CHAPTER 12, FOREIGNER POACHING IN FIJI AND CENTRAL AFRICA

Section: Fiji: Cannibalistic Feasting and Christian Abolitionism

Like the Bismarck Archipelago, Fiji is an archipelago of numerous islands situated in Melanesia. In certain parts of this archipelago, cannibalism was widespread not only in warfare1 but also, among those who could afford it, in times of peace, with kidnapped foreigners frequently mentioned as victims. It would be wrong, however, to consider the cannibal customs of both these regions as largely identical. In New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the capture and consumption of foreigners seems to have been motivated largely by convenience and a desire to get rid of potential enemies—in Fiji, on the other hand, prestige might have been the most important factor.

John Elphinstone Erskine (1806–1887), a British admiral who in 1849 visited the region on a private trip, tells that a few weeks before his visit, “400 men, women, and children [known] as the Butoni, had arrived” in Bau Island from neighboring Viti Levu, the largest island in the archipelago. They brought a large amount of tribute with them—at that time, Bau, though a small island, was the main power in the region and able to extract tribute from most of the inhabitants of Viti Levu and other nearby islands.2 To furnish “the best” for the “first breakfast” of the visitors, “a tributary town on Viti Levu” was obliged “to provide one or two human bodies.” Accordingly, “two poor wretches were entrapped on a small island” and delivered to Bau, “where they were slaughtered and eaten.”3

But this was not enough—while the visitors stayed, they had to be regaled. For another “breakfast” (Erskine does not say whether it was held the next day or later) the chiefs of a recently subjugated city in Rewa (a region in the southeast of Viti Levu) were therefore asked to supply human bodies. After they failed expectations by delivering “one man only,” one of the chiefs of Bau—“Navindi, the . . . chief of the fishermen, whose duty it is more particularly to procure human flesh”—decided to take over. But his first attempt at ambushing a few people in Viti Levu failed, and the Bauans started to fear that they might be forced to “have recourse to their own resources; that is, to slaughter some of their own slaves to furnish the Butoni banquet, a sacrifice of course to be avoided if possible.”4

But this fear was groundless, since a second ambush, laid in the mangroves near a village on the main island, where “the women are accustomed to come to the coast to pick shell-fish for food,” turned out a full success. Navindi’s men captured fourteen women, while one or two others were “clubbed to death” trying to escape. “One man, attempting to save either his wife or daughter,” was captured as well. Soon after, a chief who had converted to Christianity informed the mission station on neighboring Viwa (another small island north of Bau) of what had happened. The missionaries were on a trip to another island, but their wives, “Mrs. Lyth and Mrs. Calvert,” decided to try and save the lives of the captives. Together with the Christian chief, they went by canoe to Bau. Upon their arrival, they heard “the shrieks of two women then being slaughtered for the day’s entertainment”—a remark that suggests that about two of the captives might have been killed every day (or every few days) to provide meat for the visitors.5

Undeterred, the three hurried to “the house of old Tanoa,” the principal chief. The Christian chief appealed to Tanoa after gifting the latter two whale’s teeth—“a necessary offering on preferring a petition to a chief.” After consulting with Navindi, Tanoa decided: “Those who are dead, are dead; those who are alive shall live.” But the majority of the captives was dead. Of the fifteen ambushed (one of them a man), “ten had been killed and eaten, one had died of her wounds,” and one girl had been claimed as a slave by the principal wife of Tanoa’s son Thakombau. Three others remained, who were handed over to the petitioners and taken to the mission station.6

Erskine, who heard of these events from the missionaries, adds that their account was “corroborated by the testimony of many of the white residents here.”7 James Calvert (1813–1892), the husband of one of the heroines, left a shorter account of the incident. His version is written in a more dramatic language, and he claims that one additional captive was saved; otherwise, both accounts are quite similar.8 Calvert also reports a similar, smaller case that took place in Rewa: “A party who went in search of a victim to feast the people employed in building the King’s house, killed a Christian woman while out fishing.” Hearing what had happened, the local missionary hurried to the landing place where the canoe of the killers had just arrived and “pushing his way through the crowd who exulted at the prize, found the body lying naked in the bottom of the canoe.” With the king’s permission, the missionary claimed the body and took it to the mission station for a Christian burial.9

Calvert’s colleague and coauthor Thomas Williams (1815–1891) adds that cases of persons being kidnapped “on purpose to be eaten” were not rare, which he saw as proof that “this flesh is in high repute.” He writes that “one of the last bodies which I saw offered to a Chief was thus obtained [through kidnapping] for the special entertainment of the distinguished visitor,” and that, in cases which had a happier end, he had “conversed with those who had escaped, severely wounded, from an attempt to steal them, as a supply for a forthcoming feast.”10

David Cargill (1809–1843), another Wesleyan missionary who arrived in Fiji in the 1830s, also observed that victims for cannibal feasts were frequently kidnapped. “The natives . . . kidnap men, women and children to glut their appetite for human flesh,” he wrote in his diary.11

The reports of kings and chiefs (terms often used interchangeably in the sources) in which they agree, under pressure from Christian missionaries, to free prisoners or at least give up dead bodies for burial indicate a society torn between different value systems. In the Christian understanding, cannibalism was wrong and evil, but traditionally, serving human flesh to one’s guests and helpers (such as the builders working for the king) had been a matter of prestige for those powerful enough to do so.

In Bau and a few other regions, cannibal meals were apparently held fairly frequently before the missionaries managed to discourage the practice. Mary Davis Wallis, the wife of an American captain who accompanied her husband on his extensive journeys during the 1840s,12 heard from a man who had spent two years on the island “that dead bodies were brought to Bau as often as twice, and sometimes three times in a week”; once divided and cooked, they were distributed for consumption. “If they had more than could be devoured in Bau, portions were sent to other towns.”13

Cannibal practices were so common that even the missionaries, though trying to abolish them, could not help getting used to them: “Cannibalism soon lost its dreadful novelty, and began to be regarded as a matter of course,” Calvert remembers.14 Even missionaries and other travelers who visited Bau for just a short time saw how cooked human bodies were taken out of earth ovens or how human body parts were prepared for consumption: “Two human bodies were in the ovens” when Mr. Cross, another Wesleyan missionary, arrived in Bau in 1838.15 Three years later, his colleague Thomas J. Jaggar noted briefly in his diary: “Visited Bau—whilst there a man been roasted.”16 And a man who made just a few short visits to the island wrote that on his “first visit, I saw them opening an oven, and taking a cooked human body out of it; second visit, limbs of a body preparing for being baked.”17

In Rewa, such sights were common as well. Calvert claims that “bodies were frequently brought to Rewa for cannibal purposes, where, just opposite the Mission premises, they were dragged, washed, and abused with every obscene indignity, and then cut up or torn to pieces and cooked.”18 As Wallis had noted as well, bodies were exchanged as gifts between the principal islands and regions. In May 1841, “there arrived [in Rewa] the bodies of twenty persons who had been entrapped and killed by the young Chief of Viwa, and by Thakombau,” the son of Bau’s paramount chief.19 Jaggar notes as well that people were kidnapped and killed for this purpose.20

Section: Prestige and Human Tributes in Fiji

While there can be little doubt that cannibal meals were quite common in Bau and Rewa, it would be wrong to consider these two places as typical for Fiji as a whole. Bau was the dominant power in the archipelago, and the paramount chief of Rewa was the leader of the Burebasaga Confederacy, the largest alliance of Fijian rulers.21 The leading chiefs of these regions were the most powerful men in the whole archipelago—and the regular feasts and gifts of human flesh were an expression of that power. They could order people in other regions to be kidnapped with impunity and they could request the chiefs of lesser regions to provide some people for consumption. In other regions, human flesh was eaten as well, at least during wartime—but a more or less regular access to human flesh even outside of warfare was likely the privilege of the most powerful few, as well as of allies, subordinates, and friends with whom they decided to share it.

Those unable to capture outsiders from neighboring communities might have been forced to give up some of their own community members if human tributes were expected. “More than one white man has seen the canoe of Tanoa, after a condescending visit to Ovolau, returning to Bau, with the bodies of infants, offerings from the people of Levuka, ostentatiously hanging at the yard-arms,” writes Erskine.22 Ovalau is another island near the east coast of Viti Levu (and Levuka its largest settlement)—much larger than Bau, but its inhabitants apparently considered it wise (or necessary) to contribute human “offerings” for the ovens of the more powerful neighbor.

To understand the “yard-arms” one must know that Fijian canoes—also known as drua—were much larger than the vessels typically called canoes today. They could be more than thirty meters long and they often had two parallel hulls (like a catamaran), a mast, and a large triangular sail.23 That children were hung from the mastheads or other exposed parts of the rigging has also been reported for canoes returning from successful war campaigns—in such cases (maybe not in the case of offerings) it seems that the victims were usually still alive at the start of the trip. In November 1839, Cargill saw a large number of ships delivering war captives to Rewa: “About 30 living children were hoisted up to the mastheads as flags of triumph. The motion of the canoes while sailing soon killed the helpless creatures and silenced their piercing cries.” Their bodies, as well as those of supposedly more than two hundred other captives, were subsequently “roasted and eaten.”24

Thomas Williams likewise notes that “children have been hung by their feet from the mast-head of a canoe, to be dashed to death, as the rollings of the vessel swung them heavily against the mast.”25 Thomas Jaggar describes the same cruel custom.26 According to the English-Australian missionary and ethnologist Lorimer Fison (1832–1907), the children exposed and killed in this manner were mocked as “birds of the sail.”27

Erskine notes that the “ostentatious” shipment of human offerings from Ovolau to Bau was just one instance of a tradition in which “children [were] offered by the people of their own tribe to propitiate a powerful chief,” who used them to furnish a “banquet.” Since no one who had any choice in the matter would have given up their own children, it is certainly no accident that he writes “tribe” rather than “their own family”—orphans and young members of poor or unpopular families likely stood the highest risk of losing their lives at such occasions.28

In other cases, those who were given away for consumption had reached adulthood or at least adolescence. Williams writes that “young women have been placed alive beside a pile of wood given by the Kandavuans to the Chiefs of Rewa. I knew also of a man being taken alive to a Chief on Vanua Levu, and given him to eat.”29 (Vanua Levu is the second largest island of the archipelago, while Kadavu—sometimes spelled Kandavu—is the fourth largest one.) John Jackson, an Englishman who spent several years in Fiji and was later hired by Erskine as an interpreter,30 once secured himself a “wife” by liberating a young woman who would otherwise have been given away together with a heap of provisions—of which, he suspected, she was meant to be a part:

>> We all went out to look at the provisions collected in a heap, which were raw, and to my surprise I saw a young virgin sitting on the top of the yams, oiled all over, her skin decorated . . . with leaves. . . . It struck me instantly what she was intended for, because I had been told that when they give the provisions away raw to any great personage the animals are always given away alive to correspond; and having already had proofs of their notorious cannibalism, I was quite certain she was to be cooked with the yams. . . . I began therefore to upbraid them in a very abusive manner . . . and swore the first that offered to butcher the woman I would shoot.31

He then turned to Bonavidongo, the chief with whom he was traveling, and complained “that I had been so long with him, and had not been offered a wife, and that it was more than I could stand to see him eating nice young women who were so desirable in my eyes alive, and if he did not save the girl’s life I would leave him altogether.” When the locals merely laughed at him, he became so “exasperated” that he “rushed up the yam heap and laid hold of the girl by the hand and hauled her down, and then led her up to a tree, sticking my back against it, and cocked my musket . . . , swearing I would shoot the first one that came towards me.” Still laughing, they said “they were sorry to see me put myself in such a rage, adding, ‘Watima, watima’ (she is your wife, she is your wife).”32

This happened in Natewa Bay, a large bay on Vanua Levu. Whether or not the “virgin” would really have been eaten (considering the accounts by Williams and others, it does not seem implausible), she knew what was expected of her in her new role: “She remained with me all the time I stayed in Nateva, and proved very faithful and grateful for my saving her life.”33 Once Jackson left Natewa Bay, it seems he left her behind.

In this case and in the cases mentioned by Williams it is unclear whether the victims were kidnapped foreigners, captured enemies, or community members of those who handed them over—but, in any case they were human tributes or gifts (the distinction might have been rather subtle) given to the powerful.

But why did the powerful like to regale their followers and guests with human flesh? Two reasons are mentioned in the sources: on the one hand, meat in general was a rare luxury—and human flesh was considered even tastier than other kinds of meat; on the other hand, being eaten was seen as deeply humiliating—a sign of inferiority. Being able to eat others, or having human bodies at one’s disposal, might in turn have been a sign of superiority and power.

The first motive came up when Erskine invited Thakombau (the chief’s son and later paramount chief of Bau) on board his ship. He used the opportunity to harshly criticize the local cannibal customs in a speech translated by Calvert. While Thakombau listened politely, at some point he murmured some angry words which Calvert later translated as: “it was all very well for us who had plenty of beef . . . to remonstrate, but they had no beef but men.”34 Calvert himself quotes the remark as follows: “You foreigners have salt beef to eat when you sail about; we have no beef, and therefore make use of human flesh.”35

Erskine notes that edible animals were rare on the archipelago and that people were limited to a largely vegetarian diet, except “at feasts and on great occasions.”36 Fison adds that “the common people rarely taste flesh meat of any kind, but live almost entirely on a vegetable diet.” Pigs, the only edible mammals (besides people), were “reserved almost exclusively for the chiefs and their favoured henchmen.” He concludes that “the Scarcity of Animal Food” might well have been “the primary cause of cannibalism.”37

But the preference for human flesh was not merely due to a lack of alternatives—several sources indicate that, from a culinary viewpoint, pigs were considered inferior to people. The Methodist missionary Walter Lawry (1793–1859), who visited Fiji in 1847, calls it “remarkable” that many Fijians told him “that the flesh of human beings is really very good, and they like it”—clearly preferring it to pork even when both were available, as he notes elsewhere.38 In the early twentieth century, Wilfrid Walker met three Fijian men who frankly told him that they had eaten human flesh and remembered it as “far better than pig.”39 A few decades earlier, Alfred St. Johnston, another British traveler, had noted: “So delicious was human flesh considered, that the highest praise that they could give to other food was to say, ‘It is as good as bakolo.’”40

Bokola (or bakola, bakolo) was the term used for “a dead body which is to be eaten” and for the flesh of such a body. Calling a living person bokola or suggesting that one of their ancestors had ended as an “inmate of the oven,” were deeply offensive insults, as Fison notes.41 The term bokola has survived as an insult even in contemporary Fiji, though cannibal practices have long ceased.42 An analogous insult was used in the Duke of York Islands (part of the Bismarck Archipelago), according to George Brown: “Their language contains separate words for a corpse (minat), and for a body to be eaten (wirua). One of the most abusive words which can be used is to designate a man by the latter term.”43

Being eaten meant that you had lost out, that others had overpowered you and were able to exploit and destroy you for their own purposes; it was not only a terrible end, but also humiliating for the victim and their relatives and descendants. Having human bodies at one’s disposal—whether by subduing and killing enemies and strangers or by forcing others to offer you human tributes—was a very visible way of demonstrating one’s superiority. The historians Korn, Radice, and Hawes observe that “the supply of bakola to a town was, in a sense, the raison d’être of a chief”—an undeniable proof that the community was stronger and more powerful than those around it.44

Maybe to show off further and leave no doubt about who was for dinner, bodies were sometimes roasted whole and decorated in a way that made them seem almost alive—according to Fison, such bodies were called “trussed frogs”:

>> The limbs having been arranged in the posture which it is intended they shall assume, banana leaves are wrapped round them to prevent the flesh falling off in the possible event of over-baking, and the whole body is carefully bound with the walai [a tough runner used as string or rope], so that the desired posture may be preserved. A hole of sufficient size is then dug in the earth, and filled with dry wood, which is set on fire. When it is well kindled, a number of stones, about the size of a man’s fist, are thrown into it; and when the firewood is burnt down to a mass of glowing embers, some of the heated stones are lifted nimbly by tongs made of bent withes, and thrust within the dead man’s body. The fire in the hole is then raked level and covered with large leaves, on which the body is carefully laid: the hot stones are arranged around and over it; it is covered with banana leaves, and then the dug out earth is shovelled back upon it and heaped above it. Presently the mound swells and rises; little cracks appear, whence issue jets of steam diffusing a savoury odour; and in due time, of which the Fijians are excellent judges, the culinary process is complete. The earth is then cautiously removed, the body lifted out, its wrappings taken off, its face painted, a wig or a turban placed upon its head, and there we have a ‘trussed frog’ in all its unspeakable hideousness, staring at us with wide open, prominent, lack-lustre eyes. There is no burning or roasting: the body is cooked in its own steam, and the features are so little disturbed by the process that the dead man can almost always be recognised by those who knew him when he was alive.”45

Several accounts claim that victims were sometimes still alive when they were put into an earth oven46—it is unclear whether this was deliberate torture or whether (like apparently in parts of New Guinea)47 it was motivated by a belief that it would improve the taste of the flesh.

While many of those killed and subsequently eaten in war campaigns were male warriors, Erskine notes that the victims of kidnapping were “generally females”48—maybe because they regularly had to leave the security of their villages to gather food. Lawry states that “one way of obtaining food is to lie in ambush, and seize upon females, as they return with water, or from bathing.” He adds that groups of fishers were also frequently attacked, clubbed to death, and eaten49—while he does not mention the gender of these fishers, notes from elsewhere50 indicate that they might often have been women. When people were given as more or less voluntary “offerings,” it seems that the victims were usually children or young women. They might have been considered the least important members of the community—those the male decision makers were most willing to give up, if a human victim was required of them.

Culinary preferences might have played a role as well: the men “interview[ed]” by Walker assured him “that women and children tasted best”; Erskine observes that “the flesh of women [is] considered more tender than that of men” and other missionaries and travelers agree.51 Such preferences, however, where relative rather than absolute. Remembering that “I have seen the grey-headed and children of both sexes devoted to the oven,” Williams concludes: “Cannibalism does not confine its selection to one sex, or a particular age.”52

Because of the high prestige and supposedly superior taste of human flesh, many members of less powerful communities likely craved to eat it as well, but for them, opportunities to do so will have been rare. One occasional opportunity in coastal communities were foreign castaways who shipwrecked at their shores. Like in New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago53 and in other Melanesian regions such as Vanuatu,54 it seems that castaways were killed and eaten almost as a matter of course.55 Mary Davis Wallis notes about a specific case:

>> They were not enemies, but such is their custom. If the canoe had arrived in safety, the lives of the visitors would have been spared, and they would have welcomed them; but when a canoe is cast away, the natives say that it is sent them by their gods, and as they are fond of something to relish their vegetables once in awhile, the flesh does not come amiss.56

It also seems that foreigners who had voluntarily come into a community but were not accepted by the locals could be treated as a source of meat. The Wesleyan missionary Joseph Waterhouse (1828–1881) tells that a woman had run away to a different town after a quarrel with her husband. The friends of her husband asked that she be sent back, strengthening their request by giving a whale’s tooth. “The townspeople then assembled and deliberated on the case, and decided that they would not send her home, but kill her for their Sunday’s meat! Whereon they put her to death, cooked her body, and ate it the following day, which was the Sabbath.”57 Apparently the missionary was especially annoyed because he got the impression that the people had mixed their cannibal customs with the Christian tradition of a Sunday roast. Teaching new values was not always easy.

Section: Central Africa

Travelers and foreigners were also at risk of being “poached” and eaten in certain parts of central and western Africa. The following account will focus on central Africa—especially, but not only, the Congo basin, from which a large part of the reports of foreigner poaching in Africa originates.

Camille-Aimé Coquilhat, the founder of Bangala Station, heard that cannibal meals had been quite common in the area before the arrival of the Europeans. While slaves could be killed for consumption, many of the victims were captured enemies or foreigners. In June 1885, two young Bangala soldiers told him that, before his arrival, “it was rare that they spent eight days without attacking either some village or some passing canoes to procure human flesh.”58

Similar practices are reported from the Ubangi River. Herbert Ward writes that “every village seems to be continually at war with its neighbors.” While villages were fortified and secured by “stockades of sharpened poles,” individuals or small groups who approached the river were in constant danger of being snatched by warriors “prowling about in their large war-canoes, making excursions to parts known to be frequented by small bands of hunters and fishermen, who are easily vanquished, bound, and, in due course, killed and eaten.”59 Edward Glave likewise states that fishers surprised by warriors from neighboring communities were often “spear[ed]” and “devour[ed].”60

According to Maurice Musy, such attacks on people with a foreign and potentially enemy background were a kind of low-intensity warfare. He observes that, while open attacks on hostile villages were relatively rare, the usual style of warfare was “to steal a few isolated men” belonging to enemy communities “and eat them.”61

Farther east, near the Mongala River, Guy Burrows met a chief who boasted that he and his family had eaten dozens of captives belonging to “tribes of the interior.” Some of the eaten, he explained when questioned, had been individuals spotted alone “in the neighbouring bush,” while others had been captured in raids on enemies’ villages made when the latter “were attacking some other tribe,” leaving mostly women, children, and old men behind as easy targets.62

It seems that any foreigner was a legitimate target, as all were considered potentially hostile. Burrows observes that, while cannibalism was officially condemned by the colonial government, it was secretly considered quite useful because it discouraged native soldiers from deserting. He notes that soldiers were deliberately stationed far away from their villages, “and the bush is no place for a stranger in tropical Africa. It would merely mean that sooner or later they would be killed by some village, and a grand feast would follow.” Women captured in punitive expeditions and forced to work on Free State plantations had to stay for the same reason: “If they attempted to wander home there would be an end to them, for they would sooner or later be killed in the bush and eaten by one or other of the cannibal tribes through whose district they would have to pass.”63

Occasionally soldiers nevertheless tried their luck, but at least sometimes the outcome was as predicted. Referring to people who live on the northern shore of the Congo River, Ward writes that “it was these populous tribes that caught the Houssas last year, who deserted [Captain] Deane. . . . They ate five and sold four back to the State.”64 Soldiers employed by the French Congo did not necessarily fare better. In a letter written in late 1889, Musy reports that five men had deserted from a colonial post near the Ubangi River. After about a week, three of them had voluntarily returned to the post; a fourth had been captured and returned by the inhabitants of a friendly village. “The fifth [however] was eaten by the natives who took him.”65

The same fate expected some of the soldiers and porters fleeing from Henry Morton Stanley’s last expedition. While forced to stay behind in a village on the Aruwimi River as a member of the so-called rear guard,66 Ward met Nasaro bin Sef, a Swahilo-Arab slave and ivory trader. The latter gave him “a Remington rifle . . . found by his men in a native house when raiding a village” for slaves. Ward suspects that the weapon “must have belonged to a deserter” from Stanley’s part of the expedition, explaining that “the natives . . . confess having captured and eaten five of seven [deserters] who were trying to get down the river in canoes.”67

Three months later, in June 1888, the rear guard had started to move, attempting to catch up with Stanley. Now several of their own soldiers tried to escape, with a predictable outcome recorded by Ward’s companion James Jameson, the antihero of the “horrible Jameson affair”68: “The natives tell Muni Somai that some of them belonging to another village have caught and eaten three of the deserters.”69

There was, it seems, no clear distinction between the kidnapping and consumption of isolated individuals belonging to hostile groups and attacks against unknown foreigners from farther away, as any foreigner was considered a potential enemy. This corresponds to reports from the Bismarck Archipelago, which document similar attitudes, but it contrasts with the situation in New Guinea, where at least the same number of enemies had to be eaten in revenge for slayed community members, while foreigners from unknown or weak groups could be used as food without fear of reprisals.70

A similar lack of such a distinction has also been reported for the Fang (or Fan) people who live west of the Congo basin, near the Crystal Mountains (today shared between Equatorial Guinea and Gabon). Albert Bennett, a missionary and medical doctor, found that the Fang still practiced cannibalism when he worked in the area in the late 1890s. He notes that enemies killed in war as well as “members of other tribes waylaid and killed while journeying in the bush” were among the victims. There was no strict separation between these two methods of procuring victims, as any outsider was treated as an enemy. Women belonging to enemy populations were shot and killed on sight when encountered outside the safety of their own towns. “It is always safe to shoot a woman because she cannot shoot back,” a Fang man told him with satisfaction. In a village, Bennett saw a captive teenage boy who, as he later learned, had been killed and eaten shortly after his visit.71

About twenty years earlier, Oskar Lenz (1848–1925) had visited the area on behalf of the Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Erforschung Äquatorial-Afrikas (German Association for the Exploration of Equatorial Africa). During his stay, he saved a man who had been attacked by a group of Fang:

>> Suddenly we heard a human sound on the left river bank. Carefully we approached and discovered a Galloa man with numerous gunshot wounds in a completely helpless condition. He was unable to move ahead and would certainly have died quickly if we had not found him. We took him in our boat and learned from him that he had been traveling towards the Apinshi together with a compatriot. But their small canoe was attacked by three Fans. They killed his colleague and took the body with them to eat. He had managed to swim to the shore, but their shots had hurt him so severely that he could not get up any more.72

It seems that the attacked men were random victims, as no specific enmity between Fang and Galloa has been reported.

Around the Kasai River, insufficiently armed foreigners were considered fair game as well. The Free State captain Sidney Hinde tells of an incident where several dozen prisoners of war had escaped. He asked the chief of the local Songye people (Basongo) to find and return them, but got the reply “that, with the exception of one prisoner, they had all been eaten.” The survivor, who was promptly sent back to Hinde, turned out to be “a little boy-servant of mine who had been persuaded to run away by some of the deserters.” The boy said that “by a lucky chance . . . he had found a friend in the village” and had therefore been spared. But he had witnessed what had happened to the other fugitives and “his descriptions of what he had seen at the time were quite sickening.” As compensation for the eaten runaways, the chief sent Hinde “thirty-seven slaves.”73 Apparently, he had concluded that they had been Hinde’s slaves and that he had to make up for their loss.

That people could be “poached” and eaten in this region is confirmed by Melville Hilton-Simpson, who claims that the Bankutu people (who live east of the Songye) “actually stalk and shoot men for food as other natives hunt animals, and this despite the fact that their country teems with game.”74

David Livingstone was one of the first Europeans to set foot into the Congo basin. In 1870, sometime after his arrival in the Maniema region, he heard of several people who had been killed and eaten upon venturing too far from home:

>> It transpired that Kandahara, brother of old Moenékuss, whose village is near this, killed three women and a child, and that a trading man came over from Kasangangayé, and was murdered too, for no reason but to eat his body. . . . The people over a hill N.N.E. of this killed a person out hoeing; if a cultivator is alone, he is almost sure of being slain.75

The original version from Livingstone’s handwritten journal leaves no doubt that the women and the child were likewise killed for consumption: “It transpired from Monanyembo’s statements that old Kandawara—in addition to the trader from Kasangangazi—killed three women and a child for no other reason than to eat the bodies.”76

The original journal also reports cases of cannibalism motivated by revenge and of slave eating that are not mentioned in the printed edition compiled after Livingstone’s death:

>> A very fine fair woman far gone in pregnancy was killed close to our camp by the sons of Moenekuss because she belonged to a chief who killed their elder brother. Her blood stained all the path—and her body was hid in the forest for a feast. Another slave was killed and dismembered for the same purpose.77

A few months later, Livingstone heard of another cannibal killing: “Moenembegg, the most intelligent of the two sons of Moenékuss . . . told us that a man was killed and eaten a few miles from this yesterday: hunger was the reason assigned.” Livingstone, who had earlier noted that “the soil is excessively rich, and the people, although isolated by old feuds that are never settled, cultivate largely,” found this motive unconvincing. Instead, he comments: “The love of high meat is the only reason I know for their cannibalism.”78

Similar practices existed among several Zande clans in the northeast of the Congo basin. Filiberto Gero learned from an Amadi informant that his people once liked to capture and eat members of the neighboring Babukur clan. Others of Gero’s informants agreed, remembering that members of several clans—Amadi, Adhuga, and Apambia—used to kill and eat unprotected strangers they spotted outside of settlements.79 They told him that the victims were often women and children from neighboring groups who had ventured too far from home while gathering firewood or fetching drinking water—such victims were targeted not only because they were easier to overpower than adult men, but also for culinary reasons.80 Spotted strangers were killed by shooting them with poisoned arrows or smashing their heads with a club. In colonial times, when cannibalism could no longer be practiced openly, those who caught a human victim spent days in the forest while consuming the flesh; the victim’s fat was taken home in a pot to be used as a cooking ingredient and dressing.81

The German explorer Adolf Friedrich, Duke of Mecklenburg, and the English anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard likewise observed that outsiders belonging to foreign tribes or clans were sometimes killed and consumed among the Zande. Adolf Friedrich states that, when he visited the area around 1910, human flesh was still a “favourite food” among the Apambia and that “any member of another tribe who ventured too near their mountainous dwellings fell a victim to cannibalism.”82 According to Evans-Pritchard, most of those eaten among the Zande had been killed enemies and convicted criminals, but from time to time “a fat Buguru, a member of a neighbouring and subject foreign people and a man more or less without the law, was slain and eaten.”83

A rare survivor’s account has been recorded by the missionary Josef Fräßle, who was stationed near Basoko, where the Aruwimi joins the Congo. One day, Fräßle spotted a young boy running out of the forest towards the mission station, his skin bloody from the thorns of the jungle, his body covered in dirt. The boy, who might have been about seven, begged for protection. “Sir, down there in the woods, far behind the last huts,” he exclaimed, “there they’re eating my brother Kitibo. . . . They have slaughtered him like an antelope; they have cut his throat and put him on the fire, and now they’re eating him.”84

Asked to tell his story, the boy said that he and his twin brother had been orphans living near the other shore of the Congo River.85 After their father had died of an illness eight months earlier, their mother had been sold into slavery by his heir. The boys, forced to take care of themselves, often went into the forest to collect food. While capturing crabs, they were surprised by eight men from Basoko who seized them, tied their hands behind their backs and took them to their canoe on the Congo. They traveled downriver for some time, later steering into a side arm (possibly the Aruwimi). When night fell, they tied their young captives to two trees and kindled a large fire.86

>> Then they came to us and inspected us. . . . “This one,” they said at last, “we’ll take first; he has more fat than his brother.” They untied my Kitibo and dragged him towards the fireplace. Both of us cried and screamed; my brother struggled with all his strength. But what can a child do against big men, and the forest has no ears for the voice of a child. Sir, they threw my brother to the ground, I saw it and I screamed, and all eight of them crouched around him, fixing his hands and feet, and then they cut his throat. I heard my Kitibo, my dear brother, groan, groan like a dying antelope. His groans became slower and weaker, and then he was dead. My brother was dead. My soul broke in pain! They carved him up and put his flesh into their pots. “This one we’ll eat here,” they said, “and the other one we’ll smoke afterwards.”87

Animated by a desperate fear, the boy managed to bring one of the lianas with which he was bound to his mouth and ultimately bit through it. He slipped away while the men were busy cooking his brother. After running for hours through the forest, he finally reached the safety of the mission.88 If the boy’s account is accurate, the children had been caught near their own village by a group of men who lived more than a day’s journey away. Why the kidnappers ended up in their proximity is not known—they might have stalked their village in a revenge mission, they might have been deliberately “hunting” for people, or they might have been travelers looking for provisions and deciding that the children would do.

From Nigeria, an oral account likewise indicates that, at the end of the nineteenth century, children spotted outside alone were at risk of “being kidnapped and either killed and eaten or sold away [as slaves] or sacrificed to one god or the other”; travelers faced the same risk.89 Several other accounts also report that foreigners and lonely individuals belonging to hostile communities were often kidnapped and slaughtered for food.90 Cases of foreigner poaching in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are also documented for an area ranging approximately from western Ivory Coast to Sierra Leone.91

Section: On the Origins of Foreigner Poaching

The oldest known source mentioning foreigner poaching in Africa likewise refers not to central, but to western Africa. The Andalusian historian Al-Bakri (ca. 1014–1094) mentions a “kingdom called Damdam, the people of which eat anyone who falls into their hands.” The Akhbar al-zaman, a collection of facts and anecdotes about the known world written around the start of the eleventh century in Egypt, also mentions this kingdom, simply stating that its inhabitants “eat men.” Both these Arab sources locate the kingdom on the western bank of the Niger River, somewhere downriver of Kawkaw (an old name for Gao in today’s Mali).92 These early accounts do not necessarily mean that foreigner poaching in West Africa is older than in Central Africa. Rather, Arab travelers at that time occasionally reached Western, but not Central African regions. Much time would pass until Europeans would reach either region.

Neither for Africa nor for Melanesia is there direct evidence revealing how and why the practice of capturing and consuming foreigners emerged—all accounts refer to the custom as already well-established, if not under siege and disappearing. As pointed out earlier, the practice only seems to have existed in areas where war cannibalism occurred as well, indicating that it might have been a descendant of the latter practice. Indeed, the boundaries between war cannibalism and foreigner poaching are blurred because a state of hostility between neighboring peoples usually prevailed in the regions from which such practices have been reported; killing and eating members of hostile groups might thus have been a part of ongoing low-intensity war campaigns, as Musy concluded.93

In regions where any unknown foreigner might potentially have meant trouble—conceivably, they might have been spies for groups who planned an attack or raid—it also seems to have been quite common to treat such foreigners as potential enemies. This might explain why in regions where war cannibalism was already common, foreigners from unknown groups were subjected to the same treatment as killed or captured enemies.

Nevertheless, while suspicions of foreigners as potential enemies might have helped to establish such practices, the practice sometimes spread beyond such origins. The killing and consumption of castaways, reported from various Melanesian islands, was hardly due to a fear of what these shipwrecked foreigners might bring—rather, they seem to have been considered suitable victims because they had been cut off from their home communities and their consumption was unlikely to trigger revenge. Such acts seem to have been driven by convenience and tradition, not by fear and certainly not by hatred.

This corresponds with Charles Gabriel Seligman’s observation that in New Guinea revenge-driven cannibalism was clearly distinguished from “unpaid score”: the killing and consumption of castaways and strangers from faraway or weak communities whose deaths were considered unlikely to trigger a revenge. Such killings, he notes, did not have to be motivated—since they were unlikely to hurt the community, “the desire for a favourite food” was considered sufficient explanation. The lives of strangers did not matter; therefore their death was not considered a matter of moral concern.94

The British writer Lady Dorothy Mills observed a similar attitude when traveling through Liberia in the 1920s. She learned that both war cannibalism and foreigner poaching had been common until four or five years earlier: “The victims were generally prisoners taken in the innumerable little internecine wars, or unwary travellers, generally of another tribe.” Twice she met Kpelle men who freely “admitted having eaten human flesh” and who “spoke of the present prohibition with regret and utterly without shame or real consciousness of wrongdoing”95 People knew that it was now forbidden to kill and eat enemies and foreigners, but at least for some of them this was merely a rule imposed from above—morally, the fate of strangers was not a concern, and overpowering and killing enemies or (possibly armed) travelers might even have been a proud accomplishment.

The fate of foreign-born women and children in New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago96 indicates that the circle of persons who mattered was very limited. Even those who had lived in a community for years could be exploited as a source of meat if convenience, a desire for revenge, or the need for a precious gift made it opportune to do so. Only those born into a community, it seems, were truly safe.

How well does the Obeyesekere conjecture—that cannibalism, except possibly as practiced in the context of religious sacrificial ceremonies, emerged only as a result of interactions with Westerners—fit the evidence of foreigner poaching? Quite badly, one must say. Since most of the evidence was indeed recorded by Westerners, our insight into earlier times remains very limited. However, none of the sources gives any indication that the practice was of recent origin; and oral statements such as recorded by Seligman and Coquilhat suggest that foreigner poaching was practiced at least in some areas before interactions with Europeans intensified. That foreigner poaching in West Africa is mentioned in an Arab source from the eleventh century—centuries before Europeans started to trade with these regions—is also hard to reconcile with the Obeyesekere conjecture. Moreover, there is little or no evidence that foreigner poaching was related to or associated with religious ceremonies—indeed, both Seligman and Simon Haberberger explicitly note that the practice did not have any magical or spiritual meaning.97

From the endnotes:

51. Walker, Wanderings, 45; Erskine, Journal, 262. “The flesh of women is preferred to that of men” (Cargill quoted in Hogg, Cannibalism, 25). “The flesh of women is [considered] rather better than the flesh of men; and when the Chief wants something very delicate, or in case many bodies are before him, a child is roasted for his repast” (Lawry, Friendly and Feejee Islands, 91). “Women were considered better for cooking than men, and the thighs and arms the best portions” (St. Johnston, Camping among Cannibals, 229).