘without remorse, as butchers would drive sheep to the shambles . . . to fall victims, on a later day, to their horrible and sickening greediness’. King Munza of the Monbuttu made a notable concession to Schweinfurth’s visit by insisting that no one should be seen eating human flesh in public as long as the white visitor was among them.
The Bambala, also of the Congo, preferred human flesh after it had been buried in the ground long enough to begin to putrefy. Another reported delicacy among the Bambala was a paste made from a mixture of human blood and flour.
Even the massive influx of Christian missionaries during the latter half of the nineteenth century could do little to stem the tide of cannibalism among the various Congolese tribes. The Revd Holman Bentley worked for the Baptist Missionary Society’s outpost in the Congo for many years during the later decades of the Victorian era and reported numerous anecdotes concerning the local addiction to eating people. On one occasion, while Bentley and others were at dinner, they were interrupted by a young Boshongo chief, who asked to borrow a knife. To the horror of the missionaries, the man was later discovered to have used the knife to slit the throat of a slave girl and dismember her. When he was arrested, the chief had some of the girl’s limbs, along with those of other victims, in a shoulder bag. It seems, however, that not all the local tribes went in for such a do-it-yourself approach to cannibalism. Some family groups, or perhaps several families, would pool their resources to buy a human haunch or even an entire, living slave who would be kept in a cage, fattened up and killed when he was judged ready for cooking. According to Bentley, ‘The whole wide country seemed
to be given up to cannibalism . . . They could not understand the objections raised to the practice. “You eat fowls and goats, and we eat men; why not? What is the difference?” The son of Matabwiki, chief of [the] Liboko, when asked whether he ever ate human flesh, said: “Ah! I wish I could eat everybody on earth!”’ Bentley insisted on the veracity of these amazing occurrences when he wrote, ‘This is no worked-up picture, it is the daily life of thousands of people at the present time in Darkest Africa.’
Towards the end of the Revd Bentley’s African assignment, his assertions were upheld by Captain Sidney Hinde who served with the Congo Free State Force during much of the 1880s and 1890s. In his memoirs, Hinde wrote, ‘What struck me most, during my expeditions throughout the country, was the number of cut-up bodies I found. Neither old nor young, women or children, are exempt from serving as food for their conquerors or neighbours.’ It was a situation that would long outlast the easily shocked Victorian sensibilities.
As late as 1924, a Royal Society expedition to the Congo found conditions little changed from the previous century. According to their report, however, the tribes they encountered had a far more reverential motive behind their cannibalism than the ones discussed earlier. ‘When a man died, the body was kept in the house until evening, when the relatives who had been summoned gathered for the mourning. When darkness set in, and it was felt safe to work without intrusion from inquisitive onlookers, a number of elderly women relatives of the dead man went to the place where the body lay, and cut it up, carrying back the pieces they wanted to the house of mourning, and leaving the remains to be devoured by wild animals. For the next three days, or sometimes four, the relatives mourned in the house in which the death had taken place, and there cooked and ate the flesh of the dead, destroying the bones by fire and leaving nothing.’