Section: Consumption of the “Unwanted” and “Unfit”

Not everyone caught in a slave raid even made it to the nearest market. The enslaved woman whom Glave talked to stated that her husband and several other men had been killed. It is quite possible that their bodies had been eaten since (according to Glave) a successful raid was usually followed by a feast of human flesh. The raiders shackled only “the stronger portion of their captives . . . hand and foot to prevent their escape”—the rest were killed and eaten, and the bodies of those killed in the attack served the same purpose. Old people in particular were rarely preserved for the slave markets; instead, they were murdered immediately after a raid: “their marketable value being very small, no trouble is taken with them.” Before the surviving captives were brought to the nearest slave market, the fresh human flesh was consumed together with “all the bananas” found in the destroyed village.69

As bananas were a “staple food crop in the equatorial forest,”70 it is not surprising that they are mentioned as a side dish to human flesh not just in this but also in various other accounts. Among the Songye people, human flesh was usually served with bananas or cassava, notes the renowned German ethnologist Leo Frobenius (1873–1938).71 According to the Belgian author E. Carlier, the “Bondjo” people on the Ubangi liked to cook the flesh of executed slaves and war captives “in boiling water with cassava and bananas.”72 The famous Scottish missionary David Livingstone (1813–1873) once met a Swahilo-Arab slave trader who told him that he had recently seen human flesh cut up and “cooked with bananas” after a fight.73 And after talking with a group of Bangala people about their customs, the Scottish traveler James Jameson noted in his diary that “they remove the inside [entrails]” of killed enemies or of “nice, fat, young women” purchased for consumption, “stuff them with bananas, and roast them whole over a big fire.”74

To return to the coupling of slave raids with cannibalism, Herbert Ward agrees with Glave, writing that the raiders operating on the Lulonga and nearby rivers ate “those who are less suitable for the slavemarket” before selling the remaining captives.75 And the British diplomat Roger Casement (1864–1916) comments: “The towns around the lower Lulongo River raided the interior tribes, whose prolific humanity provided not only servitors, but human meat for those stronger than themselves.”76

The same practice of immediately consuming those considered unfit for sale seems to have existed among the Songye people living around the Sankuru, the longest tributary of the Kasai, which in turn is one of the largest left-bank (southern) tributaries of the Congo. Leo Frobenius heard from his local informants that young children caught in raids were “skewered on long spears like rats and roasted over a quickly kindled large fire” for immediate consumption. Adults (and supposedly older children) were usually kept alive and taken home, to be sold or eaten later.77

Raids undertaken for the double purpose of acquiring slaves (which were sold or employed locally) and victims for consumption are also documented in other regions. Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg (1873–1969), the leader of a German research expedition through the Congo basin, states that the Nzakara people (who live around a northern tributary of the Ubangi) regularly led raids, or war campaigns, against a neighboring people in order to “procure fresh slaves, and also human victims to satisfy their cannibal instincts.” These raids still took place around the year 1910, when Adolf Friedrich was in the area. At that time the captured slaves were retained locally—in earlier times some of them might have been sold to traders for ultimate export across the Atlantic.78

The French botanist and explorer Auguste Chevalier (1873–1956), who had been in the same region a few years earlier, writes that the Nzakara “frequently undertake expeditions to supply their pantry” with human victims for consumption. He does not mention slave taking, but it seems plausible that (as Adolf Friedrich states) some captives were left alive and exploited as slaves. Chevalier adds that “women and children” were preferably eaten because they made “refined dishes”—likely a deadly expression of patriarchal dominance, though it is also conceivable that male slaves were in higher demand as laborers and hence had a better chance of being spared.79

An echo of Chevalier’s statement comes from the Tshopo province in the northeast of the Congo basin, where a young chief explained to a Protestant missionary that “the flesh of the women and children is the best.” With evident nostalgia, he remembered the good old times (which in 1903 had only just passed, it seems) when captives taken in raids could still be fattened for consumption.80 While not mentioned, it seems quite possible that some of the captives were actually sold to the Swahilo-Arab traders who had been active in the area. The role of these merchants, who usually came from Zanzibar and nearby regions and traded in slaves and ivory destined for the East African coast and the Arab world, will be investigated later.81

According to Chevalier, children (though possibly not the smallest ones) and adolescents captured in raids or warfare could expect a somewhat better fate among the Mandja people, who lived west of the Nzakara. When Chevalier was in the area, children taken in raids were kept as slaves by their captors, while in earlier (precolonial) times, most of them were sold to Swahilo-Arab slavers. The corpses of killed enemy fighters were eaten, and adults taken captive were sooner or later killed and generally eaten too. Chevalier adds that human flesh was distributed equally among all families, except for “the heart and the liver,” which were reserved for the chief.82 The neighboring Banda people engaged in similar practices, but here the chief received “a leg or sometimes just a thigh” in addition to his regular share.83

Not only were slave raids deadly for many, the transport of slaves destined to be resold elsewhere or exported was often deadly as well. A captive who became too weak to move on was usually killed.84 When asked what happened with slaves who were unable to walk, a Swahilo-Arab slaver replied that “[we] spear them at once! . . . For, if we did not, others would pretend they were ill in order to avoid carrying their loads. No! We never leave them alive on the road; they all know our custom.”85 It must be pointed out that this was a general custom practiced not only throughout Africa, but also by European captains who, on their route across the Atlantic, frequently threw slaves overboard if they seemed too ill or weak to “be sold to advantage.”86 But in regions where human flesh was considered edible, the practice could be applied with an obvious twist: from a cannibal viewpoint, even a dead slave was a useful resource.

While stationed in Luebo, a town in the Kasai region, William H. Sheppard (1865–1927) and Samuel N. Lapsley (1866–1892)—the first African American missionary in the Congo and his white companion87—heard from a friend “that some cannibals had killed a woman and eaten her, and that this woman had a little child who had also eaten of her mother.” When told that the slave caravan where this had happened would pass nearby, Lapsley waited for it to show up.88

> Mr. Lapsley approached the head man, the chief, and . . . gently asked why they had killed and eaten one of the slaves.
> The chief explained, as a matter of course, that the woman’s feet were swollen and she could walk no more, so they only did as they always do with those who are unable to march.89

To spare her the fate of further slavery and possibly a premature death, Lapsley then purchased and liberated the six-year-old girl who had involuntarily shared in her mother’s flesh, paying with “some foreign cloth.”90 The slavers might have belonged to the Zappo Zaps, a group of Songye people known and feared as large-scale slave raiders and traders, since another time Sheppard notes that a group of “Zappo Zap (cannibals) . . . with a caravan of slaves to sell” had arrived in the town.91

Hinde reports that he repeatedly saw leftovers of cannibal meals on the roads in the Kasai region: “On the road—generally by the smouldering camp fire, or the blackened spot indicating where the fire has been—are the whitening bones, cracked and broken, which form the relics of these disgusting banquets.”92 While motives and contexts of such cannibal meals outside of settlements are unclear, some of them may well have been held by slave caravans after one of their captives had become too weak to move on.

Generally, there can be no doubt that the international slave and ivory trade and cannibalism in the Congo were not separate phenomena, but that they were interwoven, strengthening and complementing each other….