CHAPTER 5, THE ROLES OF ARAB-SWAHILI MERCHANTS AND THE CONGO FREE STATE

Section: Cannibalism among Allies of Swahilo-Arab Merchants

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In the late nineteenth century, the acquisition and transport of slaves and ivory from central and eastern Africa to the Arab world was largely organized by merchants from the island of Zanzibar and surrounding areas on the East African coast, where Swahili is widely spoken—either as mother tongue or as language of trade. Because only “some of them were pure Arabs, [while] others were of mixed African blood [or] African converts to Islam,” they are now commonly known under terms such as “Swahilo-Arabs.” In the European sources written at that time they were simply (but somewhat misleadingly) called “Arabs.”1

Western traders usually acquired the slaves (and also the ivory) they intended to export “by purchase or negotiation with local rulers, merchants, or noblemen”—they rarely got their own hands bloody by organizing or participating in slave raids.2 Many of the Swahilo-Arab merchants took a more active role. It was not rare for them to join forces with local people to raid nearby villages. Often, instead of paying their allies, they agreed to share the spoils in a mutually agreeable way. The consumption of human flesh is as strongly proscribed in Islam as in the Christian world, and there are no indications that these Muslim traders did not take this prohibition seriously—for themselves. Various accounts, however, reveal that at least some of them were willing to join forces with those who considered human flesh a delicious part of the spoils—provided that enough good-to-sell slaves remained for the Swahilo-Arabs.

These arrangements were not always free of conflicts. In 1863, the British explorer and officer Sir Samuel White Baker (1821–1893) met the party of a certain Ibrahim, a Swahilo-Arab trading in ivory and slaves. One of Ibrahim’s men, who called himself Ibrahimawa, told Baker that they had for some years done business with the “Makkarika, a cannibal tribe”—a local name used for the Zande people.3 He characterized them as “remarkably good people,” who nevertheless had a “peculiar taste for dogs and human flesh.”4

> They accompanied the trading party in their razzias, and invariably ate the bodies of the slain. The traders complained that they were bad associates, as they insisted upon killing and eating the children which the party wished to secure as slaves: their custom was to catch a child by its ankles, and to dash its head against the ground; thus killed, they opened the abdomen, extracted the stomach and intestines, and tying the two ankles to the neck they carried the body by slinging it over the shoulder, and thus returned to camp, where they divided it by quartering, and boiled it in a large pot.5

If this was the behavior of remarkably good people, one wonders what bad people might have done. Despite the disagreement between the Swahilo-Arab slavers and their local allies about the fate of captured children, the Arabs were evidently satisfied enough with the arrangement to keep the “Makkarika” as allies and porters. Though some children were killed, they apparently still got enough captives to make the joint raids a success for both parties.

A man employed by Baker told him that he had once seen a group of Swahilo-Arab traders, who brought with them a “great number of slaves” and were accompanied by a group of “Makkarika” porters, carrying the ivory the Arabs had purchased or robbed. When they stopped at Gondokoro, the town where Baker was at that time,6 one of the enslaved girls tried to run away. Her owner (one of the Swahilo-Arabs) shot and wounded her, causing “a large lump of yellow fat” to exude from the bullet wound.7 When the “Makkarika” saw this, they

> rushed upon her in a crowd, and seizing the fat, they tore it from the wound in handfuls, the girl being still alive, while the crowd were quarrelling for the disgusting prize. Others killed her with a lance, and at once divided her by cutting off the head, and splitting the body with their lances, used as knives, cutting longitudinally from between the legs along the spine to the neck.8

Fearing for their lives, “many slave women and their children who witnessed this scene, rushed panic-stricken from the spot and took refuge in the trees.” But this incited the “Makkarika” to “give chase”: they pulled several children from the trees (the mothers, it seems, were spared), slaughtered them, “and in a short time a great feast was prepared for the whole party.” The man added that after witnessing this “horrible feast” he could not eat anything for the next three days.9

In other cases, the arrangements about dividing the spoils seem to have worked out better. Around 1870, the German botanist and ethnologist Georg Schweinfurth traveled for some time with a Swahilo-Arab ivory and slave trader named Mohammed—a man he considered his “friend.”10 Mohammed cleverly exploited the hostilities between different clans of the Zande, who are not a monolithic people but made up of various culturally diverse ethnicities or clans, only some of which practiced cannibalism.11 Mohammed convinced one of these clans to join him in his “usual raid against the Babuckur” (or Babukur)—another Zande clan, though Schweinfurth apparently did not know this.12 Mohammed sought to acquire both corn to feed his caravan and female slaves to sell. The Zande, by agreement, also got some of the captured women, whom they used in various ways: “the youngest were destined for their houses [as servants and consorts], the middle-aged for their agriculture [to work in the fields], and the eldest for their caldrons [sic]!”13

Schweinfurth reports that he personally saw how, after the raid, Zande warriors “were bestowed with old unfit women—for eating.” A few days later, he purchased the fresh skulls of several of these women for the Anatomical Museum of Berlin.14 That, by paying for the bodily remains, he might have given an incentive for further cannibal killings does not seem to have concerned him; instead he comments: “as I was not able to bring the poor [women] to life again I saw no reason why I should not purchase their remains in the interests of science.”15

Schweinfurth does not say what became of the men killed or captured in the raid. According to Filiberto Gero, who spent several decades among the Zande, male captives had often been killed and eaten quickly—they might have been considered too dangerous to keep alive.16 While younger women were kept alive as slaves, the Zande saw no reason to raise their babies, as Schweinfurth learned shortly after the raid. In a local farmstead he met

> an old woman . . . sitting surrounded by a group of boys and girls, all busily employed in cutting up gourds and preparing them for eating. . . . Midway between the two huts a mat was outspread; upon this mat, exposed to the full glare of the noon-day sun, feebly gasping, lay a new-born infant: I doubt whether it was more than a day old.17

When he inquired why they did not take better care of the baby, the locals told him that, cooked together with the gourds, it would soon make “a dainty dish.” The mother, they explained, was “one of the slaves who had been captured in the late raid,” but her baby had been taken from her “because its nurture would interfere with her properly fulfilling her domestic duties.” Young servants, insofar as they were desired, could be captured—there was no need to raise them from birth. Schweinfurth was so appalled that he “felt ready to shoot the old hag” who was calmly organizing the preparations for the meal. But (he adds) “I was swayed by the protestations of the Nubians [Swahilo-Arabs] ringing in my ears that they were powerless in the matter, and that they had not come to be lawgivers to the Niam-niam [Zande],” and so he decided to leave the women and the baby to their respective fates.18

His comment refers to a repeated discussion he had with his Swahilo-Arab companions:

> Often I reproached the Nubians of my retinue with allowing such abuses to go on before their eyes, and under the sanction of the flag bearing the insignia of the Holy Prophet; but just as often I received the answer that the Faithful were incompetent to change anything, but must submit to the will of God; it was impressed upon me that the Niam-niam were heathen, and that if the heathen liked to eat each other up, it was no concern of theirs; they had no right to be lawgivers or teachers to cannibals.19

Considering that their own leader, Schweinfurth’s friend Mohammed, had organized the raid and convinced the Zande warriors to participate in it, this absence of “concern” is certainly remarkable. But this attitude seems to have been quite typical for Swahilo-Arab traders who came into Central Africa and enlisted local help. They were likely morally strict in their own behavior towards other Muslims, but they disclaimed all responsibility for the actions of nonbelievers, including their own allies. Schweinfurth also observes that they were not at all keen to spread the Islamic faith in the regions they visited, since believers had to be treated as “brothers” and could no longer be legally enslaved.20

The neighboring Mangbetu people also repeatedly accompanied Swahilo-Arab merchants on their raids, and here similar arrangements were made. Schweinfurth talked with several Swahilo-Arabs who told him they had seen their companions “cut [human] flesh into long strips and dry . . . it over the fire in its preparation for consumption.” He heard that the corpses of all enemies killed during fights were dried and taken home for consumption; many prisoners claimed by the Mangbetu were subsequently eaten too.21 The Swahilo-Arabs were apparently quite willing to let the Mangbetu keep any children too young to make useful slaves; while Schweinfurth stayed at the court of King Munza, he heard persistent rumours “that nearly every day some little [captive] child was sacrificed to supply” the royal table. Even though he repeatedly visited the king, he was never allowed to join his meals or indeed to observe any Mangbetu eating. Munza frankly told him that since he knew of the European’s “aversion,” he had ordered that any cannibal acts had to take place “in secret” during his stay.22

Schweinfurth nevertheless once spotted a human arm being smoked over a fire. Another time he saw “a number of young women who had a supply of boiling water upon the clay floor in front of the doorway of a hut, and were engaged in the task of scalding the hair off the lower half of a human body”—a sight that reminded him “of the soddening and scouring of our fatted swine.”23

The Italian explorer Gaetano Casati (1838–1902), who visited the Mangbetu more than a decade later, received similar information about the fate of children captured in their regular raids against neighboring peoples. He notes that, while adult captives were kept as “slaves to be employed in the fields, . . . it is said that very young ones are still destined to satisfy cannibal taste.”24 Adults could usually expect a better fate, but only as long as they behaved. By then, Munza had been succeeded by his brother and, in contrast to Schweinfurth, Casati saw the court officials dine (he does not say whether he was invited himself) and was “horror-struck” when the “roasted leg of [a] woman” was served. It turned out that the leg had belonged to an enslaved woman, who, “weary of long-continued service, left her master’s house, and went to stay with some friends.” Punishment was swift and harsh: she was executed and her body donated (or sold?) to the royal court for consumption.25