CHAPTER 6, UNDERSTANDING CONGOLESE SLAVE EATING

In the preceding chapter we explored the interconnections between Congolese cannibalism and other practices such as the ivory and slave trade and the highly exploitative regime of the Congo Free State. We have seen that there was no insurmountable chasm between “cannibals” on the one hand and “everybody else” on the other. Many of those who did not practice and who in theory might have condemned cannibalism still benefited from the practice by selling or giving people to those who would use them as food, or by joining forces with people eaters and letting them have human flesh as part of the “spoils.” While so far we have thus looked at cannibalism largely from the outside, we now have to approach the practice in itself: Under what circumstances and for what reasons were slaves or purchased captives consumed? Why were people eaten at all—why not (just) eat animals or vegetable matter instead?

…

Section: Food for Feasts

In today’s highly industrialized countries, meat is often eaten more or less on a daily basis. This was not the case in most earlier societies. Human flesh, in particular, seems to have been eaten relatively rarely throughout most of the Congolese societies practicing cannibalism. (We will later discuss some evidence of possible exceptions.) When Edward Glave traveled along the lower Ubangi River, the people he met proudly displayed the skulls of the victims they had eaten. Once he “asked one young chief, who was certainly not more than twenty-five years old, how many men he had eaten in his village, and he answered me thirty. He was greatly astonished at the horror I expressed at his answer.”1

Despite Glave’s horror, the answer also indicates that cannibalism was by no means a daily affair. The young man had (if his statement is correct) participated in the consumption of about thirty victims—he had certainly not eaten them all by himself. Assuming that he had started eating human flesh around the age of fifteen, this would mean that his village was able to get a single human body (whether of a purchased slave or a captured enemy) about three times a year; if he had already eaten it as a child (a question to which we will return later), such occasions were even rarer.

John Weeks notes that “cannibalism was very general” along the north bank of the Congo from the mouth of the Ubangi to about four hundred kilometers farther upriver—the region where the people generally known as Bangala live. Still, he adds, cannibal feasts were relatively rare, because “slaves were dear, and bloody fights [which provided dead enemies for consumption] were infrequent.” While the inhabitants of the towns near Weeks’ mission station “bought slaves to eat” when they could afford to do so, this was not often the case, since a male slave cost about seven times as much as a goat.2 It seems that human flesh was a treasured luxury item, certainly not an everyday fare.

The most detailed report of a slave-eating feast held in this area comes from the Belgian officer Camille-Aimé Coquilhat (1853–1891), who had helped set up Bangala Station (today Makanza), one of the earliest outposts of the later Congo Free State on the Congo River. In October 1884 (a few months before the Free State was officially founded), he noted in his diary:

> Mongonga, the chief of Mongwele, had bought at Bolombo a native of Irebu [about 300 kilometers downriver of Makanza], who had been caught in the act of conversation, unauthorized by the husband, with a local woman. This morning, he broke his arms and legs with a sledgehammer in order to eat him tomorrow.3

This remark indicates that local laws could be very harsh. Just talking to another man’s wife without her husband’s permissions seems to have been enough to get a man convicted to slavery and possible death! During the following night, writes Coquilhat, the victim was “exposed . . . still alive, to soak in the river, the head alone coming out of the water.” The purpose of this treatment “was to make the black skin easier to remove,” he explains. In the morning, the man was beheaded, skinned, and dressed for consumption.4

> The head was boiled in a separate jar. As for the body, it was dismembered and put in the pot with goat quarters, palm oil and salt. Large quantities of chikwanga [cassava bread] were also cooked. Twenty jars of cane beer were assembled. Friends were invited, including Longenga, the chief of Mokolengila upstream.

> The feast was superb. About five o’clock the guests embarked in a large canoe, in the center of which was placed the remaining half of the steamed man in an enormous pot. They are going to continue the party at Longenga’s, who has made a fine supply of beer.5

Mongonga decided to stop at Coquilhat’s post—for a friendly chat, it seems—but the latter did not let him.

> I strictly forbade him to land, fully expressing my horror at his cannibalism. The chief of Mongwele was frankly surprised at my revulsion.

> “You’re joking, aren’t you?” he said.6

Only when Coquilhat told his soldiers to aim their weapons at Mongonga, the chief realized that he was serious,

> but he still did not understand it.

> “Why is the white man angry with me?” he asked his friends. “When he kills a goat, I do not interfere. This man whom I put to death was my property; I had neither robbed nor captured him, but bought him for fine cloth.”7

Coquilhat’s report shows that cannibal feasts could be highly social affairs. Neighbors visited and friends were invited, with the human flesh shared among all. The practice was not considered controversial—the chief organizing the feast was genuinely surprised when Coquilhat expressed his disapproval. The status of an enslaved person seems to have been similar to that of an animal; Mongonga did not understand what was bad about killing a slave, if killing a goat was acceptable.

Coquilhat confirms Weeks’s observation that human-flesh meals were not frequent. He was aware of three such meals held in his “immediate vicinity” during the course of five months but adds that the actual number was likely higher, since the locals soon started to hide the practice after they had learned of the European’s disapproval. Nevertheless, he estimates that not even the powerful and wealthy Mongonga was able to enjoy human flesh twenty times per year.8

Another account of a slave-eating feast comes from Weeks, who worked in approximately the same area as Coquilhat. The inhabitants of a village near his mission station decided

> to have a great feast. They bought as fat a slave as they could procure, broke his legs and arms, and fed him for three days, while they made a great quantity of sugarcane wine. I made every possible endeavour to save him, but utterly failed to do so, and on the third day he was killed and the horrible orgy was held.9

Like Coquilhat’s, his account shows that such feasts were communal affairs in which a whole village might join. This is also confirmed by Herbert Ward, who in 1886 had become commander of Bangala Station, the government post cofounded by Coquilhat. The first time he witnessed cannibalism, he writes, he “saw a group of perhaps forty or fifty men gathered in a circle around a large fire” on which human flesh was being roasted.10 According to Ward, cannibalism was still quite common when he was in the area: “almost weekly some savage act of cannibalism would be brought to my notice.” Like Coquilhat and Weeks, he notes that both enemies killed in war and purchased slaves were eaten.11

That human bodies were a welcome addition to festive occasions has also been reported from other regions. Disasi Makulo (ca. 1871–1941) belonged to the Turumbu people who live near the confluence of the Aruwimi into the Congo River.12 As a child, he had been kidnapped by a group of Swahilo-Arab slavers who worked for Tippu Tip. Later, he was purchased and freed by Henry Morton Stanley and became a helper of the Baptist missionary George Grenfell.13 As he was born in a region where cannibalism was widely accepted, but educated by Europeans who strongly condemned the practice, Makulo experienced the mismatch between local and Western attitudes most clearly. In his mid-twenties, he visited the village of his birth which he had not seen for more than ten years. Once his relatives recognized him, the joy was great.

> By way of welcome, the gongs were sounded from one end of the village to the other. The next day a great feast was organized. Goats and dogs were slaughtered, and two slaves were seized to sacrifice them too. Seeing this, I was greatly indignant at the persistence in my tribe of those barbarous customs of slavery and cannibalism! But before the decapitation order was executed, I intervened and told my parents that what they wanted to do was the worst possible act. I myself went to untie these slaves.14

Though he had spent his first twelve or so years in this village, his compatriots no longer understood him, nor he them. “Many of them wondered with astonishment how and why I pitied these slaves, and others reproached me for having prevented them from eating the delicious flesh of man.” The feast was nevertheless a success, with two days of uninterrupted dancing.15

But Makulo was unable to convince the villagers to change their ways. During a later visit, he saw a female slave “tied up, arms and legs, ready to be beheaded” and slaughtered for consumption. He freed her by cutting her ropes, but again it seems doubtful whether his act led to any lasting change.16

All these accounts indicate that human flesh was not a daily food; nor was it eaten just at occasions that had a special religious or spiritual meaning. Rather it was considered the proper food for feasts—not altogether different from animal meat, but somehow better, for reasons that we will continue to explore in subsequent sections. This observation is in agreement with an account from Sidney Hinde, who repeatedly went hunting with various Bangala men. He observed that they “always break the legs and wings, or arms, as the case might be, of birds and monkeys before killing them”—the same procedure that slaves had to undergo prior to their death and consumption, as described by Coquilhat and Weeks. When Hinde criticized their cruelty, they explained “that it was better to let the bird [or other animal] linger, as it made the flesh more tender.”17 Queried further, several Bangala men told him, independently of each other, that when they were

> at home and about to prepare a feast, the prisoner or slave who was to form the pièce de résistance had always his arms and legs broken three days beforehand, and was then placed in a stream, or pool of water, chin-deep, with his head tied to a stick to prevent him committing suicide, or perhaps falling asleep and thus getting drowned. On the third day he was taken out and killed, the meat then being very tender.18

While both animals and human victims were submitted to the same cruel treatment in order to supposedly improve the taste of their meat, it seems that birds and monkeys were considered good enough for everyday fare—but when a proper feast was called for, the centerpiece had to be a “prisoner or slave.”

The same procedure, apparently meant to serve the same purpose, has been documented from the Ubangi area. The Catholic mission historian G. Renouard describes the last hours of enslaved children as follows: “the arms and legs of a child are broken, and the child is left for long hours at night in the water of the river, in order to macerate the meat and make it more tender.” With some pathos he adds: “The tortures and horror, the mad agony felt by the child do not move the hardened souls of the executioners. . . . What do the lives of others matter, provided they can add some enjoyments to theirs!”19

Section: Conspicuous Consumption and Prestige

Throughout large parts of Africa, slave ownership was an important sign of status—slaves often “represented the most striking manifestation of personal wealth,” notes Hugh Thomas.20 Killing slaves could give their owners even more prestige, since it showed that they were able to waste resources and still remain wealthy. Slaves could not only be killed or buried alive at funerals, but in some regions (where cannibalism was not practiced) agreements between chiefs were confirmed by killing a slave “on the spot to mark the agreement.”21

In some parts of Nigeria, the sacrifice and subsequent consumption of slaves at funerals and ceremonies held in honor of the dead was common throughout the nineteenth century (and probably in earlier times as well); sometimes the victim was subsequently eaten.22 David Northrup observes that “slaves were . . . perceived as the embodiment of capital which could be destroyed as a display of wealth, particularly by killing them at funerals.” He concludes that the deliberate and unprovoked killing of healthy slaves in order to display and celebrate the wealth of their owners might be considered “conspicuous consumption carried to an extreme, although there is evidence that troublesome or infirm slaves were more likely to be sacrificed than others.”23

It is not implausible to consider the eating of slaves in the Congo as a similar case of, quite literally, “conspicuous consumption”—at least in certain regions. Slaves and captives could, in general, also have been exploited economically or sold for commercial gain. By doing neither of those, but butchering them for feasts to which one’s friends and followers were invited, one could prove that one was wealthy (if slaves were usually purchased) or powerful (if captives were usually taken in warfare) enough to do so. Especially in the Ubangi region, several sources agree that holding cannibal feasts was a way for influential men to improve their standing. Ward notes that “a chief’s position is esteemed according to the number of slaves he is able to kill” for the purpose of consumption.24 Prosper Augouard agrees: “A chief is all the higher regarded the more often his people eat human flesh.”25

So far, we have noticed that cannibal feasts were usually rare events, held only from time to time. Several sources indicate that slaves were occasionally sacrificed and eaten at funerals—similar to the human sacrifices held more commonly in Nigeria. This has been reported from the Nzakara,26 the Ndolo on the Lulonga River,27 and the Bangala.28 More common, however, seems to have been celebrations held for more profane reasons, such as—in the case of Makulo—to celebrate the return of a long-lost relative.

On some parts of the upper Ubangi, cannibal meals seem to have taken place more frequently than elsewhere, possibly because the prestige associated with cannibalism motivated chiefs to try to outdo each other by providing human flesh on a more or less regular basis. The accounts of the French missionaries active in the area suggest that many (maybe most) of the victims were children—possibly because they were easier to get or less risky to handle. According to Father Allaire, a missionary who traveled extensively along the Ubangi, some chiefs owned so many children kept for future consumption that he felt himself reminded of “herds [of] sheep or geese.”29 Renouard claims that “the fattening of these children for slaughter” was a continuous operation in some areas, “and there are villages where they eat seven or eight of them per month.”30 Augouard gives a comparable number, mentioning “villages where several slaves are killed [and eaten] every week.” In a letter written in May 1889, he even expresses his dismay at having “learned that in a village which I know well, a child aged ten to twelve was sacrificed every day to serve as food for the chief and the principals of the area.”31

Though the reports of the French missionaries certainly have a factual basis, their estimations of victim counts must be treated with suspicion. They bought enslaved children they considered in danger of being eaten in order to save and liberate them—and, less altruistically, to raise them as Christians. Since they otherwise seem to have had very limited success at gaining local converts, they certainly had reason to exaggerate the risks threatening enslaved children in order to justify their ongoing purchase.

But Ed[mond?] Froment, the head of a French colonial post on the lower Ubangi, likewise reports a high number of victims, though his estimation is somewhat lower than those made by the French missionaries (who worked farther upriver). In some of the surrounding villages, he writes, “there is hardly a week that is not marked by an execution” of a slave sacrificed for food.32 Similar to what we have heard from other observers,33 he explains that the local people (known as Balui) sold their ivory only in return for slaves who inevitably ended their lives in the “slaughterhouses.”34

It seems that, because human flesh was held in high esteem, people sometimes expected to receive it—rather than some other, lesser good—in return for services well-performed. The French explorer Jean Dybowski tells that when another European, Mr. Nebout,

> dismissed the four guides he had been given by the chief of a village near the river mouth, they blamed him for not killing a few men when they were on the upper [Ubangi] river for them to eat in their village when they returned home and celebrated. This lack of respect on Mr. Nebout’s part seemed to them to be a sign of dissatisfaction which, they said, they did not deserve.35

The distribution of meat to one’s followers was a way to express wealth and power and to ensure loyalty; this was a general principle, by no means specific to cannibal regions. Along the lower parts of the Congo River, closer to the West African coast, “large amounts of meat were distributed to the participants at feasts of different kinds, for example at funerals and installations of political chiefs.” In this area, where cannibalism was unknown or at least rare, the meat came generally from pigs, goats, sheep, or chickens.36 But around the Ubangi River, it seems that human flesh in particular had become a favored way of expressing appreciation and securing loyalty—Nebout’s guides would likely still have been disappointed had he given them a few goats instead of human beings.

Section: Slaves as Property and Persons of No Concern

While animal meat has been eaten in most societies, the social acceptance of cannibalism has been documented for only a few. How did Congolese cannibals see the people they ate? How did they take the humanness of their victims into account? Did they more or less ignore it, essentially treating their victims as just another kind of animal? Or did they eat them in spite of their humanness—or even because of it?

Camille-Aimé Coquilhat, as we have seen, had talked with a Bangala chief who had been genuinely surprised at the European’s rejection of cannibalism, arguing instead: “When he [Coquilhat] kills a goat, I do not interfere. This man whom I put to death was my property,” which he had rightfully “bought” and could therefore utilize in any way he liked.37 One month after the slave-eating feast described by Coquilhat, a group of “boys” (native assistants) working for George Grenfell saw the preparations of a cannibalistic meal in a nearby village. In vain they tried to save the male victim from being beheaded. Reporting the incident, Grenfell describes the same way of thinking:

> The natives could not, or at least appeared not to understand why the white man and his people should take exception to their proceedings. “Why,” said they to one of our boys, “do you interfere with us? We don’t trouble you when you kill your goats. We buy our nyama (meat) and kill it; it is not your affair.”38

The same attitude of astonished surprise, combined with the “property” argument, has been recorded by the Swedish explorer Theodor Westmark, who writes that the Bangala “have never been able to grasp our complaint” about cannibalism, instead “assuring us that they had certainly done nothing reprehensible, and that the men or women they had killed and eaten belonged to them in full ownership.”39

The argument that slaves were property and that people could use their property in any way that pleased them seems to have been specific to the Bangala region. In later times, many Bangala would become merchants, sometimes traveling wide and far to conduct trade40—it seems they often showed a commercial focus which might have shaped their ways of thinking about slavery and cannibalism.

On the other hand, the equation of slaves—and of “edible” outsiders in general—with animals or simply with “meat” has also been recorded from other Congolese regions. In the early twentieth century, the Hungarian anthropologist Emil Torday stayed in a settlement on the Kwilu River, a tributary of the Kasai. He notes that not only “enemies slain in war are eaten” in this region, but that slaves were purchased and killed for this purpose. Once the local chief sent him as a gift “a so-called ‘antelope leg,’ which I instantly recognised as a portion of a human thigh.” When Torday reproached him that “such proceedings were most improper,” the chief “did not follow my reasoning,” instead making it clear that he saw no reason to “distinguish between the practice of eating the flesh of goats and that of human beings.”41

In this, adds Torday, “he took up the position of [a] vegetarian friend” of his in Europe—except that the cannibal and the vegetarian drew opposite conclusions from the shared point of view.42 Torday observes that the inhabitants of this region did not see their cannibal practices as something that was wrong or needed any special justification: “They are not ashamed of cannibalism, and openly admit that they practise it because of their liking for human flesh.”43 Elsewhere he notes that, while cannibalism was practiced in the Congo for various reasons, including a desire to humiliate the enemy and convenience during wartime, “the most common [reason] was simply gastronomic: the natives loved ‘the flesh that speaks’ and paid for it.”44

Statements equating slaves or other outsiders with edible animals were also frequently expressed around the Ubangi. While traveling along this river, Grenfell was repeatedly asked “to sell some of his Luango or Kru boys from off the steamer. Coming from the shore of the great salt sea they must be very ‘sweet,’ very appetizing. When he protested, they would say, ‘You eat fowls and goats and we eat men; what is the difference?’”45 On the same river, Glave was repeatedly asked “to barter a man for a tusk of ivory.” And when he tried to purchase a goat to feed his party, the sellers asked for one of his crew members in return. “‘Meat for meat,’ they said.”46

The Belgian author Albert Chapaux asserts that slaves were commonly referred to as “meat”: “In the Ubangi, these slaves literally serve as meat for slaughter, and when the natives are asked whether they are slaves, they simply reply: ‘Te, niama!’ ‘No, they’re beasts, it’s meat!’”47 Augouard once got the same reply when asking a local chief about the name of one of his slaves: “‘Nyama!’ It’s meat!”48

Farther east, among the Mangbetu and Zande people, similar attitudes seem to have prevailed. Not only were persons taken in slave raids and warfare often killed and eaten, if they were not considered useful to keep alive as slaves,49 but, as we will see later (Chapter 12), unrelated foreigners were frequently kidnapped and eaten too. A widespread viewpoint seems to have been that those weak enough to be exploitable in such a manner deserved no better. In 1934, when Filiberto Gero mentioned his Zande “boy” in a conversation with a Mangbetu man, the latter reacted with disdain. “The Azande were our meat,” he explained, evidently regretting that the good old times were over. Members of different Zande clans seem to have sometimes regarded each other in the same light. A member of the Amadi told Gero that his people had formerly hunted and consumed persons belonging to the nearby Babukur clan. “They were our chickens,” he remembered proudly.50

Similar comparisons with species of edible animals have been recorded from other ethnic groups in the vicinity. The French mission historian Jehan de Witte writes that the Kele people, who likewise live in the northeast of the Congo basin (in today’s Tshopo province), “systematically” raided the neighboring Mbole for “human flesh . . . , cynically” calling them “their antelopes.”51 That neighboring groups who were raided, killed, and eaten were disdainfully called “our game” has also been reported from other parts of the world, such as New Guinea.52

When Gero compiled a vocabulary of Madi, the language of the Amadi clan, he noticed that the words for “stranger” and “meat” were identical and that the word for “wild game” differed by just one vowel.53 The famous English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) talked with an old Zande man who told him that, in former times, enemies and strangers were eaten simply because they “made good meat.” They could be eaten without regret and without any specific justification, because, as a Zande might ask rhetorically, “What was a stranger to him?”54 Nothing, it seems, but meat.

Similar to Gero’s observation about the Madi language, the anthropologist Kajsa Ekholm Friedman points out that various Bantu languages spoken in the Congo region use the same word for “fallen enemy” and “game.” She concludes that enemies and other outsiders “are not real human beings and can therefore be placed in the category ‘game,’ that is, among other delicious creatures that roam in the forest.”55

While there is clearly some truth in this statement, it may nevertheless be somewhat misleading, since it presupposes a concept of a “(real) human being” that, from the cannibal viewpoint, might simply not have been relevant. Throughout the Congo (and elsewhere), enslaved women were not only exploited sexually, but they were also often forced to become wives or consorts of their captors or owners and bear them children. The cannibals no doubt knew they could interbreed with their slaves or captives and hence, in this sense at least, form a common species. It rather seems that, when it came to the question of who or what was “edible,” this did not matter to them. Slaves and captives could be equated with “game” and “meat” not because they were thought to be members of a different species, but because they were persons of no concern.

Writing about the Bangala, Weeks states that—as far as he could discover—their concepts of morality and “being good” were only concerned with the proper behavior towards relatives, neighbors, and superiors. Stealing from neighbors or otherwise harming them was wrong, but “in dealing with an alien it would not be considered wrong to rob, beat, abuse, or even murder him, unless he had come on a visit, for trade or other purposes, to some one in the town.” Strangers did not belong to any category of beings that morally mattered. Since they knew this, persons traveling in small groups in places where they had no friends “would hide by day and travel by night” to avoid being spotted; if they were, they could be captured and enslaved, or killed and eaten, without anyone considering such deeds as wrong or objectionable. Concerning the consumption of killed strangers, enemies, and slaves, Weeks comments that “I do not think they regarded the eating of human flesh with any more concern than they did the eating of a goat.”56

Regarding the Ubangi area, both Froment and Augouard stress that the local people were not mean or intentionally cruel—but also that they routinely treated their slaves in the same way as goats or other animals, apparently not considering the fate of the former as more relevant than that of the latter. Cannibalism, remarks Froment, is practiced “in broad daylight, not cynically, but as a natural thing.” It was not motivated by hate or a desire for revenge—most of the victims, after all, were purchased slaves rather than enemies. “It has no other motive and no other origin than the unbridled love of meat: one eats man as one would eat buffalo or wild boar.”57

Augouard observes that the “Bondjos,” despite their love for the flesh of enslaved children, were not aware of doing anything bad or evil: “It is with the greatest amiableness [French: bonhomie] that they kill a poor slave, butchering and eating them as if they were an ox or a sheep.” They did not understand why the missionaries criticized their consumption habits, instead wondering “why we don’t eat such a delicacy.”58

Other sources likewise indicate that the eating of human flesh and the killing of slaves for this purpose were seen as “natural” and uncontroversial things. Hinde writes that, while he was employed on the Sankuru River, a young Songye chief borrowed the commandant’s knife, which he then used to “cut the throat of a little girl-slave belonging to him.” When he was subsequently spotted “in the act of cooking her”—likely in preparation of a feast, as he had certainly not planned to eat the whole girl all by himself—he was arrested and imprisoned, though only for two months.59 It does not seem that he had acted out of spite, but rather that to him such a usage of enslaved children had been part of the traditional and natural order to things.

When Ward once asked, “Do you people eat human bodies?” upon seeing what he suspected to be smoke-dried human flesh, he got the surprised reply: “Yes; don’t you?”60 He adds that “upon more than one occasion portions of human flesh were actually offered to me with the utmost cordiality” in a gesture of hospitality.61 Weeks reports the same. He once saw a large group of fighters return after a successful attack on a neighboring village, bringing prisoners, plundered goods, and “the limbs of those who had been slain in the fight” with them.62

> Some had human legs over their shoulders, others had threaded arms through slits in the stomachs of their dismembered foes, had tied the ends of the arms together, thus forming loops, and through these ghastly loops they had thrust their own living arms and were carrying them thus with the gory trunks dangling to and fro.63

In the evening, “cannibal feasts” were held in the village where Weeks had his station as well as in neighboring ones, “and the next morning they brought some of the cooked meat to the station, and thinking they were doing us a favour, they offered to share it with us—the meat looked like black boiled pork.”64 Weeks’s companion W. H. Stapleton, who also documented the proceedings, adds that “one of our workmen eagerly joined . . . in disposing of the dainty morsels.”65

When Coquilhat tried to argue with a group of Bangala, expressing his conviction that the consumption of human flesh was “horrible,” he got the reply: “On the contrary, it’s delicious, when eaten with salt.”66 His argument, meant to be about ethics and the boundaries of acceptable behavior, had been misunderstood as a claim about taste.

Section: A Feeling of Superiority

Like Coquilhat, the Belgian explorer Edouard Lamotte argued with Bangala men about their cannibal customs. He attacked not their custom of occasionally eating slaves—which was essentially risk-free for those who did so, as long as they were not enslaved themselves—but the consumption of killed or captured enemies, by pointing out that “you, too, could one day be made prisoners and eaten by your enemies!” The reply he got was: “We know . . . , but it is the fate of war; so much the worse for him who falls!” It was especially warfare that made cannibalism worthwhile—conquering, killing, and consuming your enemies was the most complete victory over them you could ever achieve.67

Coquilhat confirms this view, noting that the warriors he met “believe it glorious—and humiliating for the vanquished—to eat prisoners made in war. ‘In this way,’ they say, ‘the enemy who makes a counter-attack no longer finds any traces of his own.’” He adds that, since slaves were eaten as well, this cannot have been the sole reason for cannibalism. Observing that “a meal of human flesh is [considered] a treat,” he concludes that cannibal acts were also driven by a strong “desire for meat.”68 But war cannibalism was likely older than slave eating, at least as a widespread custom,69 and some of the feelings of superiority and the celebration of “glorious” victories associated with war cannibalism may well have remained even when the person being eaten was a purchased slave rather than a captured enemy.

Just as among the Bangala (see the previous section), ethical concerns of those who lived near the Ubangi River seem to have been largely limited towards the well-being of their own community members. When it came to outsiders, it was a matter of strength and superiority to determine who might dominate and exploit (or even kill) whom. Traveling along this river, Glave was repeatedly invited by warriors to join them in attacks against neighboring peoples. “They said, ‘You can take the ivory, and we will take the meat’—meaning, of course, the human beings who might be killed in the fight.” They could not understand why Glave’s party did not use their superior weapons to attack villages, robbing all valuables and taking the inhabitants as slaves. They certainly knew that, if unlucky, they themselves might have fallen prey to such attacks. Still, they seem to have thought that anyone who had the power to do something also had the right to do it, and they considered Glave “very eccentric” for refusing to make use of such opportunities.70

In these cases, the right to subjugate, enslave, or eat others was considered a consequence of one’s own physical or technological superiority: being able to conquer others gave you the right to treat them as it pleased you. But the Mangbetu people in the northeast seem to have framed their own superiority in racist terms, if Georg Schweinfurth is to be believed. He writes about them:

> Surrounded as they are by a number of people who are blacker than themselves, and who, being inferior to them in culture, are consequently held in great contempt, they have just the opportunity which they want for carrying on expeditions of war or plunder, which result in the acquisition of a booty, which is especially coveted by them, consisting of human flesh.71

Gaetano Casati, who had visited the Mangbetu a decade earlier, remarks that they considered the people they raided “an inferior race, hunted to supply the slave trade or to pander to the anthropophagous taste of their masters.”72 How much of these notions of subjugating others because of their “racial” and cultural inferiority or even their darker skin color came from the Europeans—among whom racist prejudices were widespread and largely considered self-evident at that time—and how much from the Mangbetu themselves? That Casati and Schweinfurth both, independently of each other, write about the supposed inferiority of the raided makes it likely that they did indeed hear some explanations of that kind while among the Mangbetu. It is conceivable that the latter justified their behavior in terms they thought the Europeans would understand.

Section: Better Than Animals

In the modern viewpoint, it is generally considered acceptable to eat certain species of animals (though ethical vegetarians and vegans disagree) but never members of our own, human species—people like us who are intelligent, who talk, make plans, have dreams. (Of course, animals might have dreams too, but we cannot be sure of that and so find it easy to ignore it.) Surprisingly, while we regard the intelligence and language capabilities of others as an argument against eating them, some of the Congolese people eaters explicitly took the opposite viewpoint. Albert Chapaux notes that “the Bangalas are convinced that human flesh is a noble food, because man has more intelligence than an animal, as well as speech.”73 Coquilhat tried his best to convince them that eating others is wrong and harmful, arguing:

> You understand the difference between a man and an animal; one has intelligence and the other does not; the former is of the same kind as you; he has a name; he speaks to you at the moment when you are going to kill him; he did not hurt you. You eat him because he is a slave or a captive. Don’t you feel ashamed to consider man as food?74

But far from feeling ashamed, the people he talked to replied: “Everything you say proves how refined it is to eat human flesh, a meat that had a name and that spoke. It is a noble food, while the animals furnish only vile food.”75 Ward records a similar reaction from a Congolese man (he does not say of which ethnic group) who told him: “We eat men because it is good to eat meat that talked. It is our custom.”76 Apparently it was precisely the humanity of slaves and captives that made their flesh a “nobler” kind of food than that of mere nameless, unintelligent animals.

Why this is so is not explicitly said—after all, once a person is dead, intelligence, language capabilities and other specifically human qualities are gone. Nor did people believe that eating human flesh would transmit some of the desirable properties of the eaten to the eaters. Such a belief is never recorded, and some commentators explicitly note that they could find no traces of it.77 The notion has sometimes been suggested as an explanation for cannibalism, but it seems to be nothing but a myth, never confirmed by the cannibals themselves. This is not particularly surprising—eating rabbits does not allow us to run faster, nor does eating beef give us the ability to digest large quantities of grass. The idea that cannibals did not know this might have been just a subtle (and probably unconscious) attempt to declare them stupid. The actual absence of such a belief has also been noticed from other parts of the world where cannibalism was practiced.78

But why, then, the particular preference for the flesh of humans? A possible explanation is that eating flesh is a demonstration of superiority over who (or what) you are eating. Eating a cow is nothing to be specifically proud of, but by eating a human being you demonstrate your strength and cunning (it you defeated an enemy or foreigner) or your wealth (if you can afford to purchase and kill a slave).

According to Torday, human flesh was likewise known as “the meat that speaks” among the Mbala (Bambala) people on the Kwilu River—a region where slaves were occasionally killed “to provide a cannibal feast,” and where enemies and convicted criminals were eaten as well.79 In spite of using this term, however, people do not seem to have considered the fact that the meat providers had been able to speak as particularly important, instead explaining the practice as due to “a sincere liking for human flesh.” Torday notes that they spoke about the custom freely and without shame, “display[ing] no reticence except in the presence of state officials.”80

That human victims were seen as something different from and better than mere animals in, at least, parts of the Congo basin is also indicated by the fact that their execution was celebrated in elaborate ceremonies among some of the peoples who lived north of the Congo River. In this region at least the death of adult male victims seems to have been considered a special occasion quite different from the simple slaughter of an animal; it is unclear whether such ceremonies were also held for women and children.

Renouard recorded one such event in detail, based on the descriptions of the French missionaries employed on the Ubangi. The people of a village had decided to hold a feast (for what reason is not said). They had purchased a slave and fattened him for some time. All the inhabitants of neighboring villages were invited, and everyone was soon drunk on palm wine. While the crowd dances around him, the victim “sits on a log, . . . hands and feet immobilized with a forked piece of wood deeply buried in the ground . . . ; the head is attached by a liana to a flexible, curved pole, which, upon being released, must toss it into the air.”81

Then a “witch-doctor” starts to sing “a death-song, which the crowd repeats after him.” He beheads the slave with a knife, causing the pole to spring back and throw the head into the crowd. Immediately, “the women rush forward, chopping up the corpse, pulling off pieces and throwing them into the pot,” where they are cooked quickly and then consumed. “The scene continues in a disgusting orgy,” Renouard concludes.82

In spite of the chronicler’s revulsion, the description makes it clear that the sacrifice and subsequent consumption of a human victim was a special event celebrated by the whole community. There are no reports that animals intended for consumption were ever “executed” in a similarly elaborate manner.

During his visits to Balui villages on the lower part of the Ubangi, Albert Dolisie (1856–1899), an explorer who later became lieutenant governor of the French Congo, saw various places used for the ritual execution of slaves and captives:

> Here and there, there are small, well-understood facilities to conveniently cut people’s necks. They consist of a seat made of a block of clay soil on which the subject is seated. On each side there are two poles on the ground, to which the arms are attached; a third pole serves as a backrest and the patient is fixed there. In the ground, about two metres backwards, there is a long pole with a flexible end, fitted with a solid vine in order to stretch the neck.83

In one village, Dolisie was shown the “fresh” skulls of four captives who had been executed and consumed a few days earlier. A young enslaved boy, kept around to be beheaded and eaten at the next suitable occasion, approached him, “trembling all over and deeply ashamed,” and asked for his protection. Dolisie pleaded with the chief who allowed him to take the boy away.84

Guy Burrows saw similar “execution grounds” in or near many villages around the Mongala River, farther in the east. In this area, “the slave destined for the cooking-pot is made to kneel,” otherwise the procedure was the same: “A stout sapling . . . is bent down and attached with a cord to the head of the victim. When the executioner’s knife descends, the sapling reverts to its upright position, causing the severed member to fly high into the air.”85

While such elaborate decapitation ceremonies are documented only for areas north of the Congo River (to my knowledge), in the south the murder of a slave for consumption could be accompanied by the “beating of drums and outbreaks of excited mirth,” indicating that such an event was seen as something extraordinary and worthy of celebration. Glave witnessed this in a village on the Ruki in early 1890. As in other regions, the inhabitants saw no reason to hide their cannibal customs. One of them told Glave that they ate all parts of the human body, including the head, after putting it “in the fire to singe the hair off.”86

So, even if purchased people were referred to as “meat,” it seems clear that their consumption was considered something special—their death was (at least in some cases) celebrated in elaborate rituals and their flesh was considered a dish for feasts, not something eaten on a routine basis. Why was this so? In addition to the occasional explanations that explicitly refer to the humanness of the victims—they had names and were able to speak, in contrast to mere animals—there was also a very widespread explanation of a more profane nature: human flesh, cannibals throughout the Congo (and also in many other regions) agreed, had an excellent taste.

When Augouard asked the “Bondjos” why they practiced cannibalism, they assured him “with great conviction that human flesh is far above all other meats.”87 The German ethnologist Leo Frobenius notes that, among the Gbaya (one of the peoples formerly known as Bondjos), “it is openly stated that no meat is as excellent as that of humans.”88 Hinde states that the people he encountered around the Ubangi River “seem fond of eating human flesh; and though it may be an acquired taste, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that they prefer human flesh to any other.”89

Investigating why the Bangala practiced cannibalism, Weeks “could never obtain any other reason for eating human flesh other than that ‘it is very nice and better than any other meat.’”90 In the second part of the same article, published a few months after the first, he confirms that the Boloki (a large Bangala subgroup) “ate human flesh for the pleasure of it,” but adds that health concerns might have been an additional motive: “Although they did not believe that the qualities of the person eaten were imparted to them, yet they thought that human flesh had a beneficial effect on those who ate it, for if a person had bad ulcers he would quickly lose them after eating such flesh.”91 There are, to my knowledge, no other statements attributing Congolese cannibalism to health concerns; the motive might have existed, but it was certainly not the most important one.

Praise for the taste of human flesh, on the other hand, could be heard in many regions. In Maniema, the Scottish missionary David Livingstone met a fighter who told him that he looked forward to “eat[ing] those killed” in battle because “human flesh . . . is better than goat’s.”92 When Casati visited the Zande people, their king offered him the meat of a freshly killed ape with the words: “Eat it; the flesh is very nice . . . as good as man’s.” And a chief of the neighboring Mangbetu was full of praise for the delicate flesh of chimpanzees, calling it “as good as human flesh”—in his eyes, the ultimate commendation.93 Gero heard from his Zande informants that human flesh is “very sweet, even more so than monkey meat.”94

Similarly doubtful praise could be heard in certain West African regions. Referring to southern Nigeria, where slaves were sometimes eaten as well,95 the British anthropologist P. Amaury Talbot notes that “human flesh is preferred above all for its succulence, and that of monkey is generally considered to come next.” Among the Igbo people, he adds, “human flesh was prized above all other kinds of meat.” And from Ekoi people (an ethnic group living in the southeast of Nigeria and the southwest of Cameroon) he heard that “man’s flesh was sweeter than any other meat.”96 Farther in the west, the German traveler Walter Volz observed that the Kpelle people in northern-central Liberia (whom he visited in 1906/7) considered the “flavor and tenderness” of human flesh as superior to the meat of any animal, preferring the former as a matter of course whenever they could get it.97 No cases of slave eating are known from this region, but foreigners were sometimes kidnapped and eaten.98

Among the Fang people, who live west of the Congo basin in today’s Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, foreigners could suffer the same fate and corpses were widely traded as food, as we will see.99 The missionary and medical doctor Albert Bennett talked with a Fang man who admitted to have eaten human flesh—though only once, he claimed—and described it as “much superior to goat.”100 The English travel writer Mary Kingsley found that, though the Fang had become unwilling to openly confess to practicing cannibalism, they still had the highest praise for this kind of dish: “Man’s flesh, he says, is good to eat, very good, and he wishes you would try it.”101

One American who took this wish to heart was the journalist William Seabrook (1884–1945), who seems to have been disappointed when he found out that the people he visited in Liberia in the 1920s had recently abandoned their cannibal habits. While in France, he convinced a hospital intern to give him “a sizable rump steak, also a small loin roast . . . of a freshly killed man, who seemed to be about thirty years old” and had died in an accident.102 Seabrook cooked the pieces, commenting that “the cooking odors, wholly pleasant, were like those of beefsteak and roast beef” and that the pieces also looked like beef, though, while raw, they were “slightly less red.” After eating the flesh, he declared that it tasted “like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. . . . It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have.”103 While not quite as enthusiastic as some of the other cannibal voices we have heard, his confession is a curious addition to the choir of those who praised the taste of human flesh.

To return to the Congo basin, it is notable that sentiments in the southern Kasai region likewise seem to have been somewhat less euphoric than elsewhere. According to Frobenius, the Songye considered the taste of human flesh as “very pleasant, similar to pork”104—similar, but not necessarily better. Nor are there other voices from this region praising the particular taste of human flesh, it seems. What this apparent difference in attitudes might mean will be discussed later.

When Coquilhat noticed that his pleas not to eat their fellow humans failed to move the Bangala he talked to, he tried to appeal to their material interests instead. He pointed out that eating a human being meant “destroying an instrument of wealth” and that the Bangala could make better use of their slaves by “forcing [them] to work,” for example, as fishers, cultivators, or weapon makers. While the individuals he spoke with admitted that this was true, they did not see it as a sufficient reason to give up their custom, arguing that they would lose “a special enjoyment, that of eating an excellent meat ‘of a peculiar taste.’” And they added, in a not-so-subtle criticism of the European settlers’ materialism, that “we are not accustomed, like the white man, to give up a great pleasure to make a doubtful gain.”105

What was the underlying reason for the widespread praise for human flesh? Was it just by chance that the eaten whose flesh was praised so much belonged to the same species as the eaters? Or did the cannibals—maybe subconsciously—enjoy the feeling of superiority they received from eating others and thus totally subjugating them to their own will? Did the humanness of the victims inform the cannibals’ sense of taste or had, conversely, the perceived excellent taste of human flesh helped to make cannibalism more acceptable? Since taste is a subjective matter and since, by definition, nobody except cannibals knows how human flesh tastes, it seems impossible to really untangle these questions. All that can be said is that, from the people eaters’ viewpoint, taste mattered—and they generally saw it as an argument in favor of their custom.

Section: Regional Differences

While there can be no doubt that cannibalism in general, and slave eating in particular, were quite widespread in some parts the Congo basin, it is equally clear that they were not practiced everywhere. A large part of the reports of slave eating comes from the northwest of the country, referring to certain tributaries (such as the Ubangi, Lulonga, and Ruki) and a stretch of the main Congo River (the area where the Bangala and related peoples live). Other reports refer to the Mangbetu people and some Zande clans in the northeast, the region around the Aruwimi River in the east, and to the Kasai and its tributaries in the central west. This leaves large areas—including the whole south and parts of the east—where slave eating seems to have been unknown, or at least very rare. But there were also more locally focused differences—it seems that cannibals and non-cannibals lived sometimes side by side. This is notable in the case of the Zande, where several sources leave no doubt that some clans did practice cannibalism, while others did not.106

Elsewhere similar local differences seem to have existed. While the European writers of that time tend to speak about “cannibal” and “non-cannibal tribes,” such labels must be regarded with great care. Who became known as a “tribe” or ethnic group often depended on decisions made by outsiders, whether Europeans or neighboring peoples. Often those who spoke the same or similar languages were treated as a unit, even if in their culture and their customs they might have been quite diverse.107

It is therefore not surprising that the patterns of who did or did not eat human flesh do not clearly fit the tribal labels used by Europeans. “Balolo” was such a label used for those who lived along the upper parts of the Ruki, the Lulonga, and their headstreams108—people who, as we have seen, are repeatedly mentioned as victims of their more “powerful” and violent neighbors, “who are continually making raids upon them, capturing and selling them into slavery, and eating those who are less suitable for the slavemarket,” as Ward writes.109 But the distinction between raiders and raided might not always have been as clear-cut as that. A photograph published in the Belgian colonial magazine Le Mouvement Géographique in 1897 shows a group of naked children and several armed men guarding them. It is entitled “Children captured near the Lulonga by Balolo cannibals”; the accompanying text explains that the photograph was taken in 1889 and represents “a party of Balolo marauders returning from a raid and leading a convoy of young prisoners destined to be exported to the Ubangi as meat for slaughter.”110

It is possible that the (anonymous) author of this article made a mistake and it was actually the children, not their captors, who belonged to those generally known as Balolo. But it is also possible that Balolo men sometimes decided to do some raiding of their own if they saw a suitable opportunity. Those who had suffered under earlier raids may also have been motivated by a desire for revenge to launch counterattacks against the attackers or their allies. While it is unclear what really happened here, it seems unwise to assume that the boundaries between “perpetrators” and “victims” were always clear-cut and impermeable.

While Ward does not say whether Balolo sometimes undertook any raids of their own, he observes that some subgroups showed a clear “desire of eating human flesh” and practiced cannibalism when given the opportunity, while other Balolo groups “denied all participation in such practices”—credibly, as Ward judges, noting that such statements were sometimes made during the first contact with white people, when the latter’s “abhorrence” could hardly have been known.111

Elsewhere too, the boundaries between cannibals and non-cannibals did not always follow the tribal appellations used by Europeans. Torday calls it a “striking difference” that the northern groups of Mbala (Bambala) people on the Kwilu River liked to eat human flesh (and sometimes sacrificed slaves for this purpose), while the Southern Bambala “abhor cannibalism.” He suspects that the northern groups had adopted the practice under the influence of their neighbors, and conjectures more generally “that cannibalism is spreading through retaliation, for people coming in contact with cannibals see those who have fallen in war eaten by their enemy, and it is a natural act of revenge to eat the first prisoner that falls into their hands.” But he also observes that cannibalism could spread through imitation, with curious people who saw others eat human flesh inclined to try it themselves if given an opportunity.112

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