CHAPTER 7, COMMERCIAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS OF CONGOLESE CANNIBALISM

Section: Sale of “Edible” Slaves to Neighboring Peoples

In this chapter we will explore the connections between commerce and cannibalism and the economic aspects of the custom. We have seen that slaves were purchased for consumption—something that was, of course, only possible because there were traders willing to sell under such terms. In some cases, the owners of slaves might simply not have cared what would happen to those they sold; in other cases, people seem to have made a deliberate business out of catering for the needs of cannibalistic neighbors.

While camping near a Balui village in late 1886 on the way to his mission station, Augouard “saw in the middle of the [Ubangi] river something which appeared and disappeared as it struggled. Assuming an accident, we wished to go to the rescue of the castaway; but the natives, guessing our thoughts, seized their light canoes, and went to collect a poor child that was frightfully lean.” The rescued girl turned out to be a slave owned by one of the villagers who had planned to sell her, maybe after some fattening, to “the cannibalistic Bondjos.” But because she had become “sick and too thin,” he had “thrown her mercilessly into the water” rather than wasting further food on her. On hearing this, Augouard bought her from her owner for “a piece of cotton, valued ten francs.”1

While cannibalism was not unknown among the Balui themselves,2 some of them apparently regarded the ownership of slaves as a business opportunity rather than an occasion for a feast—just as has been reported for the “Boubangis,” who lived further upriver.3 The fate of slaves was considered of no concern—when Augouard purchased the nearly drowned girl, the villagers were utterly amazed, “wonder[ing] what we wanted to do with such a creature. If we had not purchased her, she would certainly have been thrown back into the river.”4 That his intent was to save the child’s life was not something they could understand.

According to Augouard, this case was no exception since enslaved children circulated as a kind of “common currency” in the Ubangi region. Even children too young to make useful workers were accepted as payment by cannibals and non-cannibals alike, the latter knowing that potential buyers who might seek them for “feasts” were never hard to find.5 Without particularly mentioning children (who may have been more or less discounted based on their age and size), Glave notes that “the standard of value on the Ubangi was human life—human flesh.”6

In addition to children, women seem to have been sold for consumption as well. The French ethnographer Dr. Poutrin states that some groups of the M’Baka (often subsumed under the “Bondjo” label) made a business out of selling “young and healthy” women across the river where they were “killed and eaten.” These transactions took place “in times of peace,” when human flesh was otherwise hard to get. Poutrin might have heard of this from French soldiers who once rescued a group of women sold for this purpose.7 While he does not say so clearly, he seems to think that the victims had been born in the village that sold them. But unless they had done something which had seriously offended their community, this seems doubtful. There are reports that community members considered guilty of serious wrongdoing were sometimes sold as punishment even in the knowledge that they would probably be eaten,8 but there is no conclusive evidence that “innocent” free individuals were ever subjugated to such a fate.

One possible exception is an account of the British officer John Hanning Speke (1827–1864), who claims that the Bembe people (Wabembe) in the northeast of the Congo basin, “when they cannot get human flesh otherwise, give a goat to their neighbours for a sick or dying child,” because “such flesh” was considered “the best of all.”9 Since he heard this from others about the Bembe, it might have been nothing but a rumor. Nevertheless, it is possible that poor parents were sometimes willing to sell a child whom they considered dying and lost to them anyway even if they knew that the victim was destined for consumption. The women mentioned by Poutrin, however, were “young and healthy.”

Several sources also indicate that parents were sometimes driven by poverty to sell their children into slavery and that some of these children, after passing through the hands of several interim traders, were purchased by cannibals who might well have used them for food—but in these cases the parents did not know what would happen to their children and will certainly have hoped for a less sinister outcome.10

While a few might have been sold by their own parents or communities, most of the slaves who circulated in the Ubangi region likely were the victims of raids, warfare, or kidnapping. Many seem to have been children, possibly because they were considered easier to handle or because of a preference for their tender young flesh11—“four to sixteen years old” was the preferred age range according to the Dutch trader cited earlier.12 Several of the children purchased and liberated by the French missionaries said that they had been resold more than twenty times.13 G. Renouard adds that these children, once freed by the missionaries, often had trouble adjusting to their new situation: having known, sometimes as far back as they could remember, that their bodies were “only valuable according to the state of their fat” and that their lives were “worth less than a quarter of a hippopotamus or of a buffalo,” they found it hard to develop any sense of self-respect. Sometimes they could scarcely believe that they would be allowed to grow up and old, considering the missionaries’ attempts at educating them just another cruel delay of a fate they had been forced to accept as inevitable.14

Children also seem to have made up a considerable part of a cannibalistic slave trade that took place in the Kasai region, farther in the south. According to Sidney Hinde, the Songye people (Basongo) in his vicinity, while not opposed to eating human flesh at suitable occasions, increased their wealth by shipping “slaves and children” downriver to the Basongo Meno (another Songye group) who purchased them “for food.” The reference is certainly to be read as “adult slaves and enslaved children”; there are no indications that the Songye were desperate enough to sell their own offspring to people who might eat them. Observing that the victims were often children—maybe because for adult captives it was easier to find non-cannibal buyers elsewhere?—the local Free State commissary reacted drastically, ordering “the sentries on the river to take, or fire on, any canoes descending the river with children on board, and, after catching a few, succeeded in stopping the traffic.”15

Leo Frobenius notes the central Songye groups were more martial than those living near the borders of their region. Both, he adds, preyed on the neighboring Luba people, but while the central groups raided whole villages, the peripheral groups preferred capturing lone individuals or purchasing slaves captured by others. Victims were exploited as laborers, killed and eaten, or both.16 Those called “Basongo Meno” by Hinde might well have been one of more peripheral groups who bought victims from the more active raiders who lived in his vicinity. The Presbyterian missionary Samuel Lapsley mentions them as well, calling them “the awful Bassonge Mino, saw-toothed cannibals,” but adding that they “were friendly and peaceably disposed towards the white man.”17

A trade in slaves that were subsequently consumed has also been reported from the Aruwimi River in the east of the Congo basin. The German Catholic missionary Josef Fräßle (1878–1929) was stationed near Basoko, where this river joins the Congo. He writes that the Turumbu people (to whom Disasi Makulo belonged)18 living across the river received twice a week a shipment of “slaves, women and captives,” brought in an “ultra-long dugout. . . . Those unhappy people were bound to poles [in the river], with their ankles dislocated, and sticking up to their heads in the water. After four days their flesh was tender for the kitchen and they were slaughtered.”19

As in other regions, for a long time the Free State was apparently unwilling or unable to stop the deadly trade—in 1906, however, the trader responsible for most of the cannibalistic shipments was finally arrested and executed, according to Fräßle. (He does not say anything more about this trader except that he was responsible for the semiweekly delivery of slaves for butchery, so it is not known to which ethnic group he belonged or whether he was a foreigner.) But this does not seem to have changed people’s attitudes towards their slaves, at least not quickly. Like their French companions on the Ubangi, the missionaries bought enslaved children in order to free them and raise them as Christians, but doing so was expensive. Fräßle complains that the owners of such children were unwilling to sell them for twenty-five or even fifty marks, arguing that “their meat, their labor is worth more than that.”20 Butchering purchased children for meat or exploiting them as workers—both were still valid options.

The practice of soaking people for several days in the river prior to slaughtering them has also been reported from the Bangala people and the Ubangi region.21 Around the Ubangi and among the Bangala this practice was combined with the breaking of legs and arms, according to these sources, while Fräßle writes that the victims’ ankles had been “dislocated” (German: verrenkt), which indicates that they had at least been deliberately sprained, if not outright broken.

Prisoners caught in battles or raids were in some regions subjected to the same treatment, as Ward reports (based on personal observation) from the Lulonga River.22 He explains the practice as due to “a prevalent belief . . . that the flavour of human flesh is improved by submerging the prospective victim up to the neck in the water for two or three days previous to sacrifice.”23 Fräßle, Hinde,24 and Renouard25 all explain it as motivated by a desire to make the flesh more tender, while Camille-Aimé Coquilhat writes that it made the “skin easier to remove.”26 Whatever the exact motive was, it seems clear that the additional suffering this cruel treatment caused their victims did not concern the cannibals. Apparently, they were not deliberately sadistic, but neither did they care.

An episode reported by Léon Roget, a captain of the Free State army, indicates that the sale of persons for consumption was not always free of risk for the sellers. Roget, who like Fräßle was employed near the Aruwimi River, describes a conflict between two villages in this area. One of them (called L—) had purchased a woman from the inhabitants of the other village (called M—). The buyers had slaughtered the woman and started to cook her flesh in eighteen pots; the villagers might have distributed the dismembered body among themselves with each family taking their part home for cooking, hence the many pots. But a dog belonging to M— strolled through the village and ate some of the flesh from one of the pots. The buyers felt cheated and sent a group of armed men who kidnapped a young girl from the other village. The girl was killed, and her flesh added to that of the purchased woman.27

When the sold woman had apparently been a slave, maybe caught in a raid elsewhere and deliberately sold, the girl seems to have been a random victim. Hence it is unlikely that she too had been a slave or captive; more likely she had belonged to the village community and her parents and relatives must have felt devastated by losing her. Yet collectively the villagers merely argued that “by taking a little girl of that size, L— had compensated itself too amply,” since her body had yielded “more meat” than what was stolen by the dog. They had retaliated by kidnapping and consuming someone from the other village in return, triggering a small war in which several more persons on both sides suffered the same fate.28

When hearing of the conflict, Roget volunteered to act as “arbitrator” and restore peace between the villages, but Albert Chapaux, who recorded this account, does not tell whether and how he was able to do so. According to Roget, cannibalism was frequent in the region, with this case just “one example among thousands.”29 The case indicates that responsibility was held collectively and that the inhabitants of a village were held responsible even for acts of their animals. Promising human flesh and then not delivering enough of it, or taking some of it back, was dangerous, since it left a debt of human flesh which the buyer was entitled to have settled.

Section: Human Flesh as a Commodity

We have seen that, at least in parts of the Congo basin, the owners of slaves were under no obligation to keep them alive: they were free to sacrifice them or use them for food, if it pleased them to do so. Wealthy men used this to regale their friends and followers with human flesh, thus increasing their prestige and ensuring loyalty. We will turn to the question of prices in the next section, but it seems pretty clear that buying a whole slave was an expensive proposition, usually out of reach of the common people. Those less wealthy who had cannibal tastes could therefore only hope to get invited to such a feast, or get human flesh in some other way, say as a fighter taking part in a war campaign. In some regions, however, it was not necessary to buy a slave or fight in a war to get access to human flesh, because this flesh was also a commodity offered for sale.

Like slave eating in general, it seems that such transactions were considered quite natural along parts of the Ubangi River. In a letter written in late 1887, Augouard complains that “the people are cannibals to the highest degree who, without shame, offered us a human thigh or arm for ten or fifteen sous!” In another letter he adds that “human flesh is an ordinary butcher’s article. They sell an arm or a leg for a value of one franc and take their gourmandism so far that they prefer the parts that are most greasy and devoid of nerves.”30 A few years later, Maurice Musy (1865–1890), a French explorer and colonialist who founded the French governmental post of Bangui (today the capital of the Central African Republic), met a Mr. D—, the manager of a French factorerie. The latter told Musy that during a former journey along the same river he had accidentally purchased human fat and used it for cooking, discovering too late the origin of the substance. Both of them had been offered pieces of human flesh for purchase. Such incidents were “not rare” and one soon “does not even pay attention” anymore, Musy comments.31

Some of the offered flesh might have come from killed or captured enemies or from “poached” foreigners. Referring to some clans of the Zande farther in the east, Gero writes that they used to sell the flesh and fat of killed strangers and enemies to neighboring villages; the victims’ fat was extracted by slowly boiling their bones.32 But regarding the Ubangi area, the Baptist missionary William Bentley notes that, while “people did not as a rule eat their own townsfolk and relatives”—something that was true very widely indeed—“they kept and fattened slaves for the butcher, just as we keep cattle and poultry.”33 Similar to the accounts given by Glave and others,34 he states that most of these slaves came from the markets around the Lulonga River. According to Bentley, some people made a business out of purchasing them from intermediaries in order to “feed [them] up . . . until they were fat enough for the market, then butcher them, and sell the meat in small joints.” Any flesh not sold during the same day or so “would be dried on a rack over a fire . . . until it could be kept for weeks, and sold at leisure.”35

Once a little enslaved girl was offered to Musy and his companions. They were in an openly cannibalistic region where they saw “human meat” cooking in pots, and it is possible that the girl was offered to them after they had asked for provisions, as they usually did when arriving in a settlement. But though they assumed (not without reason, as we have seen) that enslaved children in this region were frequently used as a source of food, they did not buy her, “since her presence on board could cause inconvenience.” After recording this decision in a diary-style letter, Musy added: “maybe at this hour she is being eaten. That is very likely.” It is not clear whether he had a specific reason to suppose this—had he heard or seen something?—or whether he was just expressing a general fear.36

At the Lulonga and surrounding rivers, slaves could also meet a premature end. One night, while traveling along the Maringa River, a headstream of the Lulonga, Glave

> heard a woman’s piercing shriek, followed by a stifled, gurgling moan; then boisterous laughter, when all again became silent. In the morning I was horrified to see a native offering for sale to my men a piece of human flesh, the skin of which bore the tribal tattoo mark of the Balolo. I afterward learned that the cry we had heard at night was from a female slave whose throat had been cut.37

When he returned to the same village ten days later, Glave learned that five more enslaved women had been killed and consumed in the meantime.38 If this frequency was typical (which is unclear), it would mean that a slave was slaughtered about every second day in that village alone, her flesh then apparently sold to passing sailors and quite possibly to the villagers themselves. While traveling along the Lulonga, Roger Casement once witnessed this as well: “A woman was killed in the village I was passing through, and her head and other portions of her were brought and offered for sale to some of the crew of the steamer I was on.”39

These independent reports indicate that scenes of this kind seem not to have been rare in this part of the country—apparently the demand for human flesh was high enough to sustain the deadly business model. That all the victims in these cases were women seem too striking for mere coincidence. We will return to this question when discussing the patriarchal aspects of Congolese cannibalism.

An even crueler practice, noted by various observers, is that slaves or captives were presented alive to potential purchasers who then could choose which parts of the body they would buy before the victim was slaughtered. Gero learned from his local informants that this custom had formerly existed among the Kunda, one of the Zande clans:

> Before giving the death blow to a prisoner, they would parade him around like a beast for sale; actually they used to sell the parts of his body to different bidders, marking in succession, with white ochre or with ashes, what was desired and paid in advance, while the wretch was still alive. The hapless victim was in this way meeting those who would gather around to partake of his flesh. When every part and limb was properly marked and sold out, he was butchered to satisfy the buyers and provide them with their macabre fare.40

The same practice is also documented from other areas in the north and northeast of the Congo basin. Father Allaire, one of the French Catholic missionaries, saw slaves offered in this way during his travels along the Ubangi River:

> In the tribe he [Allaire] had just visited . . . the slaves for sale are led to the markets. Some are bought wholesale, and others in parts. Whoever cannot afford a whole specimen, buys only one member, the arm for example, on which he makes a longitudinal mark with a kind of white chalk; a second customer buys the other arm or leg, and puts his mark on it; others buy the head, hands, chest, etc. When all the members have been marked, the head of the unfortunate is cut off, and each of the buyers devours the piece that belongs to him on the spot.41

Emil Torday ascribes the same practice to the Budja (a Bangala subgroup) and related peoples living around the central Congo River:

> It often happens that the poor creature destined for the knife is exposed for sale in the market. He walks to and fro and epicures come to examine him. They describe the parts they prefer, one the arm, one the leg, breast, or head. The portions which are purchased are marked off with lines of coloured ochre. When the entire body is sold, the wretch is slain.42

Ward describes the procedure as well, adding that he knew it from “personal observation.”43 A further description, possibly based on Allaire’s account, comes from the mission historian Renouard.44

The distribution of the flesh of still living victims did not always take place in the commercial context of a marketplace. Dr. Poutrin notes that the M’Baka people on the upper Ubangi ate both “the dead and the wounded” during times of war as well as “the prisoners, brought back to their opponent’s village.”45 The latter

> are tied by the neck and wrists to a kind of yoke and exposed against the pole which stands in the middle of the place. The chief, then his warriors, designate on their bodies, by limiting them by red lines, the part they reserve for themselves. Then the man is immediately killed and dismembered.46

In this case, the flesh was not sold, but the victorious warriors marked the chosen body parts in the same fashion as described by other observers for cannibal slave markets.

Ward calls this treatment of still living slaves (or captives) “the most inhuman practice of all,” and Augouard concludes his retelling of Allaire’s observation with the rhetorical question: “Can you imagine anything more barbaric and coldly cruel?”47 Understandable as these sentiments are, Nigel Davies comments that the practice reminds him of how “in India in pre-refrigeration days British families would join forces to buy a whole sheep and eat it the same day.”48 Indeed it seems plausible that the practice was motivated by practical concerns rather than deliberately cruelty: once a large animal (including the human kind) had been slaughtered, the flesh had to be distributed quickly or it would spoil. Human flesh not eaten immediately was often smoked for later consumption,49 but people certainly preferred fresh meat to smoked.

However, together with the cruel custom of breaking people’s arms and legs and letting them soak in a river for days—which was apparently motivated by culinary considerations—this practice clearly shows that slaves and captives were considered of no concern: their fate, their suffering and humiliation simply did not matter.

Section: The Price of Slaves and of Human Flesh

If human flesh had to be purchased, was it a rare and expensive luxury? Or was it priced similar to the meat of edible animals? Information from the cannibal regions of the Congo basin is relatively sparse, but the information that can be found points to regional differences that need to be explained.

As already noted, John Weeks writes that slaves were relatively expensive among the Bangala: for the price of one man, one could buy about seven goats, and this “prohibitive price” prevented them from “gratify[ing] their desire for human flesh very often.”50 Women were even more expensive in this area and therefore rarely eaten—a point to which we will return later.

Farther south, slaves seem to have been considerably cheaper. In Luebo, a town in the Kasai region, Samuel Lapsley once asked a Mr. Engeringh, a white settler, how the latter got “wives” for his native workers. Engeringh answered that he bought enslaved women from the Zappo Zaps, the Songye fighters known and feared for their involvement in the slave trade.51 A woman, he explained, could be bought for just two pieces of handkerchief, while male slaves were more expensive, costing “three pieces, or four if he is plenty large. If there is as much to eat on a man as on three goats, he brings the price of three goats, that is, three handkerchiefs.”52

Engeringh added that, while the Zappo Zaps themselves engaged in cannibalism, they spared most of the slaves they bought or captured in order to resell them eastward. Ultimately most of these slaves were purchased by cannibals who lived around the Sankuru River (where Hinde was stationed)—the people living in this area were Songye, just like the Zappo Zaps themselves. “And as the point of view of the final purchaser determines the price, and the consumers are cannibals, the price of a man is generally determined by the amount of meat on him.”53

The goats domesticated in the Congo basin were dwarf goats, as Harry Johnston points out.54 The breed commonly found in West and Central Africa reaches an adult weight of eighteen to twenty-five kilograms.55 That a man could weigh as much as three or four of these goats is therefore not unrealistic.

According to Engeringh, the Kuba people, who live between Luebo and the Sankuru, did not eat people, but some of them had no scruples to act as intermediaries in this murderous trade.56 Around the Kwilu River, a tributary of the Kasai farther in the west, similar interactions between cannibal buyers and non-cannibal sellers or traders seem to have taken place. The anthropologists Emil Torday and T. A. Joyce claim that the people living around this river “buy many slaves . . . for eating” from neighboring communities that did not practice cannibalism.57

The anthropologist Melville Hilton-Simpson (1881–1938) writes that, among the Songye people, the price of a male slave rarely exceeded the price of five goats—somewhat, but not much higher than the price quoted by Lapsley, especially considering that Hilton-Simpson mentions only the usual maximum, not the average price. The price of a woman bought as a “wife” varied between the equivalents of 2.5 to 7.5 goats, likely depending on characteristics such as youth and beauty.58 At the lower end, this price range is close to Engeringh’s statement that he only had to pay the equivalent of two goats for an enslaved “wife” meant for his own workers.

If Engeringh is right, buyers in the Kasai region were very pragmatic—they bought both slaves and goats for consumption, paying for the “amount of meat,” but without seeing a reason to pay a premium for human flesh. This corresponds to Frobenius’s observation that the Songye considered its taste as “very pleasant [and] similar to pork”59—it seems they were happy to get tasty meat from whatever mammals were available, as long as prices were comparable. Hilton-Simpson’s higher price suggests that human flesh might actually have been somewhat more expensive than that of goats, but not by a huge amount. The Bangala were more enthused, praising human flesh as “better than any other meat.”60 Here the flesh of slaves seems to have been about twice as expensive as that of goats, according to the price quoted by Weeks.61 Still a low price for a human life.

That slaves could be fairly cheap is confirmed by Ward, who notes—without revealing which specific region he had in mind—that “two ordinary women may be purchased for the price of one pig.”62 Obviously, he does not talk about modern, systematically fattened pigs which might reach a weight of two hundred kilograms or more. Red river hogs—a species that is widespread in the Congo basin—weigh between 45 and 115 kilograms when fully grown.63 Two women will have easily reached, if not surpassed, that weight—indicating that, if they were purchased for consumption, their flesh was hardly more expensive than that of a pig.

But as Hilton-Simpson, Weeks, and other sources indicate, the prices of women tended to vary more than those of men and could be considerably higher. Throughout Central Africa, there was usually a higher demand for female than for male slaves because of their gender and sexuality—a point to which we will return later. On the other hand, the demand for slaves that were too young or too old to make useful workers or beautiful “wives” was very low or even absent—outside the cannibal regions at least. François Coulbois, a missionary purchasing and liberating slaves around Lake Tanganyika (east of the Congo basin) in the 1880s notes the typical prices of slaves as follows: healthy adult males cost a hundred francs; twelve-year-old children about fifty. Younger children cost fifteen to twenty-five francs, while tiny four- or five-year-old ones could be had for just five francs. Toddlers and old people were not even offered for sale; there was no market for them.64

No cannibalism has been documented for this region (to my knowledge), but if any cannibals had strayed into the markets visited by Coulbois, they would have considered the prices charged for young children very attractive: twenty children aged four to five could be purchased for the price of a single adult man, while their combined weight, and hence the “amount of meat” on their bones, might have been five times as much.65

Since the non-cannibal demand for young children was so low, their risk of ending under the butcher’s knife must have been even higher than that of adult slaves in regions where slave eating was accepted—as the many sources who mention children as victims indeed seem to indicate. In Luebo, Lapsley was once offered a six-year-old girl in return for a goat—the weight of both might have been about the same.66 Farther east, in Maniema, James Jameson purchased a ten-year-old girl for just half the price he had recorded for a goat. Even if merely the “amount of meat” is considered, this price seems very low—but the deal was arranged by an Arab-Swahili merchant who might well have been able to negotiate considerably better prices than Jameson, an inexperienced foreigner, could himself have done.67

One of the French missionaries working in the Ubangi region once exchanged an empty bottle for “a four-year-old child [who], sick and frighteningly thin, was worthless from a nutritional point of view,” as the mission historian Jehan de Witte comments.68 In a region where glass was a rare foreign import, an empty glass bottle may actually have had more value than the missionaries realized. Still, there can be no doubt that the lives of young children were cheap at that time and that those who preferred eating a child over eating a goat were not ruined by doing so.

The discussion so far has referred to the prices of living slaves. Very little pricing information is available regarding the flesh of slaughtered human beings that was sometimes offered for sale around the Ubangi, the Lulonga, and possibly other rivers. Prices are mentioned, however, in two letters by Augouard written from the Ubangi area. In one he states that “the people . . . offered us a human thigh or arm for ten or fifteen sous,” in another he notes: “they sell an arm or a leg for a value of one franc” (that is, twenty sous). In an earlier letter he had mentioned that the price of a chicken was six to seven sous.69 While the data is too sparse to allow a robust judgment, these statements suggest that the prices of human flesh and chicken meat may have been roughly similar.70 This would fit the largely pragmatic attitudes documented from at least parts of this area, where slaves were simply called “meat” and where people failed to see an essential difference between the consumption of fowls, goats, and human beings.71

To summarize, it seems that the prices of human flesh and animal meat were generally comparable, typically varying from the same price to about twice as expensive for the human variety. How does this fit with our earlier observation that human flesh was considered a proper dish for feasts and might have increased the prestige of those who could provide? Actually, these observations are not as contradictory as it might appear from the viewpoint of a society where many people eat meat products on a daily basis, more or less. But to understand this better we will further investigate, in the next section, how often and under which circumstances human flesh was eaten.

Section: Famine Food or Occasional Diversion?

Several sources consider Congolese cannibalism as motivated, at least in part, by hunger. Referring to the Ubangi region, Renouard argues that “the cannibalistic peoples are not agricultural. Thus famine would be the order of the day if, to prevent it, they did not keep stocks of children for fattening and of slaves destined for slaughter.”72 Josef Fräßle considers “essential destitution” (German: Lebensnot) one of the reasons for the cannibalism practiced by the Turumbu;73 Auguste Chevalier thinks that the Banda and the Mandja (two ethnic groups in today’s Central African Republic) practiced cannibalism out of necessity and destitution.74

It is well known that, in times of famine, desperate people will turn to human flesh if all other sources of food are exhausted—sometimes even killing for the purpose.75 And it is plausible enough that within and around the Congo basin, cannibal activities might have increased during times of starvation. According to Gero, adult slaves who had not been eaten immediately after capture were generally safe among the Zande as long as times were good, but if provisions ran low in times of famine, some (or all) of them were slaughtered for food.76 If this was not enough to ward off starvation, desperate husbands sometimes exchanged a wife “with the wife of another family. Both unfortunate women were destined to the same fate of being butchered and eaten up, each away from her former home.” In this way, at least, “the woman slaughtered and consumed was not the family partner.” He found recollections of such practices among various clans.77 According to E. E. Evans-Pritchard, the victims of these exchanges made only “in exceptional circumstances of famine” were usually girl children (“daughters”) rather than married women.78

Glave reports that the frequent raids against the Balolo people on the Maringa River led to a collapse of their provisioning systems and forced the survivors to consume the corpses of their dead: “Throughout the regions of the Malinga [Maringa] they become so brutalized by hunger that they eat their own dead, and the appearance of one of their villages always denotes abject misery and starvation.”79

While famine could lead to cannibalism, such periods of extreme food scarcity were exceptional episodes, not characteristic for the whole of the Congo basin over long periods of time, and Glave’s account is of an unusually gentle form of cannibalism, where dead bodies were eaten, but nobody was killed. Episodes of famine cannibalism reported from other regions are strictly limited in time—lasting from weeks to at most a few years. A whole population could not over longer periods sustain itself largely from human flesh because the number of victims would be so substantial that the population would literally eat itself out of existence.80

The sources we have reviewed indicate that cannibalism was practiced from time to time, often when there was reason for a feast, but that it was by no means a daily affair (with the possible exception of war campaigns). Some sources indicate that the inhabitants of a village might have been able to feast on human flesh a few times a year, others from the Ubangi area claim up to about two victims (possibly mostly children) per week, or a hundred per year.81 One or two sources assert that kings or wealthy men might have been able to eat human flesh almost daily, but conceivably these are just exaggerated rumors—and even if true, they would only have applied to a tiny minority of people.82 Had cannibalism been primarily a hunger phenomenon, we would expect a different pattern with human flesh being a regular constituent of lean meals held in dire times by people who would otherwise face starvation, but not eaten at all during better times. But this is not what we see from the Congo, where apparently it was rather a dish of choice for occasional lavish feasts.

Even the authors who consider Congolese cannibalism as driven by hunger tend to agree that this was not the only reason. Renouard notes that cannibalism was also practiced on the Ubangi because well-armed attackers found that they could capture people more easily than many animals, and adds that the flesh of children was preferred over that of elephants and other large animals because it was not only more tender, but also much quicker to cook.83 Fräßle lists “palatal delight” (Gaumenlust) among the motives driving cannibal acts.84 Chevalier notes that, among the Mandja, while young captives were kept or sold as slaves and slain enemies and adult prisoners were eaten, old captive women were considered useless for any purpose: they were killed immediately and their corpses discarded as too stringy.85 This is not something one would expect if a lack of other food had really been the primary motive for their cannibalism.

While the consumption of slaves and captives thus cannot be explained as a hunger phenomenon, periods of famine and situations of temporary food scarcity during wartime might nevertheless have helped to establish the custom and make it socially acceptable. As we have already observed for New Zealand (Chapter 2), slave eating can hardly be understood without taking war cannibalism into account. In the Congo, slaves were more often and more widely traded than in New Zealand, but a large part of them were taken in wars or warlike raids. War cannibalism was more widespread, and it might well have been older than slave eating.86 And in addition to a desire to humiliate the enemy,87 the consumption of killed or captured foes was repeatedly motivated by convenience in a situation where food was otherwise hard to get.

Evans-Pritchard observes that Zande warriors seem to have considered human flesh a handy source of food, especially during war campaigns, when they “were often desperately hungry” and found it difficult to secure enough provisions. Though taste mattered as well: “I can add, having on a number of occasions discussed the matter with middle-aged and elderly Zande, that I have never heard any other reason given for devouring human flesh than either hunger, or more often, a taste for it.”88 Gero agrees, noting that war cannibalism was practiced, “we could almost say, for logistic reasons”: after a battle, human flesh was readily available and would spoil if not used, while other food sources were less easy to secure or, if among the “spoils,” could be taken home for future consumption.89

Convenience was also given as a reason for war cannibalism in West Africa. In Liberia, the American journalist William Seabrook talked with an old fighter from the Krahn people, who explained: “Perhaps there are sheep and goats and chickens in the conquered village, perhaps not, but why slay them when there is already slain provision of good meat? Is it reasonable to let it spoil and wastefully kill other which is no better?”90 And A. O. Arua (born ca. 1927), “a very well informed local historian” from southeastern Nigeria, remembered in 1973 that in former times “the human flesh [of enemies] was eaten” because “feeding in the battle field was difficult” and provisions were always scarce.91

While it seems clear that Congolese cannibalism in general cannot be explained as a hunger phenomenon, hunger—in times of famine or during war campaigns—might thus certainly have helped to establish the practice. People who had become used to eating human flesh in such circumstances might well have decided to continue the practice in better times, provided that convenient victims—such as captured enemies, kidnapped outsiders, or slaves not urgently needed for other purposes—were available. That war cannibalism was associated with a sense of accomplishment and superiority—in order to eat your enemies, you had to defeat them first—may well have shaped the festive mood of elation that people still seem to have felt when eating slaves.

Section: A Certain Scarcity of Meat

We have seen above that human flesh does not seem to have been an ultimate luxury good whose price exceeded that of animal meat by a huge margin. But this certainly does not mean that it was just a daily, ordinary dish. Rather, meat of any kind may have been a rare and highly valued delicacy. Several sources suggest that human flesh was appreciated as an occasional diversion in a diet that might otherwise have been somewhat monotonous and largely devoid of meat.

Gero notes that Zande, the largest of the languages spoken among the Zande people, had two negatively connoted words that might be translated as “cannibal”: rîaboro (someone who eats people) and barîkangba (someone who eats corpses). These terms were used for acts considered abominable, such as the snatching of corpses from funerals. English has a few terms for cannibals (“cannibal,” “man-eater,” “anthropophagus”), all of which have negative connotations as well (only very bad, or maybe extremely desperate people will become cannibals). But in the Zande language, according to Gero, there was also a third term without negative overtones, used for cannibalistic acts that were considered socially acceptable, such as the consumption of enemies and strangers. Surprisingly enough, it was simply rîkawa (someone who eats meat).92

Gero’s informants explained that the Zande were limited to a mostly vegetarian diet in times of peace. Domesticated animals could not be eaten on a regular basis, because there were too few of them. Hunting game was only possible during some parts of the year, and even during these times, hunters would often return unsuccessfully (if they had success, they most often caught monkeys, small antelopes, wild cats, and rodents). Capturing and butchering the occasional passing stranger as well as eating persons killed or captured in war and (among a few clans) the corpses of deceased community members thus became a way of making an otherwise monotonous, largely vegetarian and often scarce diet more varied and plentiful. Human flesh, though by no means the only meat eaten, thus became to be considered the prototypical “meat,” and “meat eating” and “cannibalism” (in a nonpejorative sense) became synonymous.93

Gero points out that two Zande clans that had been particularly cannibalistic—the Abarambu-Adhuga and the Apambia—had owned no domestic animals except dogs (which were sometimes eaten), speculating that this might have increased their propensity for human-based dishes. The Amadi, another cannibal clan, raised goats in addition to dogs. They, too, enjoyed human flesh, but seemed less “voracious,” often selling the flesh and fat of enemies and murdered strangers to the Abarambu-Adhuga and other neighboring peoples instead of eating it themselves.94

In other Congolese regions, the situation might have been similar. About one of the peoples on the Ubangi River once known as “Bondjos,” Dr. Poutrin writes: “the scarcity of the game, the monotony and poverty of the vegetable food easily explain the avidity of the M’Baka for all that is human flesh.”95 Jean Dybowski agrees:

> Cannibalism, however repugnant it may be, becomes more explainable . . . if one considers that all these people, very hungry for meat, have no domestic cattle. They are reduced, at most, to a few small goats and dogs that they eat, but no oxen, sheep or pigs, and there is no doubt that, from the day we import cattle and they will find fresh meat on a regular basis, they will no longer fight each other in order to get it.96

Several Europeans complained that the (nonhuman) meat commonly eaten in the Congo basin was not particularly flavorful: “The principal domestic meat supply to be had on the Congo is fowl. . . . For table use he is not a success; no amount of fine cooking will change his tasteless nature,” notes Glave.97 Ward laments about a “meagre diet—sometimes so meagre that it can scarcely be termed monotonous.”98 In a similar tone, Melville Hilton-Simpson complains about “districts where game is so scarce that one has little or no break in the monotony of meals off skinny chickens and insipid goats’ meat.”99

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The limited availability and—according to some observers—mediocre quality of other meats eaten throughout the Congo probably helps to explain why human flesh became popular. Faced with a scarcity of animal protein, people were apparently willing to extend the realm of the “edible” farther than elsewhere.

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