CHAPTER 10 THE QUESTION OF EUROPEAN INFLUENCES AND THE OBEYESEKERE CONJECTURE

[I'm omitting much theoretical reflection in this chapter, but some factual information might be of interest.]

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Section: Early Accounts of Slave Eating in Central and Western Africa

While most of the information on Congolese slave eating comes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an earlier account indicates that slaves were eaten in this region already in the late sixteenth century. It was published in 1591 by the Italian Filippo Pigafetta (1533–1604) and is based on the memories of the Portuguese trader and explorer Duarte Lopez (1550–?), who had just spent five years in the coastal Kingdom of Kongo. Pigafetta mentions a people he calls Anzichi (or Anziques) who lived “on both sides” of the Congo River, farther upriver than the coastal kingdoms.20 About them he writes:

> They have shambles for human flesh as we have of animals, even eating the enemies they have killed in battle, and selling their slaves if they can get a good price for them; if not, they give them to the butcher, who cuts them in pieces, and then sells them to be roasted or boiled. It is a remarkable fact in the history of this people, that any who are tired of life, or wish to prove themselves brave and courageous, esteem it great honor to expose themselves to death by an act which shall show their contempt for life. Thus they offer themselves for slaughter, and as the faithful vassals of princes, wishing to do them service, not only give themselves to be eaten, but their slaves also, when fattened, are killed and eaten.21

According to Lopez, adds Pigafetta, “in consequence of this people being so cruel, they were not traded with, excepting in so far as they came to Congo”—that is, the Kingdom of Kongo. Apparently though there was by no means a trade boycott. Traders might have feared to visit the country of the Anzichi, but when they came, they were welcome. They sold, he adds, slaves from their own as well as neighboring peoples and also ivory and cloths; as payment they accepted salt, shell money, and “goods brought from Portugal, including silk, linen cloths, glass, and suchlike.”22

Despite their cannibal customs, Lopez had a high opinion of the Anzichi, calling them “faithful, truthful, loyal, and simple” and believing that they might become good Christians if missionaries were sent to them.23 It is not clear if he had any actual contact with them or if the information relayed by Pigafetta is mere hearsay. Some of it is certainly doubtful—the notion that people voluntarily gave their own lives to provide an ample meal for their “princes” is not confirmed by later sources and it is hard to believe that such acts, if they occurred at all, were more than rare exceptions. On the other hand, that enemies and slaves were killed and eaten and that slaves were sometimes deliberately fattened for this purpose is in agreement with many later sources reporting from the Congo basin. This makes it plausible that these practices did really exist already at that time among the Anzichi, whoever exactly they were—it seems unlikely that hearsay accounts would have falsely claimed something that later actually became true….

Emil Torday and T. A. Joyce mention that Frobenius identifies the Anzichi with the Teke people who live around Stanley Pool (Pool Malebo), on the shores of which the capitals of the two Congo states, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, are situated today. They merely call this assessment “interesting” which seems to express some reservations.24 From later times, there are (to my knowledge) no hints attributing slave eating to the inhabitants of this region and very few mentions of cannibalism in general. In the late nineteenth century, the area from which slave eating was reported started about five hundred kilometers upriver (northeast) around the confluence of the Ubangi into the Congo. Pigafetta leaves no doubt that the Anzichi lived around the Congo River but does not indicate from how far away they came. If they came from the regions for which slave eating has been documented in later times, they might conceivably have belonged to some of the ethnic groups which later became known as Bangala. In later times, the Bangala were known as diligent merchants who not rarely covered long distances while conducting their business, which fits quite well with the description given by Pigafetta.25

Pigafetta’s account seems to be the first description of slave eating attributed to inhabitants of the Congo basin. Just like later sources, he does not describe the custom as something that was new—thus it seems quite possible that similar acts had already occurred in earlier centuries, but since the basin itself was not visited by people who wrote about it until the second half of the nineteenth century, we cannot be sure one way or the other. But the same custom has also been documented for Nigeria and some other West African regions26—and in this region, early accounts indicating that slaves were considered “good to eat” were written down by Arab historians and travelers centuries before Pigafetta’s work.

Shihab al-Umari (1300–1349), a historian from Damascus, records what a friend of one of his informants told about his visit to an unidentified West African town. When the visitor “presented to the king of this place . . . a quantity of salt,” he was given “two most comely slave girls” in return. A few days later he talked with the king who was surprised and maybe a bit offended when he heard (or saw) that the girls were still alive. “I sent those girls to you,” he told his visitor, “so slaughter and eat them! Their flesh is the best thing we have to eat. For what reason have you not slaughtered them?” When the visitor replied, “This is not lawful for us,” the king inquired which foods were allowed to him, and subsequently sent him cattle and sheep for consumption. The enslaved girls are not mentioned again.27

Considering that this is a third-hand account, it might be seriously distorted, but the anecdote is close enough to later accounts to assume that there may be some truth in it. This would make it is one of the earliest accounts of the slaughter of slaves for food. It also indicates that the practice might have been considered so self-evident that the king was surprised to hear that his visitor was not allowed to eat human flesh. And it reflects an attitude also recorded, in much later times, both in the Congo and in West Africa—that human flesh is “the best thing we have to eat.”28

Another early account of cannibalistic hospitality comes from the Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/1369). In this case, the situation was reversed: the donor of the human gift was not a cannibal, but the recipients were. In 1352, during the last of his extensive journeys, Ibn Battuta visited the Mali Empire, one of the largest African empires of its time. While its inhabitants were Muslims like Ibn Battuta, some of their customs were deeply foreign to him. He was shocked to note that there were friendships between married women and men who were not their husbands, and that husbands did not mind if their wives spent time with other men. Equally displeasing to him was that all unmarried girls and women, even the sultan’s daughters, as well as enslaved women of all ages, went around fully naked.29 (Comments on the partial or total nudity of the inhabitants of tropical regions are also a recurrent feature of the later European travel literature.)

During his stay in the capital, a group of warriors “who eat human kind” came to visit the sultan, Suleyman.30 Eager to please his visitors,

> The sultan did them honour and gave them a slave girl as part of his reception-gift. . . . They slaughtered her and ate her and smeared their faces and hands with her blood and came in gratitude to the sultan. I was informed that their custom whenever they come in deputation to him is to do that, and I was told . . . that they say that the tastiest part of women’s flesh is the palms and the breast.31

Though Ibn Battuta had earlier complained that the sultan was “a miserly king from whom no great donation is to be expected,”32 he was apparently “generous” enough to donate a slave to his cannibal visitors every time they came to his court.

These fourteenth-century Arab sources indicate that cannibalism and the eating of slaves were apparently practiced in certain West African regions long before the first Europeans arrived in these regions. Both sources mention the practice in the context of gift giving: living slaves were donated by kings and sultans to guests who then ate them, or who were supposed to do so. Just as we have observed of later times from the Congo,33 it seems that this kind of flesh was considered appropriate for special festive occasions and was certainly not a daily fare. Ibn Battuta’s account also indicates that there was no absolute dividing line between those who practiced cannibalism and those who condemned the practice: Suleyman was a Muslim, and we may safely presume that he did not eat any human flesh himself—yet he apparently had no qualms about donating enslaved girls to visitors who would treat them as a source of food.

All in all, it seems pretty clear that the strong version of the Obeyesekere conjecture overestimates the influence of European contacts on other cultures. Such contacts did not have the astonishing effect of turning non-cannibals into cannibals or turning cannibalism from a rare sacred ritual into a “conspicuous” and relatively profane practice. Practices such as war cannibalism likely reach back into times long preceding the first European contact. This also seems to be true of slave eating, at least in regard to West Africa. When it comes to the Congo basin, the verdict is not so clear, due to a lack of sources. There can be no doubt that the consumption of slaves and persons captured and killed in slave raids intensified as a result of the international slave trade. The trade in other export goods—ivory, in particular—further helped to enable such practices, in stark contrast to the contemporary European view of such trade as “legitimate” and harmless.

But, as Jewsiewicki and Mumbanza mwa Bawele observe, the sale of persons seems to have been associated with their subsequent consumption already at times and in places where the international slave trade had not yet left any notable effects. Cannibalism and slave eating were not independent of international trading networks and European influences, but neither were they simply their result and offspring.

Section: The Slow Disappearance of Congolese Cannibalism

Considering that the international slave trade was clearly related to the more localized consumption of slaves, we might well ask about the effects of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and of slavery itself on Congolese customs. This is a sensitive issue since effects in the long term might have been quite different from those in the short term. In the long term, the logical consequence is clear: if there are no slaves, nobody can buy them for food. In the short term, however, very different effects may have resulted because a decreased demand for slaves exported into the Americas did not immediately lead to an equal reduction of slavery and slave raiding in the Congo or other regions which had become “supply areas” for this trade.

The transatlantic slave trade flourished until the middle of the nineteenth century, when abolitionist attempts to stop it finally started to pay off—although a certain amount of illegal smuggling of slaves from the Congo basin and other areas into, in particular, Cuba and Brazil, continued until the end of the century. Demand nevertheless dropped sharply, but the supply of newly captured slaves did not immediately shrink, because the “mechanisms for procuring slaves endured when the external demand ended,” as Elizabeth Isichei notes.34 As a result, the prices of slaves fell considerably, but the collapse of demand did not lead to an immediate collapse of supply.

Patrick Manning observes that “the economics of slave capture . . . are the economics of theft”: the complete cost of “producing” and raising a person is borne by their family and finally the person themself, not by the raiders who take them captive. For raiders and warriors used to the capture and sale of slaves, it therefore made sense to continue this “business” even as the price of their “goods” fell, because their own “cost of production” was nearly zero. In other cases, previous war campaigns or slave raids had left a desire for revenge which in turn produced more captives, regardless of whether or not the latter still fetched a good price.35

Slaves were therefore still captured in wars and raids, but their prices were lower than before, and many slaves who would otherwise have been exported were now purchased by African buyers—often as laborers and servants, but also for more sinister purposes.36 Isichei observes that the number of human sacrifices increased in parts of West Africa, because the fallen prices made the practice more affordable.37 In the West African regions where cannibalism was unknown, there were sometimes “mass executions of male captives [since] even at very low prices, no buyers were to be found.”38 The local purchase of slaves also increased in the Ubangi area—where they were apparently not infrequently bought for food—according to the historian Robert W. Harms.39 Edward Glave notes that, when he visited the area around the mouth of the Ubangi in 1890, the number of slaves sacrificed and often eaten was higher “than when Stanley first saw these people in 1877; the reason being . . . that contact with white men has made them richer, and has enabled them to obtain more slaves.”40

There are thus two ways in which interactions with the West and changes in the Western mode of living and production might have led to a temporary increase in Central African cannibalism, in general agreement with Obeyesekere’s thesis. On the one hand, slaves became cheaper and thus more affordable for purposes such as sacrifice and consumption. On the other hand, as highlighted by Glave, an increasing trade with Europeans brought more wealth into the area, which could, among other things, be spent on purchasing slaves. The well-documented direct exchange of ivory against “edible” slaves has been covered in earlier chapters, but even in cases where the connection between trade and subsequent cannibalism was less obvious, trade generated an income that could be used for arbitrary purchases.

While in the short run the abolition of slavery and the increasing contacts with Western traders might thus have led to an increase in cannibalism, the long-term effect was clearly very different. Today cannibalism has all but disappeared from the Congo basin, except possibly during times of violent conflicts. Various reports indicate that cannibal acts still took place during the Second Congo War that ravaged the country around the turn of the millennium (1998–2003),41 and there are also reports of such acts committed during a later conflict in 2016/17.42 But, while cannibalism might not yet be wholly a thing of the past, the practices covered in this book—slave eating, foreigner poaching, and commercial cannibalism—disappeared during the course of the twentieth century.

European observers in the early years of that century already noted that attitudes and behaviors had started to change. Weeks writes about the Bangala: “In the early nineties there was no shame in admitting that they had eaten human flesh, but after a few years of teaching they were ashamed to confess to such a custom. Men whom I had seen eating human flesh later on denied ever having tasted it.”43

Remembering how the flesh of slaughtered slaves had formerly been openly offered for sale, Roger Casement states that “sights of this description are to-day [1904] impossible in any part of the country,” thanks to the efforts of the colonial government (which he otherwise severely criticizes for its exploitative treatment of the population). But he also notes that cannibalism was still practiced in some parts of the county—in particular around Lake Tumba, near the mouth of the Ubangi River—though “repressed and not so openly indulged in as formerly.”44

Weeks explains the change as due to the missionaries’ “teaching,” while Casement explains it as due to the fear of the colonial government, which could and sometimes did prosecute those involved in murders and other acts that had become illegal under colonial law. Another factor that certainly contributed to the disappearance of slave eating was the suppression of slavery itself. Here too the Congo Free State, though officially outlawing slavery, was slow to take action. In 1902, slaves were still “almost daily . . . exposed for sale” in Luebo45 (where Sheppard and Lapsley had been employed more than a decade earlier)—but in subsequent years, the trade in slaves had at least to move underground, if it did not disappear altogether.

In the Ubangi region—shared between the French Congo (which controlled the right riverbank) and the Congo Free State (which controlled the left), the open trade in captives or slaves purchased for consumption seems to have come to a stop in the 1890s or early 1900s. After visiting the French Congo in 1902–4, Auguste Chevalier calls the “Bondjos” still openly and “passionately cannibalistic,” but adds that meals of human flesh had become less frequent than in the past, because raids on other villages had largely ceased “thanks to the surveillance of our administration.”46

Here it seems that, at least on the French side, the state fairly effectively suppressed warfare and slave raids—and without such activities, no victims could be acquired for consumption. In the inner parts of the Free State, where state control was often weak or where the state had other priorities, the disappearance of cannibal customs seems to have been slower. Torday, who from 1900 to 1907 lived mostly in the Kasai region,47 comments upon his time there:

> For a European who has neither the right nor the power to intervene, it is a most uncomfortable position to be obliged to witness, or at any rate know of the perpetration of acts of cannibalism in his immediate neighbourhood. But I hear that the Government is now proposing to establish several small posts with the express intention of putting down the practice.48

It is not quite clear to which year the “now” in this quote refers, as Torday had started to write the book immediately after his return, but only published it six years later.49 In 1908, after the complaints about the abuses of Leopold’s ultra-exploitative regime had become too large to ignore, the Belgian government annexed the country and turned it from the king’s private dominion into a regular colony. But while this might have stopped Leopold’s attempts of enriching himself at the cost of the Congolese, the new government does not seem to have taken its role as law enforcer very seriously, at least not everywhere.

After vising the Belgian Congo (as the country was now called) around 1920, the British traveler Frederick Migeod (1872–1952) wrote: “It seems that cannibalism is rank all up the Kasai and Sankuru rivers, and the State largely leaves it alone.” He excused this, somewhat weakly, as possibly caused by the “difficulty . . . of obtaining evidence for a judicial trial, for in the absence of the body it is difficult to have proof of the murder.”50

From a Portuguese trading agent working in the Ubangi area, he heard that the M’Baka people—formerly known under the generic “Bondjo” label—still loved to consume human flesh, killing slaves for this purpose whenever they could afford to do so. While adults were “dispatched with a lance,” purchased children were supposedly disposed of more cruelly by submerging “the child’s head . . . in a pot of boiling water until it is dead”—possibly a modification of the earlier practice of soaking intended victims in the river overnight. Afterwards “the body is cut up and cooked as ordinary meat.” While the agent admitted that he had not seen this, he assured that “it was everywhere accepted as a fact.”51

While the agent’s account may be unreliable, it is remarkable that the Europeans in this area were apparently widely convinced not only that slaves were still commonly bought and sold but also that they could be murdered without the state taking a serious interest in the matter. It is a much more pessimistic judgment than Chevalier’s assessment given nearly twenty years earlier, according to which the “Bondjo” were still “passionately cannibalistic” in theory and inclination, but mostly lacked suitable opportunities in practice. It is possible that the difference is due to the sides of the river they had visited—Migeod reporting from the side belonging to the Belgian Congo, whose government seems to have largely neglected to enforce its laws at least where native victims were concerned, while the French colonial government might well have taken its duties more seriously.

It even seems that the greater mobility of people that became possible, and sometimes necessary, under the colonial regimes, allowed cannibal customs to occasionally spread into regions where they had formerly been unknown. Migeod, who wrote shortly after World War I, opined that “during the War non-cannibal soldiers and carriers became associated with others who enjoyed human meat, and many are bound to have tried it from curiosity.” He heard that “quite recently some human meat was bought and sold openly in the Kinshasa market, right in the middle of European life.”52 Kinshasa, which a few years later would become the capital of the Belgian Congo, is outside the regions from which cannibalism had been reported in earlier times.

Prosper Augouard heard of a similar incident that happened in 1917 near Brazzaville, then the capital of French Equatorial Africa and situated opposite Kinshasa on the other site of the Congo River. Two “Bondjos” had moved there in search of work—a remarkable feat, considering they came from the area around Bangui, situated a thousand kilometers northeast of Brazzaville. While fishing in the river, they saw

> Two harmless Batekes (people from this region) repair[ing] their nets on an island. In front of such defenseless victims, their instinct reappears. The Bondjos approach them amicably and suddenly strike them down unexpectedly, killing them, cutting them up and smoking them, then carrying them off to the village. They even have the audacity of selling pieces in the open market!53

According to Augouard, the incident was only discovered because of a quarrel between one of the men and his wife. He beat her when she asked for money to buy clothes. “Furiously, the woman stealthily took a smoked arm out of the hut, the fingers still attached, and took this piece of evidence to the police commissioner. The two murderers were arrested.”54

Such acts of kidnapping and killing unrelated others in order to eat them (or sell their flesh) fall under the general category I propose to call “foreigner poaching”—though in this case the attackers rather than the attacked were of a more or less foreign status, having only recently moved into the area. Reports of foreigner poaching from earlier times will be covered later,55 but in the context of discussing the disappearance of cannibal customs it is noteworthy that such acts seem to have persisted at least as long, if not longer, than the consumption of slaves.

When the American traveler Hermann Norden visited the Kasai region in 1923, a menagère (black concubine of a white man) told him she was afraid to visit the next village, fearing she might be caught and eaten on the way. Such fears were apparently not groundless—a few months before his arrival, a “menagère had been eaten by the Badinga, a tribe notoriously cannibalistic.” And while he stayed in the village, “another woman fell exhausted on the station verandah. Her chest had been pierced with an arrow, and she told us of an attack as she came through the forest. The man who walked with her had been killed and would be eaten.”56

Norden talked with the son of a local chief who explained that “human meat tasted better than any other.” Turning to an old Belgian who had translated Norden’s question, the young man added: “Why do you ask me these things? You know that the flesh of a man tastes better than the flesh of a goat.” The Belgian admitted that it was quite likely he had occasionally been served human flesh without knowing what he was eating.57

While traveling in the company of a Norwegian trader, Norden met a village chief whose people had once eaten one of the “soldiers” employed by the trader. But these old things were forgotten, the Norwegian explained, and now they were on very friendly terms.58 While in the modern world, meeting one’s end in order to serve as food for others might seem the ultimate horror, Norden found a quite different attitude in this area, where such occurrences were still sufficiently frequent to get used to: “I was to become accustomed to this casual mention of cannibalism. . . . No stress was put upon it, nor horror shown. This person had died of fever; that one had been eaten. It was all a matter of the way one’s luck held.”59

Lonely travelers were also still occasionally kidnapped and eaten in the 1920s by members of the Abarambu-Adhuga, one of the Zande clans in the northeast, according to Filiberto Gero’s local informants. But by then, they added, such acts happened only in secrecy and were disapproved of by most.60

After the 1920s, there are no more reports that clearly refer to slave eating or foreigner poaching. It seems that these practices disappeared for good at about this time; or if they were still practiced, it was so rarely and so discreetly that they do not show up in the historical record. But acts of commercial cannibalism—the sale of human flesh—still took place several decades later. “In 1961 in Uganda,” reports the anthropologist Robert Edgerton, “a man offered to sell me human fingers that had been smoked. When I declined in horror, he offered to return with a smoked slab of a young woman’s buttocks, a truly ‘choice cut,’ as he put it.”61 Who the unfortunate young woman was and how her body ended up for sale is unclear.

Around the same time, human flesh might also have been available for purchase in war-torn parts of today’s Congo-Kinshasa, which finally gained its independence from Belgium in 1960. Immediately after independence, two southern provinces—Katanga and South Kasai—declared their secession from the new state, encouraged by the Belgian government which thus hoped to regain effective control over at least part of its lost colony. The American journalist D’Lynn Waldron, who visited the country at the beginning of the five years of conflict and warfare that would follow, claims that unscrupulous “entrepreneurs” quickly discovered that the flesh of war victims could be sold with a profit. Supposedly the government reacted by passing “a law that no meat could be sold without some of the hide attached” in order to prove that it had come from an animal.62 In this case it seems that the human flesh had not been openly sold as such, but presented as if it were of animal origin—a practice also reported from China during times of famine.63

Again, it it interesting that the geographical spread of reports of cannibalism from this time is wider than in earlier times. While Kinshasa and Brazzaville are to the west of the areas of the Congo basin from which cannibalism had once been commonly reported, Uganda is to the east. It seems that the movement of people had indeed caused cannibal practices to occasionally spread into areas where they had been unheard of before.

Another remarkable detail of Edgerton’s account is that the seller apparently considered the demand for human flesh sufficiently large that he found it reasonable to approach random people on the street in the hope of making a sale (similar to what illegal drug dealers might do in certain areas). While Edgerton was horrified, it does not seem that such an attitude was already so widespread as to make that business model impossible or inadvisable. But this may have changed quickly in subsequent years, as there are no later reports of even a secret trade in human flesh.

Section: How and Why Did Cannibalism End?

… I am not aware of clear statements indicating that cannibalism in the Congo was abolished out of a fear of legal prosecution, but such statements were recorded in other parts of the world.

Traveling through Liberia in the 1920s, the British writer Lady Dorothy Mills (1889–1959) met men who told her that they had eaten the flesh of enemies and poached foreigners until a few years prior, when the state had started to seriously prosecute such acts. She notes that they “spoke of the present prohibition with regret and utterly without shame or real consciousness of wrongdoing, as one speaks of the ‘drink’ prohibition of the United States.”64 In New Britain, as already quoted, the missionary Matthäus Rascher heard from people that they had had to abandon cannibalism, to their regret, because of “the fear of the [colonial] judge and the difficulty of getting human flesh without attracting attention.”65 Similar declarations have been made elsewhere.

There can be little doubt that law enforcement, if it effectively prosecuted either the consumption of human flesh itself or acts that usually preceded it—such as murders, kidnappings, and the slave trade—was a deterrent that contributed to the disappearance of cannibalism. This also means that it is pretty clear that the neglectful attitude of the Congo Free State—and to a certain degree apparently also of its successor, the Belgian Congo—to effectively prosecute crimes against native victims allowed cannibalism to flourish longer and take more victims than it would have if these colonial regimes had taken their role as law enforcers more seriously….

Analyzing the situation in one of the Solomon Islands, Martin Zelenietz concludes that there the practice of headhunting and the cannibal feasts accompanying it disappeared not so much out of legal repression—though that played a role as well—but because of changes in customs which meant that they ceased to fulfill their earlier functions. Headhunting raids had helped to build alliances and to “maintain and increase political prestige and power.” When the situation changed and access to European trade goods became an important indicator of power and success, raids became a hindrance, because the fear of counter raids and the general high degree of violence made such access more difficult. Consequently, they were abandoned.67

Something similar might have happened in the Congo. Slave eating in particular and cannibalism in general had been highly social affairs. Leaders and wealthy men regaled their followers with human flesh to show their power, wealth, and generosity; whole villages as well as members of neighboring communities joined in cannibal feasts to celebrate important occasions. People eating had served to increase prestige and social cohesion. But once the newly powerful and influential—colonial rulers, missionaries, foreign traders—made it clear that they considered cannibalism an abominable crime, it could no longer effectively do so. People might have continued their human-flesh feasts for a while in secret, but a feast that must remain hidden for fear of prosecution is hardly an impressive sign of power and status, and secret events could hardly involve whole communities and neighbors, like earlier feasts had.

Moreover, it seems quite likely that the younger generation, raised in missionary schools or otherwise under the influence of Western values, started to regard the customs of their elders as gross and unacceptable, just like Disasi Makulo did. And ways of signaling status and power likely changed as well under the influence of capitalism, with cars or other expensive import goods replacing earlier markers of prestige such as regaling one’s followers. Ultimately, cheap and easy access to a variety of animal meats and other new foodstuffs might have made human flesh lose much of its appeal as a rare delicacy.

Though revenge- and hate-driven war cannibalism might still occasionally be practiced, peacetime cannibalism in the Congo disappeared over the course of just one or two generations and with very little protest and resistance. While further research is needed to understand this process in detail, it seems plausible that cannibalism ended not just because of legal repression, but because it went out of fashion.