Section: Ivory as Export Good and the Role of Westerners

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Were Europeans sometimes even more closely involved in this deadly trade? As mentioned, both John Weeks and Emil Torday knew of a white trader (conceivably the same man) who acted as “intermediary” in the exchange of ivory against slaves who were subsequently eaten. This may have been an exception, but it is notable that a Dutch trader, Edward Glave, and white captains known to Sidney Hinde were all invited to exchange ivory, or sometimes other goods, against “edible” slaves.31 Dybowski made the same experience. When his group tried to purchase fruit or vegetables, the locals asked to be given a man in return, “and when we asked why they wanted him, we were told, ‘But why, to eat him!’ And they could not understand that we did not wish to make this exchange of fresh provisions.”32 Travelers visiting other rivers sometimes received similar offers.33 If white men (with the exception of the one or two traders mentioned by Weeks and Torday) never agreed to such proposals, would not the locals quickly have stopped making them? If Western merchants did indeed join in the illegal and often deadly exchange of slaves against ivory, they certainly had reasons to remain silent, which would explain the absence of more evidence….

Section: Slave Trade, Raiding, and Cannibalism

From the sources discussed earlier, and others we will encounter later, there can be little doubt that slaves were sometimes bought directly for consumption (or for fattening and consumption), without any other purpose they were supposed to serve. How, we may well ask, had a situation developed where slaves were considered good for eating and were apparently readily available for this purpose? Why did cannibalistic buyers buy and why did slave raiders or other slave owners supply them? Why was such a custom not stopped by ethical or economic concerns?

These questions cannot be answered by considering the Congo basin in isolation. The region was part of a large trading network, reaching from the Americas in the west to the Arab world and Asia in the east, and the local custom of slave eating was closely intertwined with this trade, as we will see. Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Mumbanza mwa Bawele point out that slaves who permanently lived with this status were rare or unknown among most Central African peoples until approximately the first half of the nineteenth century. Oral evidence indicates that captives taken in wars were often killed and (in many regions) eaten. Women of childbearing age were frequently spared and forced into marriage with one of their captors; children were sometimes adopted into the families of their captors. Some other captives were already exported towards the African west coast, passing through the hands of various intermediary traders before finally being shipped across the Atlantic to the Americas.38

At that time, the consumption of killed or captured enemies already seems to have been quite common—at least, none of the later sources dealing with the practice suggests that it was new.39 Sales of captives to others who would eat them might already have occurred as well. In fact, as Jewsiewicki and Mumbanza mwa Bawele found by investigating oral histories about these and later times, people generally assumed that anyone sold as slave would be eaten: “Because cannibalism was common, and slaves were purchased especially for such purposes, people assumed that slaves who were sold were probably sacrificed.” Nevertheless, “incorrigibly troublesome” young persons were sometimes sold into slavery—a severe form of punishment that was expected to end in death: “One did not eat one’s own relatives; instead, one sold them so that they might be sacrificed elsewhere.”40

Nevertheless, these phenomena were limited in scope. Some people fell victim to wars and a few were sold by their own relatives, but the latter punishment was probably rare and warfare was by no means perpetual and ubiquitous.41 But around the middle of the nineteenth century, the situation worsened considerably, because the Congo basin came under pressure as a supply area for both the transatlantic (or western) and Arab (or eastern) slave trade.

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Wars “fought principally for the purpose of capturing slaves” became common, while in earlier times the taking of captives (some of whom were sold downriver towards the transatlantic trade) had been a side effect of warfare. But now raids against other villages were specifically organized for the purpose of enslaving as many people as possible. There was no strict separation between attackers and victims—any group who felt strong enough to get away with it might have raided nearby communities with whom no strong bounds of friendship or affinity existed. “When they were stronger they made us their slaves. But when they were weaker we were the ones who reduced them to slavery,” a survivor later remembered.45

Raids usually took the form of a surprise attack on a village, often in the early morning. Those who resisted or were “too strong to make slaves of” were killed, while everyone else was taken captive and could potentially be sold—if there was a market for them.46 But the demands of the international slave trade differed considerably from the supply acquired by taking everyone in a village. Paul Lovejoy estimates that about half the inhabitants of raided villages were teenagers and young adults in their “prime” (aged fourteen to thirty), while the rest were children up to thirteen (30 percent of the population) and “mature” adults above the age of thirty (20 percent). But among the slaves exported across the Atlantic, the huge majority where “prime” teenagers and adults (more than 85 percent)—there were considerably fewer children (less than 15 percent) and hardly any “mature” adults.47

Being of a suitable age was not enough to get a slave sold—European merchants preferred purchasing “the healthiest and strongest slaves,” while a “sickly slave” was considered unsalable. And nearly all the children exported across the Atlantic seem to have been at least eight years old.48 Some of those considered unsuitable for export were purchased by African buyers to be used as servants, laborers, or consorts, but local demand for very young and elder people was likewise limited or absent, hence “prices of infants and the old fell very low.” Since raiders knew this, they often did not even bother with them: “old men and women, as well as children, were considered valueless and often killed.” Joseph C. Miller estimates that in raids and war campaigns undertaken for acquiring slaves about as many persons were killed as were enslaved—either because they resisted or because they were considered unsalable.49

In regions where food taboos prevented the consumption of human flesh, the bodies of the killed were left to rot or feed wild animals. But in cannibal regions, the raiders had additional options: if they were not opposed to eating human flesh themselves, they could consume the dead rather than letting them rot. And if cannibals willing to purchase tasty humans in return for ivory or some other suitable compensation lived nearby, the raiders (regardless of whether or not they were cannibals themselves) could keep their otherwise unmarketable captives temporarily alive in order to sell them to those who just cared for their meat. Evidence from the Congo basin suggests that both these options were used. In passing it may be noted that this analysis might likewise apply to other regions where slaves were sometimes killed for consumption, such as Nigeria.50 While the Congo and Angola were the single most important source of slaves exported to the Americas, Nigeria and neighboring Benin were not far behind.51

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But why were some slaves sold towards the coast (and formerly across the Atlantic), where they often had to serve the needs of Western buyers, while others were traded locally for cannibalistic purposes? We already know part of the answer: European and American buyers were choosy, they spurned slaves who were very young, old, weak, or sickly. Johnston explicitly points out that cannibalistic and export slave trade went hand in hand: some of the slaves offered for sale around the Lulonga were sold downriver to the Ubangi or upriver to “Bangala towns” and other local destinations “where they were eaten”; others were shipped farther downriver and “resold as slaves for the white man.” Ivory was also traded downriver, transported by the same intermediaries that bought and sold slaves.54

If these trades were connected, we may expect that the cannibals (or traders hoping to resell to cannibals) often bought those less wanted for export, as they would have been cheaper. From the sellers’ viewpoint, selling otherwise unwanted slaves cheaply to cannibals was preferable to not selling them at all. There is indeed some evidence of such a division between different kinds of buyers. Among the slave markets visited by Glave was “the most important slave-trading center” in the region (as he calls it) in Masankusu (today Basankusu), a town at the source of the Lulonga River.55 Tied to the poles of slave sheds or trees, he saw slaves of “all ages, of both sexes,” including “even babies who cannot yet walk,” offered for sale without their mothers.56 This was certainly unusual—elsewhere infants were sometimes sold together with their mother, but they “added nothing to their [mother’s] price,” since buyers saw no reason to pay for “children who would need years of care” before becoming useful.57 Visitors to slave markets outside the cannibalistic regions saw children from age six, eight, or ten exposed for sale—but none (or very few) younger.58

From the cannibal viewpoint, however, youth was not an impediment. On the contrary, it might have been considered a benefit, just as many modern meat eaters prefer lamb over mutton and veal over beef. Cannibal voices praising children as particularly tasty are not hard to find. The missionary and ethnographer Filiberto Gero (a pseudonym of Filiberto Giorgetti), who lived among the Zande at the northeastern fringes of the Congo basin59 for almost forty years (from 1926 to the mid-1960s), heard from several of his local informants that the flesh of children had been preferred over that of adults because it was “very delicate.”60 When the German botanist and ethnologist Georg Schweinfurth (1836–1925) visited the neighboring Mangbetu people around 1870, he repeatedly heard that young children made “particularly tasty morsels.”61

In Nigeria, where slaves were sometimes eaten as well,62 the British anthropologist P. Amaury Talbot (1877–1945) found that those practicing cannibalism generally preferred young victims, explaining that “the younger the person, the tenderer are the ‘joints.’” In some areas, “young children” were considered “the best [food] of all,”63 and it seems they were sometimes deliberately fattened before being “baked” for the table.64

In the market at Masankusu, Glave talked with a woman exposed for sale who told him that she and her children had been captured in a raid on their village ten days earlier—her husband and several other men who had tried to resist had been murdered. She did not fear so much for her own immediate future, expecting to be sold to some neighboring people to “toil in the plantations” until she would become too “old and unfit for work.” Only then, she added, “I shall be killed to celebrate the death of a free man.”65

But she did not expect her children to be allowed to grow up. Two of them, she explained, “have already been purchased by the slave traders. I shall never see them any more. Perhaps they will sacrifice them on the death of some chief, or perhaps kill them for food.” She could not know this for sure, but it is not implausible that these were typical fates of enslaved children who were too young to be exploited otherwise. Her third child was a baby, “clutching to her shrunken breast,” which she expected to be taken from her the same day, since her owner was offering it for sale, independently of her, “for a very small price.”66

The British adventurer and sculptor Herbert Ward (1863–1919), who spent the years from 1884 to 1889 in the Congo basin, also visited the slave markets on the Lulonga. He writes that it was not rare to see “upwards of a hundred captives, of both sexes and of all ages, including infants in their mothers’ arms,” exposed for sale in one of the “strongly fortified villages” where the raiders lived. He reminds us of the connection between these slave markets and the deadly trade in slaves and ivory that took place around the Ubangi River, pointing out that some of the buyers “came in large dug-out canoes” from the Ubangi in order to purchase slaves in return for ivory. While the ivory was subsequently resold downriver until it reached the markets of Europe and the Americas, the slaves were taken to the Ubangi River, where “eventually, after having been deliberately fattened, they met their tragic fate, and their bodies were consumed.”67

Ward adds that, in another part of the country (he does not say where exactly) he personally encountered whole “convoys of slaves that had been bought or captured” and were then “conveyed to tribes who purchase them as food, giving ivory in exchange.”68