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

Section: Human Flesh as Reward

In the accounts considered so far, Free State officials did at least turn a blind eye to cannibal practices, but it is unclear whether they actively approved or facilitated them. In other cases, some of them went farther than that, giving cannibal allies or subordinates opportunities or at least tacit approval for such acts. In 1903, Roger Casement traveled through the Free State to investigate the alarming rumors that by then had reached the European public. His resulting report59 played an important role in turning the public opinion against Leopold’s reign of terror.

Among the locals interviewed by Casement was a girl who lived near Lake Tumba, a lake situated near the Congo River opposite the confluence of the Ubangi. When soldiers arrived in her town in order to punish the inhabitants for their noncompliance with the tax demands of the government, she and her little sister tried to hide. But they were discovered by soldiers who immediately killed her sister, stating that she was too young to keep up with them and carrying her would have meant too much trouble. The older girl, whose name Casement abbreviates as S S, was taken to a neighboring town, together with two other prisoners, among them “a very old woman.” A group of “soldiers asked C D [a white officer] to give them the old woman to eat, and C D told them to take her. Those soldiers took the woman and cut her throat, and then divided her and ate her. S S saw all this done.”60

The murder and consumption of the old woman had taken place not only with the knowledge of the white officer, but with his explicit permission. S S later managed to run away. She had had at least four siblings, but when Casement talked to her, she was the sole survivor of her family: “S S’s mother was killed by soldiers, and her father died of starvation, or rather, he refused to eat because he was bereaved of his wife and all his children.”61

Other survivors had similar experiences. David Van Reybrouck quotes a man whose village was attacked because the villagers had failed to fulfill the demanded rubber quota. He reported that the village chieftain was murdered immediately, together with two of his wives and a child that “was cut in two.” The bodies were then eaten by the soldiers. Ten men, who had tried to flee, were caught and killed as well. When the soldiers left, they deliberately left parts of a human body behind, “chopped into pieces and mixed with banana and manioc, in plain sight, to frighten the villagers.”62

A woman remembered how, when she was a young girl, soldiers had come into her village and started to arbitrarily shoot at people “because of the rubber. My father was murdered: they tied him to a tree and shot and killed him, and when the sentries untied him they gave him to their boys, who ate him.”63

Another work that helped exposing the crimes of Leopold’s government was The Curse of Central Africa (1903) by the two whistleblowers Guy Burrows and Edgar Canisius, already mentioned. Burrows had worked for six years for the Free State government, ultimately as a district commander; Canisius had spent five years working for the government and for one of the concessionary companies which had received exclusive licenses to exploit the country’s resources. After their return both decided that they could not remain silent about the things they had witnessed in the Congo.

John George Leigh, the author of the book’s introduction, claims that “it is notorious that the Congo native troops were living for the most part on the flesh of prisoners taken on the road and on the corpses of the Dzande people killed in the skirmishes.” In 1896, during a punitive expedition against a village accused of “massacring two white men and fifty native soldiers . . . a woman and infant captured in the bush were brought into camp and taken before the commander and his Belgian staffs.”64 Though the mother pleaded for the life of her child, “at a sign from the [Belgian] leader of the expedition,” one of the soldiers “took the child from its mother, and, holding it up by one leg, disembowelled and afterwards cut its throat before the eyes of the wretched mother, who in her turn was murdered and very probably devoured by the soldiers.”65

One year earlier, a troop led by the Belgian officer Hubert Lothaire was sent to suppress a rebellion on the Lomami River, a left-bank tributary of the Congo. They captured “a dozen men and women” who were “butchered with small knives. . . . Their corpses were afterwards passed as food to the native auxiliaries.”66

Burrows explains that soldiers were deliberately stationed far away from their own villages, to extinguish feelings of relationship and neighborly concern. This allowed them to be used in the “punitive raids” which the Free State army repeatedly undertook against villages that had “not sent in enough rubber or ivory” to fulfill the demands of the government. Villages who had not made the quota were often “wiped out” to make an example of them. Men and women who tried to escape or resist were shot; the rest were taken captive and distributed among various state stations and farms for employment as forced laborers. “The children are drafted down to the Catholic missionaries to be educated in the rudiments of Christianity and civilized vice.”67

If the desperate situation led to open resistance or rebellion, the state reacted with even bloodier raids, in which men, women, and children were arbitrarily killed. The measure of “success” of each squad was the number of dead enemies. For each killed warrior, his spear and shield were collected and counted, while a small stick was collected for every killed unarmed woman or child. Almost all the victims were civilians—usually there were about ten “sticks” for each “spear.” Even children who tried to hide from the approaching soldiers were shot without mercy.68

Children captured alive were sometimes handed over to native allies who still practiced cannibalism and might well have regarded them as a source of food. The Free State finally decided to take military action against the Budja people, not because (as mentioned above) they were still openly cannibalistic, but because they evaded the oppressive tax regime and had “massacred” a group of soldiers who tried to impose order.69 Canisius, who took part in the resulting punitive expedition, writes that his soldiers captured three infants from one of the attacked villages, who had “been lost or abandoned” when the villagers fled from the upcoming attack. Not knowing what to do with their young captives, they passed them on to a Budja chief who had decided to take the side of the government. “Very possibly they later on found their way into that dusky diplomat’s cooking-pots,” he adds.70

In this case, at least, it is unclear what became of the captive infants—maybe they were adopted into families and reached an old age. In other cases, Free State officials openly rewarded their auxiliaries with booty which included human bodies and human flesh. The anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton writes about a group “known as Zappo Zaps after the sound of their rifles,” that state officers “paid [these] heavily armed men from the cannibalistic Basongye [Songye] tribe to enforce their trading policies. . . . [W]henever a village failed to produce enough rubber, these men would attack, raping and eating their victims before cutting off their hands.”71

In September 1899, more than seven hundred Zappo Zap fighters raided and burned several villages near the mission station where the Presbyterian missionary William Sheppard was employed. Sheppard immediately visited their camp to find out what had happened. In his diary, he documented his talk with their chief, M’lumba N’kusa. “I don’t like to fight, . . . but the state told me if the villages refused to pay to make fire,” the latter told him. Accordingly, he had asked “all [the] chiefs, sub-chiefs, men and women” of the peaceful Pianga people to visit his camp for a “palaver.” They appeared for what they expected to be a round of peaceful talking, but after their arrival, N’kusa closed the fence around the camp and “demanded all my pay or I would kill them.” When they refused, almost all of them were killed; only a few managed to escape though breaches in the fence. N’kusa estimated that “between 80 and 90” persons had been killed right in the camp. Subsequently he sent his fighters to attack the helpless villages of the murdered chiefs, where many more were killed.72

Walking around the camp with the chief, Sheppard saw three naked corpses “with the flesh carved off from the waist down,” leaving only the bones. “My people ate them,” explained the chief. One of the dead was a headless man—the forehead had been turned into a “bowl . . . to rub up tobacco and dimba in,” the chief added.73 Altogether, Sheppard counted forty-one bodies, many of them partially or fully defleshed. He was told that there had been more victims but that the rest had been completely consumed (their bones apparently discarded somewhere he did not see). Most of the dead were men, but he also saw a woman whose limbs had been totally defleshed. The partially defleshed bodies of several persons hung from trees; Sheppard observed that one of them had been “tied with ropes,” indicating that the victim had been alive when bound to the tree. He also saw sixty living women who had been taken captive.74

Lachlan Vass, another clergyman, sent by the mission to verify Sheppard’s findings, “counted fourteen incinerated villages and forty-seven corpses, some of them partially eaten.”75 After the missionaries reported the incident to the Free State authorities, the captured women were released and M’lumba N’kusa was temporarily jailed. He resented this treatment, complaining to the chef du zone, a Mr. DuFour: “You have sent me to do this and yet you have put me in chains.” DuFour was never charged with anything.76

Though the Free State officially forbade slavery, it employed forced laborers on the state-owned farms whose status could hardly, or not at all, be distinguished from that of slaves. Burrows writes that “case of slave-raiding by the Belgian officials and officers . . . are frequent throughout the Congo, [and] the example set by the State is only too readily followed by the companies” licensed to work in the Free State.77 Once he met a Luba woman named Ilanga who had been enslaved a few weeks ago. She told him that a large group of Free State soldiers, led by a white officer, had come into their village, seized all the people, and carried them off as captives. They had no idea what—if anything—they had done wrong. The soldiers forced the villagers to carry “baskets of food,” some of which contained “smoked human flesh.” The group of captives to which the women belonged were made to work on the state-run plantations around Burrows’ post.78

Sometimes there were disputes between the state and the concessionary companies about how to share the spoils. In one such dispute, “the State and company’s agents mutually accused each other of having purchased rubber with human flesh, of which, it was said, a quantity had been found in one of the capita posts.” Burrows comments that “it is very certain that one or the other, and perhaps both, had been guilty of this awful barter.” Indeed, he considered it quite likely that the state had participated in the cannibalistic trade, since the “region had been almost depopulated by the agents of the State,” and he saw no reason to assume that the agents had more respect for the dead bodies of the natives than for their lives. But as the state ran the legal system, the blame was squarely put on low-ranking members of the company. “One black capita [head man]” was arrested, while “his white employers, of course, were left unmolested.”79

In 1901, Burrows investigated accusations of misconduct brought forward against the employees of another concessionary company, the “Isangi Company, which has a monopoly in the district” where Burrows was district commissioner.80 At that time, the company controlled a trading station with the same name; today, Isangi is a town in the northeastern Tshopo province of Congo-Kinshasa. According to several witnesses, a company assistant named M[r]. Hottiaux had been involved in the death and subsequent consumption of several people. A local chief stated under oath that a man who had killed two others in a dispute was first whipped by Hottiaux and then “handed . . . over to . . . chief Massanga to be eaten.”81 Two eyewitnesses reported that Hottiaux had sentenced a young man employed as his “boy” to death merely for returning to his village without permission, afterwards giving the dead body “to the natives of the neighbouring village to be eaten.”82

Another chief, Liamba, stated that in return for materials he supplied for constructing the company buildings and for work performed by his men, he “was paid with the corpses of the prisoners killed by M. Hottiaux.” Liamba himself had been present when Hottiaux ordered the captives in question to be killed. Another time, Hottiaux gave him live captives, “six women and two men . . . in payment for rubber which I brought into the station,” telling him to “eat them, or kill them, or use them as slaves—as I liked.”83

Hottiaux’s carpenter confirmed that he had repeatedly seen prisoners being brought to the post. “Some of them were given to the natives to be kept as slaves, or to be eaten, at the will of the chief.” He also saw how nine men and two women were killed by cutting their throats upon Hottiaux’s orders. Subsequently Hottiaux gave their corpses to some of his workers as payment, telling them to “cut them up” for consumption.84 After hearing these witnesses, Burrows concluded that all charges were “satisfactorily proved”; he added that such charges “are by no means uncommon in the annals of Belgian administration.”85 He does not state which punishment Hottiaux received.

Some years earlier, Burrows was present during an inquiry into a “massacre of 150 natives who had been killed” in a punitive expedition. The Free State troops had motivated a large number of native auxiliaries to participate in the attack by promising them “the bodies to eat,” as well as “loot and women.”86 Burrows does not say whether the inquiry led to any convictions.

The Congo Free State was not the only European colonial regime erected in Africa that tolerated or occasionally even facilitated cannibal acts of local auxiliaries or allies. While visiting the Ubangi region in the early 1890s, the French traveler Jacques d’Uzès says how a group of Nzakara “auxiliaries” supporting the French troops “massacre[d] some women and some children” during a punitive expedition against a local village. Then they took the bodies of those they and the French had killed, and “in the evening . . . engage[d] in a great cannibal feast that we [did] not have the means to prevent. They roast the bodies of their enemies. After removing the skin and sending their children to wash the innards in the river, they put the pieces of meat in their pot, add spices, and enjoy it.”87 The French missionary and bishop Prosper Augouard heard of similar events from French soldiers who were present when they took place.88

In the late nineteenth century, today’s Sudan and South Sudan belonged to Egypt, which was treated by the British as a protectorate, though officially it was still a part of the Ottoman Empire. In the 1870s and early 1880s, the British army repeatedly sought the help of local allies, among them Zande and Mangbetu fighters, to crush rebellions. British as well as outside sources indicate that these allies not infrequently ate killed or captured enemies.89 Gaetano Casati writes that, while trying to contain the Mahdist rebellion, the British deliberately handed over “seventy Arabs . . . accused of hostile feelings towards the besieged people to the Sandeh-Bombe [a Zande clan], who had hastened to help the Government; and the victims, having been slaughtered like cattle, were eaten by the hungry anthropophagi.”90

In the 1910s, when Cameroon was a German colony, a German military commander rewarded his local allies who had helped in suppressing a rebellion with “human flesh, that of the enemies killed in battle” and with “slaves (women and children) . . . destined to be ‘stocked’ and eaten later,” as archived documents show.91

Still, nowhere did the cooperation between colonial forces and local cannibals seem to have been as widespread as in the Congo Free State. Two factors likely played a role here. On the one hand, cannibalism was widespread, and many locals were used to it—especially men from warlike ethnic groups which the state liked to employ as auxiliaries or regular soldiers. On the other hand, the state’s reckless exploitation of local resources and the native population seems to have encouraged an “anything goes” mentality among many of its officials; and the same is true of at least some of the employees of the large European concessionary companies licensed to exploit the country’s resources in return for considerable fees.

There are no indications that cooperation with cannibals or acts such as giving away human bodies as a reward were condoned by official government policy, but neither were they strictly condemned and consistently sanctioned. When inquests took place, it seems to have been largely due to external pressure (say if missionaries had got wind of a massacre and threatened to expose it, which would have resulted in bad publicity) or if a few righteous officials such as Burrows took the initiative. Even then, it is unclear whether any white Free State or corporate official even received a serious punishment; rather, it seems that the blame was usually put on native subordinates or allies such as the “black capita” mentioned by Burrows and the Zappo Zap chief interviewed by Sheppard.

From the endnotes:

5. Ibid., 278–79. A similar method of carrying children destined for consumption has been reported from eastern New Guinea: “In the case of a child one hand was tied to one foot, and a warrior would sling the body over his shoulder as a hunter might a wallaby’s. Usually, perhaps always, the victim was dead before he was bound in this manner” (F. Williams, Orokaiva Society, 172).

18. Ibid., 224. In another account of his journey, Schweinfurth writes that he saw “babies” (in the plural) exposed in this manner before being butchered for food, indicating that while this was certainly the first such scene he witnessed, it might not have been the last (Schweinfurth, “Dr. G. Schweinfurth’s Reise,” 139).