CHAPTER 8, EXPLOITATION AND PATRIARCHY IN THE CONGO

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Section: Slaves as “Dual-Use Goods”

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There is a certain tension between cannibalism and the exploitation of forced labor—when all captives are eaten, none can be employed as slave workers, and vice versa. This is, however, not an absolute contradiction. If there are enough captives, some can be kept as slaves, while others are eaten. And even those slaves used for work or sexual pleasure can be slaughtered and eaten if their owners consider them no longer useful, if they want to teach other slaves a lesson, or if they decide that a meal of delicious human flesh has become more important than a slave’s potential future services.

In the Bangala area, it seems that slaves who had been incorporated into a community as laborers were generally safe as long as they performed to their owner’s satisfaction, but this could quickly change if they did not. Ward tells that, in the late 1880s, the local agent of a trading company had rented an enslaved boy from a village chief. When the agent complained that the boy was unreliable and did not always show up as expected, calling him “a lazy fellow and not worth much,”3 the boy’s owner reacted in an unexpected way:

> A day or two later the chief told the trader, with evident satisfaction, that the boy would not trouble him again, for that he had killed him with a thrust of his spear; and the white man’s horror was increased when, on the following day, the chief’s son, a youngster of sixteen or seventeen years of age, came swaggering into the station with spear and shield, and nonchalantly remarked that—

> “That slave boy was very good eating—he was nice and fat.”4

The “white man’s horror” is especially understandable considering that his own complaint had led to the boy’s death! According to Ward, the case was no exception: “if a slave . . . became ‘uppish’ and discontented with his walk in life, the remedy was simple. . . . The pot became his destination, and he soon ceased to afford even a topic for conversation.”5 Among the Bankutu people, who live farther south, in the eastern Kasai region, the anthropologist Melville Hilton-Simpson recorded a similar reaction: “a lazy slave is often sold as food.”6

In these cases, it seems that laziness and a general dissatisfaction of the owner with a slave’s performance could be enough to get a slave murdered and eaten. Among the Mangbetu and Zande in the northeast (and possibly elsewhere as well), slaves could suffer the same punishment if they tried to run away or otherwise misbehaved. Gaetano Casati saw how the leg of an enslaved woman who had visited friends without her master’s permission was served at the court of the Mangbetu king.7 Among some Zande clans, slaves who tried to run away were likewise punished with death and consumption, according to Gero.8

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But in some regions at least, even slaves who had lived for some time in their owner’s households or communities could fall victim to cannibalism, without such acts being motivated by misbehavior on their part. Disasi Makulo remembers that “two slaves were seized” in order to be butchered for his welcome feast, where they would have been served together with goats and dogs. These slaves had already been around, probably employed by the village or some wealthy villager for useful work—but at that moment, being able to feast on the “delicious flesh of man” was considered more important than the work they might have accomplished otherwise.9 There is no indication that their planned slaughter was motivated by any misbehavior on their part, though it is quite possible that slaves considered lazy or unreliable were preferred for such festive occasions.

Another case where a slave singled out for consumption had already lived in their owner’s household is reported by Guy Burrows. While employed as a Free State official in Riba-Riba (today Lokandu), a town in the Maniema region in the east of the country, he saw “a small native boy weeping bitterly,” while lingering near his house, but not daring to approach the white man directly. When an annoyed Burrows finally asked what was wrong, he got the reply: “My master is going to kill me.” It turned out that a group of enslaved women owned by the boy’s master had been accused of witchcraft after the brother of a local chief had developed a large ulcer on the leg. Suspected of having caused the illness, they were subjected to a trial by poison that killed seven of them—according to local legal tradition, a confirmation of their guilt.10

But the ill man’s powerful brother was not yet satisfied. He urged Munyumbi, the boy’s master, to organize a banquet for himself, his brother, and their “cronies,” in order to compensate them for the ill man’s suffering and to “appease the evil spirit.” Possibly fearing that he might otherwise be implicated in the crime supposedly committed by his slaves,11 Munyumbi gave in and selected the young enslaved boy as the “pièce de résistance”—apparently, a proper banquet would have been incomplete without human flesh. When the boy got wind of the plan, he ran away to the government post, hoping for salvation.12 Burrows arrested Munyumbi and the “fetish-doctor” who had performed the deadly poison ordeal and confronted them with the boy’s statement. “They not only admitted their guilt, but apparently failed to see anything heinous in their offence.”13

According to Leo Frobenius, a slave’s fate was sometimes preordained among the Songye people in the Kasai region. When he explored this region in a research expedition in 1904–6, he heard that it was not rare for whole villages to jointly acquire a slave (by purchase or through kidnapping) for the express purpose of exploiting first their labor and then their meat. The victims had to work under the supervision of the village chief until the time had come to slaughter them; in the last weeks before that happened, they were fed particularly well to make them fat. On a day determined suitable by an oracle, the slave was taken outside the village and there murdered and dismembered by a few strong young men. The flesh was then distributed among all the families of the village. All edible parts were consumed, except for the penises of male victims (male scrota and female genitals, on the other hand, were considered particularly tasty because of their high fat content).14

Female slaves and captives were often exploited sexually as well. This did not mean, however, that their lives were secure, as Frobenius found out during the same expedition. Three of the Songye men accompanying him as porters had started to quarrel about their wages. When he inquired what was wrong, he was told that one of them had once caught a “skinny woman” during a raid whom he had kept for “fattening up.” Later he went away to earn money, leaving the woman in the care of the two other men. They took a liking to her (who by then had become quite chubby) and impregnated her (they both considered themselves fathers of her child).15

Sometime after the birth of the child, the two “fathers” went on a journey. They took the woman with them and ate her on the way—it is not clear if they had deliberately taken her along as “provisions” or if they decided to kill and eat her after some kind of quarrel. They had left the baby with the woman’s original owner, who made up for the loss by killing and eating it—evidently feeling that the men who had consumed his slave owed him some human flesh in return. But he did not consider the baby sufficient compensation, instead complaining that the two men still owed him payment for eating his slave (who, after all, had provided much more meat). The two fathers, in turn, asked to be paid for the child they had sired and which, as they argued, had therefore been their rightful property.16 None of the men seems to have shown any particular feelings of mourning, not even the fathers who had lost their child.

Section: Gender and Age of the Victims, and the Influence of Prices on Cannibal Choices

This last case leads us to the question of how strongly and in which ways Congolese cannibalism was influenced by patriarchal patterns. The stereotypical view of a patriarchal society in which cannibalism was practiced would be that men were the primary perpetrators, while women and children were the primary victims—forced to serve and service the men, and, at the men’s whim, killed and eaten. This case fits the stereotype perfectly, but how representative was it?

There can be little doubt that many of the Congo’s societies were indeed highly patriarchal. Elizabeth Isichei remarks that throughout large parts of Africa, “women bore the heavier work load, [while] older men controlled the lion’s share of power and resources.”17 Harry Johnston adds that in the Congo basin, even free women were considered little more than “chattels,” rarely allowed to hold property of their own and passed on to other men after the death of their husbands.18 Confirming this, a young boy told the German missionary Josef Fräßle that his father’s heir had sold his mother into slavery after his father’s death, leaving the children to care for themselves.19 When a man married a free woman, he had to pay a bride price which usually went to her father or uncle; men could also buy enslaved women and keep them as wives. In both cases, marriage was a financial transaction and even free women had hardly a say in the matter.20 Girls were often married at the age of nine or ten21 or even earlier.22

Men were thus clearly dominant in at least the typical Congolese societies, but does this mean that their risk of falling victim to cannibalism was lower? Not necessarily—throughout Africa, there was usually a higher demand for female slaves than for men, “both because of their sexuality (their value in reproduction and their use as sex objects) and because their economic productivity could be utilized without entailing the degree of physical rebelliousness of male slaves,” as Patrick Manning explains.23 This higher demand meant that women and girls were often sold at higher prices, making them less attractive targets for people eaters—at least, if the latter just preferred to get their “meat” at a reasonable price. Ward, who was too Victorian to talk about sex, expresses this as follows: “a greater number of men than women fall victims to cannibalism, the reason being that women who are still young are esteemed as being of greater value by reason of their utility in growing and cooking food.”24

The same observation was made by other Europeans who visited the Congo. Camille-Aimé Coquilhat writes about the Bangala: “It is very rare that women are eaten; their commercial value is too great.”25 Weeks confirms this, noting that the price of enslaved women was usually about four times that of men, “on account of their farm work, and child-bearing capacity.”26 The Swedish explorer Theodor Westmark states that, because of their higher “intrinsic value,” enslaved women in this region usually “escape . . . the human sacrifices made solely for the purpose of obtaining human flesh to eat.”27

The situation on the upper Ubangi River seems to have been similar, according to Jean Dybowski, who writes that the “Bondjos” mostly bought male slaves from neighboring peoples willing to supply them, because “women, being apparently of superior value,” were typically sold to non-cannibal buyers ready to pay more.28 Several travelers visiting the Ruki (on the other side of the Congo River) found that the inhabitants of this area were very willing to exchange women against men—with the stated intent of eating the latter. The German officer Curt von François writes that, while traveling along this river in the early 1880s, his party was “offered women in exchange for men they intended to slaughter.”29 Especially a “fat” man, the interpreter of the group, attracted the attention of would-be buyers: “Today, a few brazen young men had pinched him again in his arm, pointing to their stomachs and voicing ‘Niama! niama!’ meaning: Meat! meat!” On the same river, George Grenfell was offered “a fine-looking woman as a wife in exchange for a plump boatman whom they wanted to eat!”30

In the latter case, the locals were apparently willing to exchange one woman against one man, indicating that in this area women were not generally more expensive than men. While François concluded from these offers that only men were slaughtered in this area, there are no strong indications that this was indeed the case. Both sources note that the people eaters did not just look for any man, but especially for those who were “fat” or “plump”—from their viewpoint, the attractive feature of such men might simply have been that they had “more meat” on their bones than a typical woman.

In other regions, it seems that the demand for women was likewise comparable to that for men. In the Kasai area, if the settler Engeringh is right, “the price of” not just “a man,” but also a woman, was “generally determined by the amount of meat on him”—and women were therefore cheaper than men.31 It is very possible that this applies only to “ordinary women,” as Ward calls them, while those who were particularly attractive still fetched higher prices, rendering them a bad deal for price-aware cannibals. Hilton-Simpson notes, as we have seen, that the prices of women sold in this area varied considerably, ranging from cheaper to considerably more expensive than the typical male slave.32

Even in regions where the general demand for enslaved women was high, premium prices were probably paid only for teenagers and young women of “prime age,” while younger and older slaves were still at risk of becoming food. Emil Torday notes this explicitly for the region around Basoko, where the Aruwimi River joins the Congo: while both male and female victims could be killed for “feasts,” the latter were “usually . . . young girls or elderly matrons who have ceased child-bearing.”33 Several sources from the Ubangi region also indicate that girl children were eaten in this area—in contrast to women of child-bearing age who apparently had a good chance of being spared.34 Among the Zande, as Georg Schweinfurth writes, captured young women “were destined for their houses”—likely to be exploited as consorts and servants, “the middle-aged” had to work in the fields, but “the eldest” went into the “caldrons.”35 Young children were also commonly eaten, as Schweinfurth and several other observers note, with no indications that those of either gender were spared.36

Rather than causing more women to be eaten than men, the patriarchal structure of Congolese societies thus seems to have had the opposite effect (at least in some regions): young and attractive women were commonly bought for sexual exploitation, and those who were healthy and not too old were bought as servants and field workers because they were supposedly easier and less risky to exploit than men. In many cases it seems that the people eaters were willing to buy those for whom such competing demand was absent or reduced: old women, young girls, and men of any age.

On the other hand, the higher prices often charged for attractive young women might have turned them into favorite targets of those for whom cannibalism was a mode of “conspicuous consumption.”37 Butchering an attractive woman for food was a sure way of wasting her beauty, but this might have driven some wealthy or powerful men to single out such victims just to show that they could afford to do so rather than having to resort to cheaper victims. James Jameson heard from a group of Bangala people that “one of their chiefs, who was very rich, is now quite poor from buying nice, fat, young women to eat.”38 In this case he could not afford it in the end, but it seems he had tried. Coquilhat’s, Weeks’s, and Westmark’s statements that women were rarely eaten among the Bangala indicate that such a behavior was by no means typical, but this does not mean that it did not occur.

Other observations, especially from the Ubangi region, also suggest that women could be preferred eating. Frobenius claims that a powerful Gbaya leader liked to keep nubile, “buxom” girls in his possession, but not, he writes with some astonishment, “to spend sultry nights with her, but to fatten her, making her plump, and then to butcher and roast her,” subsequently regaling his followers with her flesh. Grenfell adds that some of the peoples on the upper Ubangi once summarized (like the Gbaya) under the generic “Bondjo” label, “preferred the flesh of women and infants,” while on the lower Ubangi, “women are . . . valued greatly as the material of the banquet.”39 Among the Nzakara, who live around a northern tributary of this river, and in the northeastern Tshopo province, the flesh of women and children was likewise praised as tastier than that of men.40

Ward notes that, while in most regions more men were eaten than women because of the latter’s “greater value,” the proportion was “reversed” around the Aruwimi River, which flows through the Tshopo province—he does not offer an explanation for why this was so.41

Apparently, the patriarchal structures of Congolese societies could have a double effect on cannibalism: in many regions, there was a higher demand for woman who could be used as sex objects, wives, or servants, and who were considered less risky to control and exploit than adult men. This motivated people eaters to turn to other, more affordable victims—except in cases where they deliberately choose such expensive victims to make it clear that they could afford to do so. Both these reactions seem to have occurred, with the pragmatic choice more frequent than the prestige-driven one—hence the statements of various observers that more men than women were consumed.

There are two further complications: one is that women were not always higher priced than men. In the Kasai region, as we have seen, the prices of “ordinary women” (Ward) seem to have been lower than those of men, though some—possibly the most beautiful ones, or those considered most likely to bear healthy children—were more valuable. This might have been due to an oversupply of slaves that drove prices drown. In some other regions, the situation might have been similar, but since pricing information on slaves is generally sparse, it is hard to tell where and exactly why this was the case.

The other complication is that in slave raids as well as in war campaigns against enemies, men were often killed outright, either because there was a lower demand for them as slaves, or because they were considered too dangerous to keep alive, or both.42 This seems to have been the case especially in the eastern regions of the Congo basin from which slaves were commonly exported into the Arab world, since there, just as in Africa itself, there was a considerably higher demand for female than for male slaves, with purchased women and girls commonly being made into “wives, concubines, and servants.”43 In such cases, men killed or captured in raids were often eaten immediately,44 while those kept or sold as slaves were usually women, girls, and young boys.

This suggests that, if people in these regions wanted to buy a slave for a “feast,” they had to take a victim from one of these latter groups, since men were not regularly offered on the slave markets. This might explain Ward’s observation that more women than men were eaten around the Aruwimi River, and it might explain why, whenever specific details of slaves used or intended for consumption around this river and from the Maniema region (both in the east of the country) are given, the victims seem to have been women or children.45

A curious contrast is notable in reports from the Ruki and the Lulonga, two left-bank Congo tributaries whose mouths are only about sixty kilometers apart. François and Grenfell both encountered male slaves about to be slaughtered on the Ruki,46 while the flesh of enslaved women was offered to the crews of Glave’s and Casement’s steamers on the Lulonga and its headstreams, with Glave learning that six women had been consumed in the course of ten days in one village alone.47 Was this just by chance or did it reflect real differences in the preference for or treatment of victims?

Around the Ruki, as we have seen, people were quite willing to exchange enslaved women against men, as long as the latter were “fat” or “plump.” This seems to reflect a pragmatic attitude where people mostly cared for the “amount of meat” on the bones of their victims. Why then the apparent preference for women on the other river? It is conceivable that the difference was just by chance, but Glave’s account of six women (and no man) being murdered in order to sell their flesh in what seems to have been a more or less regular business operation seems too conspicuous to attribute to mere chance. Casement reports a similar case of commercial cannibalism, where the flesh of a newly killed woman was offered for sale. Maybe those who engaged in this deadly business preferred female victims because they considered them easier to subdue and less likely to make trouble? Or maybe people in this region were willing to pay a premium for women’s flesh, which was apparently regarded in several regions as better than that of men?

While this cannot be answered with certainty, it is clear that, in general, Congolese cannibalism was shaped by both patriarchal attitudes and economic considerations in complex ways. Men were, as we will see, indeed often the primary eaters of human flesh, but the eaten could be women, men, and children alike. Young enslaved children in the cannibal regions were in the unfortunate situation that they were in high demand for the table—with their flesh often regarded as better than that of adults, or at least of adult men—and in low demand for anything else.48 Young women, on the other hand, were in demand as sex objects, future mothers, and servants, and that increased their chances of surviving. But, of course, it did by no means secure it—enslaved women were eaten too, especially, it seems, when an oversupply of slaves drove prices down or when men chose to display their wealth by deliberately purchasing young women for consumption.

Captured men were likewise eaten when they were considered too dangerous to keep alive or when there was little demand for their labor power. Though the perpetrators were often men, their “male solidarity” did not extend to enemies or outsiders. Men, women, and children could all be eaten alike when they were available. But it seems that men were nowhere the food of choice—when the cannibals expressed a preference, it was usually for the flesh of women, children, or both, just as one might expect of patriarchal societies. In addition to the statements we have already heard in this regard, there is Gero’s observation that, among the cannibalistic Zande clans, women were considered “choice food, their flesh being more tender and containing more fats.” And an Amadi informant told him that children had in former times been particularly sought after because of their “very delicate meat”; members of the Adhuga clan supposedly shared this preference.49

Gero even claims that in the Apambia clan, a spinach-like plant prepared with “fat from a woman’s breast” had been considered the “national dish.” In earlier times, warfare and raids had provided victims for this dish. During colonial times, when open warfare was no longer possible, the human ingredient had to be acquired by stalking and killing women and girls from foreign clans in the forest. From his local informants, Gero heard that in the early 1930s this dish was still occasionally prepared in its original form, though not as often as it had been formerly, because this mode of securing victims was risky and most Apambia had already given up on cannibalism. When visiting a mission station in the region in 1934, Gero asked the local teacher for the “national dish.” Visibly shocked, the teacher replied: “Have we then to kill a girl?” Gero, who had assumed that by then the dish was commonly prepared with vegetal fat, hastily explained that he would be happy to go for a vegetarian variant.50

How often this dish had actually been eaten in former times is unclear—after all, the sources indicate that captive women of “prime age” were more often enslaved than eaten among the Zande, and when it came to breast fat, neither little girls nor old women will have been ideal victims. But the choice of a distinctly female body part as main ingredient of a prized dish points to a very patriarchal worldview in which women could be used by men in any way that pleased them.

Section: The Gender of the Cannibals

The Congolese people eaters were often—though by no means always—men. In this section we will explore more closely what the available sources have to say on this topic, and how it relates to patriarchal social structures in general.

When looking at the sources, it becomes quickly clear that there is some disagreement between different observers about whether or not women and children were allowed to join in the consumption of human flesh, with several sources explicitly noting that customs varied between regions. David Livingstone writes that women did not eat human flesh in the Maniema region; Johnston notes the same for the lower Ubangi region.51 Augouard confirms that some of the ethnic groups in the latter region excluded women and children from eating human flesh, but he adds that no such restriction existed among the “Bondjos,” who lived farther upriver. There women did not only join their husbands in cannibal meals, they also “display[ed] remarkable skill in disarticulating limbs or carving up a corpse.”52 Among several Zande clans, such as the Babangbing, Babukur, and Bahum, everybody, “men and women, boys and girls alike,” participated in meals of human flesh, as Gero learned from his informants.53 Among the Mangbetu, Schweinfurth saw a group of women dress a human body for consumption, but it is not clear whether they were allowed to share in the upcoming meal.54

Auguste Chevalier and John Weeks likewise note that customs varied from region to region.55 The British missionary and explorer Albert Lloyd states that among the Bangwa people on the upper Aruwimi River, women ate human flesh, but sitting “in a separate group by themselves” rather than commingling with the men.56 This, however, might well have applied for all meals rather than just cannibalistic ones. According to Johnston, there was a widespread custom of men and boys eating “by themselves. Even in the great feasts there is to a certain extent a separation of the sexes.” He explains this as “partly [due to] the tabu placed on the unfortunate women in respect of articles of food, to the advantage of the male sex.”57

Other observers reveal that, when human flesh was forbidden to women, other meats were often forbidden to them as well. Torday writes that, around the Kwilu River, “human flesh is, of course, a special delicacy, and its use is forbidden to women, though they do not disdain to indulge secretly.” They were likewise forbidden to eat the meat of goats, birds, and wild animals, with just “two exceptions—the antelope and a small rat.”58 The sole purpose of these restrictions, according to Torday, was to ensure “that there may be a larger supply for the men.”59 He investigated several cases in which a person (a slave or captive?) had been murdered and eaten, finding in all cases “that every male in the village had shared in the feast on the remains, the children being given the bones to gnaw.”60

In this region, at least, there seem to have been no special taboos that restricted the consumption of human flesh to adult men. Children (maybe just boys?) were allowed to have some of it, though only little bits remaining on the bones discarded by the men. Women did not hesitate to “indulge” if given the opportunity, but could do so only rarely and in secret, because the men preferred to keep the bulk not just of human flesh, but indeed of nearly any meat, for themselves.

Carol J. Adams notes that throughout patriarchal societies—including our own—meat eating is often predominately “a male activity associated with virility,” associated with “the assumption that men need meat, have the right to meat,” and that in cases “when the meat supply is limited, men will receive” all or most of it.61 Restrictions that forbade women to eat chicken or other (nonhuman) meat products also existed elsewhere in the Congo62 as well as in other African regions.63 It seems that the Congolese cannibals were not so different from men in other patriarchal societies in this regard: they preferred to keep the best for themselves, at least if supplies were scarce.

Though, as we have seen, there were regions where women were allowed to taste human dishes. While the evidence is inconclusive, this does not necessarily point to full gender equity between male and female people eaters in these areas. Even in male-dominated societies men will have been more inclined to share if they had plenty, and it is quite possible that the differing customs noted by observers depended more on the amount of meat available at any given time than on strict and unbending rules.

Section: Wife Eating

In and around the Congo basin, those deliberately killed for eating were usually outsiders of some kind or other—usually enemies, slaves, or kidnapped strangers. In some areas, those considered guilty of some serious act of wrongdoing could be punished by death and subsequent consumption—acts of punitive cannibalism have been documented for the Nzakara,64 the Bangala,65 the Kasai region,66 the Mangbetu,67 and the Zande.68 Criminals, however, might well have been considered some kind of outsiders too, who in consequence of their (suspected) act no longer deserved to be treated as community members.

Married women were no outsiders, but in the Congo’s patriarchal societies they did not always enjoy the full protection due to community members. Free wives usually came from other communities (marriage was exogamous) and their husbands paid a bride price (also known as bridewealth) to their families. Enslaved wives were purchased like any other slave, but, at least after they had become mothers, they were usually safe from being arbitrarily resold.69

In the modern viewpoint, people are thought to have fundamental rights—such as, most essentially, the right to life—independently of their connections. But in Central Africa, as Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Mumbanza mwa Bawele point out, a person’s rights depended on their ties to a community. If people were killed or otherwise harmed, it was up to their kin or their community to revenge them. This gave them protection as long as people who felt responsible lived nearby. Slaves were people who had no known kin and hence no protection—therefore their masters could treat them in any way they liked, including killing them for food. A free wife, on the other hand, could not be arbitrarily killed or severely hurt as long as her kin lived in a nearby community, since they would feel obliged to revenge her if necessary.70

Weeks writes that, among the Bangala, a free wife was sometimes “thrash[ed] unmercifully” if she had offended her husband—this might not have pleased her relatives, but they tolerated it as long as nothing worse happened. Slave wives, on the other hand, were occasionally killed by their husbands due to “a whim or in a fit of temper”; afterwards, the latter would “fling the corpse into the river, or invite their neighbours to feast with them on the body.”71

One Bangala chief became known among Europeans for having eaten seven of his wives. It was Mongonga, the chief who utterly failed to grasp the European aversion of his consumption of slaves.72 Coquilhat, the Belgian officer who had observed his slave-eating feast and tried in vain to convince him of the wrongness of his ways, noted in his diary: “When, two years ago, one of Mongonga’s wives gave birth to a malformed child, he decapitated and ate her.”73

Theodor Westmark describes this as a habit rather than an exception:

> A notable Bangalla called Mongonga had ten wives. The man’s passion for human flesh was so great that, in order to satisfy this filthy taste, he did not hesitate, in various circumstances, to accuse seven of these unfortunates of imaginary crimes, for which he had them killed and then he ate them. One of these unfortunates was executed on the evening of the day on which she had brought a child into the world.74

The women’s “crimes” were certainly “imaginary” according to European legal standards. But as Coquilhat notes, the unfortunate woman killed just after childbirth had produced a “malformed” baby, which in the eyes of her husband might well have indicated a failure as a mother. What (if anything) the other wives had done to provoke his wrath is not mentioned in any of the sources. However, according to William Bentley, who had also met the chief, “there had [in all cases] been some breach of morals, or in some way he had been offended; so, he had made a family feast of the delinquent, pour encourager les autres!” Though the man had “eaten at least seven of his wives,” Bentley found him “smiling, amiable, mild-looking,” rather than the monster he might have expected.75

It is unclear whether Mongonga’s eaten wives had all been slaves or whether he had dared to subject free women to this treatment. Bentley writes that “he had somewhat beggared himself in consequence” of his wife eating,76 but since a price had to be paid for free women (bride price) as well as for slaves, this does not tell us much. If some of the victims had been free, they might have lost the contact to their kin; Jewsiewicki and Mumbanza mwa Bawele note that, when that happened (usually because the relatives had moved away or died in an attack), a woman “became in effect a slave to her husband” who could now treat her as it pleased him without having to fear revenge.77 It is also conceivable that the wives’ relatives knew of his acts but did not dare to get revenge because Mongonga was too powerful.

Cases of wife eating have also been reported from other regions. When visiting the “Bondjos” in 1889, the French explorer and colonialist Maurice Musy found their women to be “very beautiful,” but he also heard that they did not live long if they used their beauty in ways that displeased their husbands: “the husbands are extremely jealous and cut off their heads and then eat them at the slightest infraction.”78 In the case of adultery, not even a woman’s relatives might have been able (or willing) to protect her from the wrath of her husband.

The tension of men’s notions of absolute power over their wives and the general obligation to protect one’s own kin is observed by Gero. He notes that among some Zande clans, such as the Babukur and Apambia, wives were occasionally killed and eaten if they “insulted their husbands, or showed laziness in work.” But if the clan of a killed woman noticed what had happened, they would try to get revenge and kill the murderous husband or some other member of his clan. The murder and consumption of free women therefore generally took place only in secret.79