CHAPTER 13, THE TRADE IN HUMAN FLESH AND IN “EDIBLE” CORPSES

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Section: Corpse Exchange in Central Africa

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When corpses are considered edible, they might also become items of trade. They can be sold to people who will eat them, or different communities can exchange their dead so that people do not have to eat the bodies of individuals they have known. The French American zoologist and anthropologist Paul Belloni Du Chaillu (1831–1903) found such a practice among the Fang people in Western Central Africa, who also practiced foreigner poaching.6 Shortly after his arrival in a Fang village in September 1856, he observed that “some Fans brought in a dead body which they had bought in a neighbouring town, and which was now to be divided. I could see that the man had died of some disease.”7

Du Chaillu, who already a few days earlier, just after his arrival in the village, had seen parts of a dead human body that had just been divided for consumption,8 writes that he was surprised. Not, he explains, by the cannibalism as such, but by the fact that “the bodies of persons who have died of sickness” were eaten—“a form of cannibalism of which I had never heard among any people.” When he inquired about the practice, the Fang he spoke to answered “without embarrassment,”9 telling him that

> they constantly buy the dead of the Osheba tribe, who, in return, buy theirs. They also buy the dead of other families in their own tribes, and, besides this, get the bodies of a great many slaves from the Mbichos and Mbondemos, for which they readily give ivory, at the rate of a small tusk for a body.10

A small tusk for a slave is an exchange ratio also documented from the Ubangi region farther in the east, where living slaves were expected as payment.11 The Fang, on the other hand, paid for the corpses of those who had already died. Considering that the price of a corpse seems to have been similar to that of a living slave, it is not inconceivable that the sellers might have killed an otherwise hard-to-sell slave in order to sell the body, indicating that (nondeadly) corpse food and (deadly) people eating are not always easy to distinguish. But in contrast to “some of the Middle Congo tribes,” the Fang did not purchase living slaves for fattening and subsequent consumption, as Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) notes with a certain approval.12 Kingsley, who visited them in the 1890s, was an English writer and one of the first European women to travel through Central Africa on her own.

“Prisoners taken in war,” however, were killed and eaten, according to Du Chaillu.13 The German explorer Oskar Lenz likewise observes that they “kill and eat all their prisoners of war, while other tribes . . . sell them as slaves.”14 Kidnapped foreigners met the same fate, as we have already seen.15

The villagers whom Du Chaillu met not only bought corpses from others, they also sold their own. After a hunter had been accidentally killed by an elephant, Du Chaillu learned that “the body of the poor fellow who was killed to-day is, I am told, to be sent to another Fan village, to be sold and eaten. This seems the proper and usual end of the Fans.”16 Persons belonging to the same village were not eaten by their relatives or neighbors, but they could be sold or exchanged against the edible bodies of foreigners. Kingsley points this out as well—in reply to distorted rumors of the local customs, she writes: “He [the Fang] is always very much abused for eating his relations, but he really does not do this. He will [merely] eat his next door neighbour’s relations and sell his own deceased to his next door neighbour in return.”17

After he had stayed in the Fang village for some time, Du Chaillu visited a nearby Osheba village and observed that “a large part of their intercourse with the Fan village consists in the interchange of dead bodies, and I saw as many human bones lying about the Osheba village as among the Fans.”18 The consumption of traded bodies was indeed a mutual affair.

Du Chaillu, who was probably the first Westerner to visit the region, encountered people who saw no reason to hide their practice or to regard it as strange or shameful. But this changed quickly once he and later visitors started to express their disapproval. When Lenz arrived in the area—about twenty years later—corpse eating seems to have still been practiced, but people had become unwilling to admit it: “From all sides I was assured that Fan families exchange their dead in order to eat them! I repeatedly interrogated Fan people about this, but they did not give me a definite answer and generally reacted with discomfort when I mentioned human flesh.”19 Another two decades later, Kingsley observed that, while the Fang people she spoke to did not hesitate to praise human flesh as “good to eat, very good, and he wishes you would try it,” they also tended to deny all personal involvement in cannibal practices.20

While the Fang live west of the Congo basin, similar customs have been been reported from several regions in the north of the basin. While stationed near the Mongala River, a northern tributary of the Congo, Guy Burrows noted that

> Among the riverside tribes . . . regular rules of etiquette concerning the disposal of their dead friends exist. If in two villages, say a quarter of a mile away from each other, any member of one community dies, the body is promptly placed in a canoe and taken to the other village, where it is handed over to supply a banquet for the chief and his friends. The compliment, of course, is returned when a member of the other village likewise fulfils the debt of nature.21

Among the Fang and neighboring peoples, dead bodies were items of trade—they were bought and sold, according to Du Chaillu and Kingsley. Around the Mongala the corpse exchange seems to have been rather an issue of mutuality: no price was charged for a corpse, but villages participating in such exchanges could expect that their own gifts of dead bodies would in turn be rewarded with a counter-gift of the same kind. Such a mutual gift exchange makes sense considering that relatives or community members were widely considered as “inedible,” but that the members of communities that participated in such exchanges apparently had no qualms about eating dead foreigners, even if they had been members of friendly groups. In such cases, cannibalism was driven neither by hatred (as war cannibalism might be) nor by love and respect (as funerary cannibalism usually is)—rather, unrelated dead bodies seem to have been regarded more or less as a convenient source of nutrition.

Farther east, Filiberto Gero heard from his local informants that in former times corpses had been exchanged among several Zande clans. Both the Babukur and the Amadi had eaten almost all dead corpses, except for those suffering from skin diseases. The latter also spared the bodies of distinct elders, war leaders, and young children, while the former knew no such restriction. Among both groups, family members were not eaten but donated to a neighboring family; the latter would reciprocate the favor once one of their members died. Occasionally the corpse of a relative was sold instead of being given away—but the exchange of corpses as gifts on the basis of mutuality seems to have been the typical mode of exchange.22

Two other clans, the Apambia and the Bahum, also regularly exchanged their dead bodies on the basis of mutuality. Members of several other clans occasionally joined in similar exchanges by buying or selling dead bodies intended for consumption—in these latter cases, an explicit price had to be negotiated since no future counter-gift could be expected. In all cases, the persons whose bodies were sold or given away had died of natural or accidental reasons; no clan member was ever killed to sell their dead body. According to Gero’s informants, these practices faded once the different clans became united under the leadership of the Avongara clan. While this clan (grudgingly) accepted certain cannibal practices such as the consumption of enemies, it was strictly opposed to corpse eating. In later times, corpses of clan members could still be exchanged for consumption in times of famine, but otherwise they were buried.23

Georg Schweinfurth, who visited some Zande clans around 1870, heard that the body of a “lone and solitary individual” who died without relatives was usually eaten. He does not say whether such corpses were exchanged or sold, but from his description it is clear that people would not have eaten their own relatives—indeed, anyone who had relatives who took care of their body was buried instead of becoming food. Thus, it seems that at that time the switch from corpse exchange to burial, described by Gero’s informants, was well underway; people had started to object to the consumption of their own relatives and friends even by unrelated others. Schweinfurth thoughtfully comments that European customs in his time were not necessarily more dignified, consigning the corpses of those who died lonely and poor “to the knife of the anatomist.”24

In some areas, the bodies of persons executed as punishment for a crime could be sold for consumption. Among the Fang, notes Du Chaillu, anyone suspected of witchcraft was killed. The body was then sold as food, as all corpses were. He suspects that the fact that “the dead body has its commercial value” increased the inclination of chiefs to pronounce the death penalty even in cases where clemency might have been called for—another case where the boundary between corpse eating and people eating became blurred.25

A trade in dead bodies intended for consumption might also have existed in some other parts of the Congo basin. Livingstone, the first European to venture into the Maniema region in the east, accompanying a group of Swahilo-Arab slave traders, heard from his companions that, a few years earlier, “dead slaves were openly purchased from them” for consumption—and, though condemning the habit, they were apparently quite willing to sell. Writing in early 1871, Livingstone adds that, though it “is still common to devour the dead,” the open trade in dead bodies had ceased in this region under the influence of the Arabs.26

It seems, however, that dead criminals could still occasionally be sold for cannibal purposes. In February 1890, writes George Grenfell, a woman considered guilty of “some misdemeanour” was executed in the proximity of Basoko. Her body was sold as “meat” to a neighboring community, “for the price of a couple of [enslaved] boys.”27

In other cases, people considered guilty of a crime were sold alive in the knowledge that the buyers would kill them for food. Gero notes this regarding the Avongara, the ruling Zande clan. While they did not practice cannibalism and discouraged the practice among other Zande clans, they were quite willing to sell “condemned men and women to be eaten [to] the cannibals who lived on the Uele river.” In return they received the “poison for their oracles” used to test the guilt of people accused of a crime.28 This was not a case of corpse eating, but rather a boundary case between punitive cannibalism (people being killed and eaten as punishment) and slave eating—from the Avongara perspective, the sold had been convicted to death, while from the buyers’ perspective they were slaves whom they could utilize in their preferred manner.

The most characteristic form of corpse food, however, was usually devoid of violence—it was to exchange the corpses of those who had died of a natural or accidental death in the knowledge that the recipients would eat them, in return for some kind of payment or a future counter-gift in kind. Among the Fang, around the Mongala River, and possibly in other regions as well, people apparently had a quite pragmatic attitude regarding the fate of their dead bodies: they knew that they would likely be eaten and did not mind, instead maybe even considering this a “proper and usual end,” as Du Chaillu speculates. Still, they considered the consumption of relatives and community members as taboo and did not practice it as a honorable funeral rite, which would otherwise have led to the more widespread practice of funerary cannibalism. Under these circumstances, the exchange of corpses, on the basis of mutuality or for payment, made sense.

In general, though, it seems that these circumstances were not often fulfilled. In Central Africa, corpse exchange seems to have been much rarer than certain other cannibal practices such as war cannibalism and slave eating. Outside of Central Africa, I am unaware of any reports of similar practices—they might well have existed in some regions, but it seems they were not widespread. While generally nonviolent, this practice could still lead to an increase of violence, as we have seen: when dead bodies had a price, the propensity of rulers to impose the death penalty might have increased, and slave traders might have murdered some of their slaves if they found that they could sell their dead bodies with a profit.

Section: Sale of Human Flesh on the African West Coast

While the corpse exchange was largely a nonviolent affair, this cannot be said of the sale of human flesh in general. People do not generally eat carrion—when we eat the meat of animals, these animals, in nearly all cases, have been deliberately killed for consumption. Human flesh does not seem to be an exception in this regard—when it appeared on marketplaces or was otherwise offered for sale, as it sometimes was in certain regions, it usually came from persons who had been murdered a short time earlier. A partial exception was the sale of human flesh during times of famine—from many severe famines it has been reported that the flesh of corpses started to appear on the markets, often in addition to the flesh of people who had been kidnapped and killed.29 But outside of famines, when cannibalism was a socially accepted practice, the sale of human flesh nearly always seems to have been preceded by an act of deadly violence.

We have already seen that in parts of the Congo basin, slaves were murdered on what seems to have been a more or less regular basis in order to sell their flesh.30 But the sale of human flesh is also documented for certain regions on the African west coast, outside of the Congo basin. The Hungarian adventurer László Magyar (1818–1864) spent the last seventeen years of his life in the central and northern parts of today’s Angola, west of the basin. He claims that, in several regions inhabited by the Ambundu people, who live around the Cuanza River, “human flesh is publicly offered for sale, but only to locals.” He asserts to have “repeatedly seen” how people were butchered for food; the victims were usually “people who are ill or old as well as robbers, children, and slaves.” Old people, he notes elsewhere, were “slaughtered when they became ill” (and were probably considered dying), while the cannibalized children had been “rob[bed] from their neighbors.”31

These “neighbors” certainly did not live next door—Magyar likely refers to raids against neighboring peoples, which were, as he notes, quite common. He explains that there was always a “pretext” for opening hostilities; usually a claim that the targeted people had caused some bad event (drought or illness) through magical means. The main purpose of these expeditions, which often involved thousands of warriors, was the acquisition of cattle and slaves. After a raid, “the captives who are able to work are . . . dragged away as slaves,” while “the elderly and children” were killed outright—or taken home in order to later sell their flesh. When Magyar was in the area, the transatlantic slave trade had already largely collapsed, but he explains that the Ambundu were a trading people and slaves had been their most important export good until shortly before his arrival.32 Here, too, the international slave trade and local cannibalism had been intertwined, with captives considered unfit for sale ending up at the meat markets instead.

Other peoples were more peaceful and rarely engaged in raids—but this does not necessarily mean that they were opposed to buying and selling human flesh. The Ambuim, who live southwest of the Ambundu, are described by Magyar as diligent farmers and traders. He adds: “It is regrettable that these peaceful people likewise consume human flesh, even selling it publicly.”33 He does not say how they got victims for slaughter, but it seems plausible that slaves or captives were purchased from neighboring, more warlike peoples. Possible providers, in addition to the Ambundu, might have been the Selles people, who live south of the Ambuim. According to Magyar, they frequently attacked neighboring settlements, killing some of the inhabitants and enslaving the rest. Captives not sold were often eaten, with Magyar claiming that cannibalism was “so widespread among them that there is rarely an entertainment during which they do not consume one human being or several.”34

I am not aware of other witnesses confirming Magyar’s reports from Angola, which means that some doubt regarding their reliability must remain. Magyar himself states that the cannibal customs he wrote about were generally hidden from Europeans; this is plausible insofar as he was married to a daughter of a local ruler, which certainly gave him opportunity to see and hear about things that were inaccessible to others. Historians such as Joseph C. Miller tend to treat his accounts as generally reliably.35

Much farther north, in some parts of Nigeria, human flesh might also have been a marketable item. The Anglo-Irish explorer and colonialist Thomas J. Hutchinson (1820–1885) claims that “during the year 1859 human flesh was exposed for sale, as butcher’s meat, in the market at Duketown, Old Kalabar.”36 According to E. Deas, a Presbyterian missionary, “cannibal markets” could be found “in many parts of Nigeria.”37

An earlier and more detailed account comes from neighboring Benin in the early eighteenth century. In 1727, the English captain and trader William Snelgrave arrived in the former Kingdom of Whydah which had just been conquered by the neighboring Kingdom of Dahomey (both situated in today’s Benin). There he met a ship surgeon from an Italian galley, Robert More, who told him that “he saw many strange things, especially human Flesh sold publickly in the great Marketplace” of Savi, the capital of the conquered kingdom. Snelgrave comments that he had not personally seen this since he had not visited the market, but that More was “a person of great Integrity.” He adds that “there were many old and maimed Captives brought from Tuffoe [possibly referring to neighboring Togo] which no Europeans would have bought.” These otherwise unsalable slaves, he concludes, were purchased cheaply by local butchers who made money from selling their flesh.38

While Snelgrave himself did not see this, he witnessed a sacrificial ceremony in which a large number of prisoners—men, women, and children—were publicly executed to celebrate the victory. The next morning, their dead bodies had disappeared, and his interpreter told him that they had been distributed “amongst the People who had eat[en] them.”39

Both Magyar’s and Snelgrave’s accounts correspond with at least the weaker version of the Obeyesekere conjecture, according to which cannibal practices were tied to Western influences. Both suggest that slaves unsuitable for export were at risk of supplying the meat markets instead. In Nigeria, insofar as the short mentions of cannibal meat markets are more than just rumors, a similar connection might have existed.

Section: Sale of Human Flesh in Melanesia

The reports from central and western Africa discussed in the preceding section and in earlier chapters indicate that the cannibalistic trade in human flesh was closely associated with slavery and the trade in living human bodies. Whether alive or (recently) deceased, the bodies of slaves could be valuable commodities. From parts of Melanesia, a trade in “edible” human bodies and body parts has been reported as well. In this region, however, this trade was related to warfare and to the kidnapping and consumption of unwanted foreigners, not to the trade in living human beings. This difference was likely due to the fact that the region never came under pressure as a supply area for the slave trade—in marked contrast to central and western Africa—and that slavery as an established institution seems to have been largely unknown outside of the Gazelle Peninsula.40

We have already encountered accounts reporting that the bodies of killed castaways and foreigners could be sold to neighboring villages for consumption—Heinrich Schnee, George Brown, and Wilfred Powell tell of such cases that occurred in New Britain, the largest island of the Bismarck Archipelago.41 Other sources make it clear that such acts were not just exceptions, but seem to have been a fairly well-established custom. The Danish explorer and anthropologist Richard Parkinson (1844–1909) spent more than thirty years in the southern Pacific. While confirming that human flesh was eaten in the Bismarck Archipelago, he rejects the “very erroneous view” that it was a daily nourishment. Rather, he notes, the consumption of a human body was a rare event, and since the flesh was divided among many eaters, each of them received only a small piece.42

After a person from an “enemy district” had been killed, the killer brought the body home in order to sell the meat. A large drum was beaten to call the inhabitants of the village together; once enough people had gathered, the body was dismembered and the pieces sold in return for diwarra (or dewarra), a locally used shell money. According to Parkinson, the total gain from selling a body was usually about fifty to eighty fathoms of diwarra. He adds that he would have liked to see the division of a corpse but was repeatedly prevented from doing so. On several occasions, however, he saw pieces of roasted human flesh.43

The German count Joachim von Pfeil (1857–1924), who visited the Bismarck Archipelago in the 1880s, gives a similar account of the dismemberment and sale of killed foreigners. He explains that he did not see this, but that his description is based on the reports of participants. He comments that killing someone “who does not belong to the tribe is not regarded murder, but a meritorious act, because it reduces the number of enemies—and everyone who does not belong to the tribe is an enemy.” That such acts also entailed “a tasty meal” for those buying the meat and “a treasure of diwarra” for the killer were seen as additional advantages, but not as primary motives of such killings.44 According to Pfeil, there was thus no distinction made between the killing of enemies and of foreigners, since anyone who was not a friend or community member was treated as an enemy.

The anthropologist Douglas L. Oliver notes that, in New Britain’s Gazelle Peninsula, human flesh was one of very few items—along with weapons—that was only traded by men, while trade was otherwise a women’s business. Usually, the flesh came from enemies killed in war.45

But such acts were not limited to New Britain. In the late 1870s, George Brown wrote approvingly about a chief who lived in neighboring New Ireland and had recently converted to Christianity: “Some few weeks ago the bushmen were fighting, and one man was killed. They brought the body a long distance to Le Bera, fully expecting that he would buy it as he used to do; but he positively refused to do so, telling them . . . that he had given up cannibalism.”46

Documentation of another case, which had taken place in the Duke of York Islands, a group of smaller islands situated between New Britain and New Ireland, was found by the German anthropologist Simon Haberberger in the archives of the English Wesleyan Mission. In the early 1880s, members of the mission working in these islands discovered to their dismay that a group of locals they considered friends and who they thought had converted to Christian values had recently eaten a human leg. They were told that several persons from another island had been killed in an attack; one of the corpses was brought to the main Duke of York Island, where it was dismembered and the body parts were sold for consumption. It turned out that, while cannibalism was no longer practiced openly because the mission’s attitude was known, people still considered it wasteful to refrain from eating killed enemies (or foreigners). Therefore, instead of abandoning the practice as the missionaries wished, they had tried to hide it from them—unsuccessfully in this case.47

Additional reports of the sale of the flesh of captured enemies and entrapped foreigners in the Bismarck Archipelago come from the German Catholic missionaries A. Kleintitschen and Josef Winthuis.48

Other sources indicate that the practice also existed in the Solomon Islands, a group of islands situated not far from the archipelago in a southeastern direction. In 1872, Edwin Redlich, the captain of a British schooner, spent some weeks in Makira, one of these islands. Upon temporarily leaving the island for a rabbit hunting trip on another island, he and his companions “met with several large war-canoes, and pulling alongside one of them, found it to contain a dead body, dressed and cooked whole.” Mr. Perry, a white settler who lived in Makira, “took it quite coolly, as an every-day occurrence,” explaining “that he had seen as many as twenty bodies lying on the beach, dressed and cooked.” There were also “two prisoners” in the canoe, “a boy about 14, and a girl 13 years of age. Intending to save their lives, I [Redlich] offered to buy them, but without avail.” Returning from his hunt, Redlich learned that the canoe crew had left Makira after selling “half of the body” and “both the prisoners.”49

That human bodies were sometimes cooked whole is not implausible. Pfeil writes that meat—whether animal or human—was roasted in an earth oven after wrapping it in banana leaves. He notes that, if one was patient, this cooking method was suitable even for large chunks and he “had seen a whole pig being roasted this way.”50 That human flesh was cooked in this manner is also documented by Parkinson.51 While both refer to the Bismarck Archipelago, cooking methods in the nearby Solomon Islands will have been similar. In general, it seems to have been usual to divide the bodies of larger animals or people into smaller chunks, but if Perry’s observation is correct, customs on Makira might have been different.

The sale of whole human bodies for consumption was still practiced decades later, according to the missionary Florence Coombe (1870–1933). “After a battle we find dead bodies hawked up and down the coast in canoes for sale,” she writes about Makira, adding that both there and in neighboring Malaita Island human flesh was apparently eaten “for pleasure.”52

According to these reports, the human flesh offered for sale in the Bismarck Archipelago often came from “poached” foreigners and occasionally from enemies killed in war, while in the Solomon Islands it predominantly came from the latter group of victims. Generally, foreigner poaching seems to have been rarer in the Solomon Islands than in the Bismarck Archipelago and in the other regions covered in the previous chapters on that custom. In both cases it is notable that the sale of human flesh was a side aspect of activities that were not driven by commercial considerations. Enemies were killed in war and foreigners were killed as unwanted intruders and potential enemies; the subsequent sale of their flesh was seen as a suitable opportunity to make money, but it was not the main motive driving these killings. This contrasts with the situation in Africa, where the sale of the flesh of murdered human beings was generally tied to the slave trade—the trade in living humans. Reports from the Congo and some other central and western African regions also tell of slaves who were killed in order to sell their flesh—a commercialization of cannibal customs that seems to have been unknown in Melanesia.

While enemies and foreigners were killed before being sold, it seems that those considered guilty of a crime could sometimes be sold alive for consumption. In the late 1880s, the British naturalist Charles Morris Woodford (1852–1927) arrived in a village in the New Georgia Islands, a group of islands in the west of the Solomon Islands. He heard that recently the local chief had fallen ill, and the “wise-man” had identified a woman who was suspected of having bewitched him. Under torture the woman confessed and produced an object which she had supposedly used to bewitch the man. The chief quickly recovered (Woodford suspects that he had merely been “sulky”) and the alleged witch was “sold to the natives of a neighbouring island” who killed and ate her a short time later.53 This is the same practice of selling convicted persons so that they may be eaten by others we have already encountered among some Zande groups in Central Africa.54

In the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands, the demand for human flesh seems to have largely followed the supply—people were willing to buy such flesh when it appeared on the market because someone had killed a foreigner or enemy. In Vanuatu, another cluster of islands situated southeast of the Solomon Islands, on the other hand, the desire to have human flesh for feasts seems to have driven an occasional trade in people who were then killed for consumption.

The British anthropologist A. Bernard Deacon (1903–1927) did field research in Malakula, the second largest of these islands, from 1926 to his premature death of malaria. He notes that “it is said to have been common in days gone by to buy, or obtain in some other way, a human victim for an important Nimangki celebration”—a celebration held when a man acquired a new rank. Usually, one participant would buy a human victim—always an outsider from another clan—announcing beforehand that he would do so and killing the victim shortly before the feast. Deacon heard that having a human victim was not an “essential part of the ceremonial,” but that the flesh was “regarded . . . as a tasty contribution to the feast.”55

Coombe writes that most of the victims eaten in Vanuatu were killed enemies or criminals executed because of severe crimes (such as stealing a man’s pig or wife), but occasionally “a man [was] killed simply to serve as a chef d’œuvre at a feast.” When she arrived in the area, cannibalism was no longer practiced openly—the last such case she knew of took place in 1897, when “a man was added to fifty pigs for a feast that signified a chief’s rise in rank.”56

Out of view of the colonial government and prying missionaries, however, such feasts continued for longer. During a journey made shortly before World War I, the Swiss ethnologist Felix Speiser visited a village in Malakula where a “big dance feast” was about to be held. A few hours before the feast, he asked one of the participants how many pigs would be killed for the occasion. “‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that doesn’t matter now, we have a human being. Yesterday we killed him in the bush, and tonight we’ll eat him.’ He says it with the calmest face in the world, as if he was talking about the weather.”57

Speiser observes that “no great feast where pigs are sacrificed is held to be complete if at the same time a human being is not eaten; this is not a matter of mere epicureanism but based rather on the notion that only the slain man fully consecrates the feast.” While at least one human victim was considered necessary to make a feast a success, “human bodies were prepared for eating in much the same way as pigs.” Occasionally “special ceremonies” accompanied the sacrifice of a human victim; “in most cases, however, there was no special ado.” Pigs and human beings were usually slaughtered together in the same manner and cooked in the same ovens. Speiser notes that cannibalism seems to have been “purely culinary in nature,” lacking an observable ritual or spiritual side.58 Repeatedly he heard that “human flesh is particularly tasty; it is said to be much better than pork and more tender.”59 The abovementioned participant of a cannibalistic dance feast enthused about its “incomparable tenderness, whiteness and tastiness.”60

Speiser writes that by securing victims for feasts, whether through kidnapping or purchase, ambitious men could increase “the influence they wield.” The victims always came from other regions, since “for a fellow villager to be eaten brings the greatest shame on the whole village, perhaps simply because the personality of the dead person is completely destroyed in this way and therefore cannot even exist as an ancestral spirit.”61 Being thus able to destroy others and render their flesh into a tasty dish for oneself and one’s followers was a sign of power and prestige.

Section: Melanesia: Foreigner Involvement in Commercial Cannibalism

Several sources indicate that human flesh was offered for sale not only to inhabitants of nearby villages or to friendly “chiefs,” but also to missionaries and sailors. In 1882, the German branch of the Catholic Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus set up its first mission station in New Britain. Father Fromm, one of the missionaries, writes that “boiled human flesh” was repeatedly offered to them for sale. “One day, in a farmhouse, a fellow brother noticed a boy who had been hanged and was in his final throes. People laughed, ranted and enjoyed his death struggle.” When the missionary returned to the house in the evening, a basket claimed to be filled with pork was offered to him for sale. “When he opened the basket, however, he was horrified to see the whole arm and shoulder piece of the boy, cooked and wrapped in leaves.”62

About the same time, the Australian government agent Douglas Rannie visited neighboring New Ireland. Upon seeing his ship, the locals “brought down quite a quantity of the flesh of a young woman whom they had just cooked. In offering parts for sale, they said that if we white men did not like to eat it possibly some of our native boatmen would enjoy it.”63 It seems they had already realized that Europeans tended not to eat human flesh—but not yet fully that they were usually strictly opposed to the idea of treating human bodies as edible matter.

In these cases, is it not clear who the victims were and why they had to die. (The “young woman” might conceivably have died a natural death, but it does not seem likely, as no cases of corpse food have been reported from this region.) Most likely they were foreigners, possibly from enemy groups, who had strayed too far from home; it is also conceivable that they were slaves or victims deliberately purchased for consumption.64

Among the evidence of human flesh sales discovered by Haberberger in mission archives is an account of a young mission teacher to whom several pieces of this flesh had been offered. It is notable that not only cannibalism but also the open offering of human flesh continued quite long into colonial times: the attempted sale took place in New Britain around 1900, at a time when the archipelago had already been a German colony for about fifteen years.65

In the 1890s, the French count Rodolphe Festetics de Tolna (1865–1933?) spent years traveling through Melanesia on his own yacht. While on Manus Island in the north of the Bismarck Archipelago, they were approached by a group of traders “from a nearby island who . . . brought us in their canoes a lot of things to trade, including [human] arms, legs and even whole bodies.”66 Sometime earlier on Bougainville, one of the North Solomon Islands, the locals who came on board had not only brought (non-cannibalistic) goods to sell, but they also “offered to buy” the young child of a crew member, indicating that the seriously ill boy—who died of meningitis a few weeks later—would make “a delicate morsel at their next cannibalistic banquet.”67

While Festetics did not yield to the suggestion, Speiser writes that several credible reports indicate that white “sandalwood dealers sold human beings from other islands” to the inhabitants of Erromango, one of the larger islands of Vanuatu. While the dealers received sandalwood in return, the sold persons were subsequently consumed.68

The New Zealand missionary Edward Reeves, who spent many years on various islands in the southern Pacific, writes that several captains who had acquired their ships during the gold rushes in New Zealand in the 1860s, subsequently engaged in an illegal slave trade that sometimes catered to cannibal needs. “Native men and women, bought at auction or from the chiefs” in Tonga or Fiji, or in other cases simply kidnapped “from some lonely island,” were sold at other islands, either “into slavery” or “to the cannibal for his gruesome feasts.” He claims that several “successful captain and crew[s],” who acquired a small fortune in this odious manner, later “retire[d] with a competency into honourable private life in England, or settle[d] as leading citizens in Fiji or Honolulu.”69

Reeves does not state how he knew of these cases, and it is possible that he reproduces just baseless rumors, but jointly his and Speiser’s statements suggest that in the southern Pacific, just as in Central Africa, white people sometimes sold slaves to those who would eat them, thus facilitating cannibalism, likely without being cannibals themselves.

Europeans were very rarely killed and eaten in Melanesia, as has already been discussed.70 Non-white members of their crews, on the other hand, were at risk of falling victim to cannibalism, and some of them ended up supplying the local meat markets. The French marine officers A. Hagen and A. Pineau report that in March 1887 three Indigenous crew members of a French ship choose to spend some time on Malo Island (in western Vanuatu) in order to visit a friend. The captain asked a Mr. de L— to take care of them until the return of his ship. But on the island two of the men, who had been born in Pentecost Island (farther in the east), where shot and wounded. “They were not killed on the spot, but they were seized, their arms and legs tied.”71

The “two half-dead men” were transported to Aore (Aura), a smaller island next to Malo, and there sold for “twenty pigs.” Hearing what had happened, Mr. de L— immediately inquired into which village they had been sold, but he came too late. Upon reaching the village, he “surprised [the buyers] while they ate one of the two bodies”; already on his way he had encountered a man “carrying a thigh of one of the victims.” The villagers threatened to shoot Mr. de L— if he reported the case, but apparently he was not deterred.72

Various members of the largely native crew of Edwin Redlich’s schooner also became the objects of a cannibalistic commercial transaction. After leaving Makira, the schooner sailed towards the Bismarck Archipelago. In the Admiralty Islands, a group of islands in the northwest of this archipelago, Redlich sent out two “large boats, with eighteen men all told, for a three weeks’ cruize [sic].” When they had not returned after four weeks, however, he started to worry. A local ruler (rajah) agreed to supply dozens of men and several boats for a search mission. After some time, two of the boats returned with three captives, who confessed to having participated in an expedition of about forty-five men who attacked and killed the sailors while they camped on a shore. “The savages took all the bodies up the River Crabara. There they cut off their heads, kept them for trophies, and sold the bodies to a neighbouring tribe, who had cooked and eaten them.”73

Section: Cannibalistic Gift Giving in Melanesia

Human bodies and body parts were not only sold, they were also considered suitable gifts, as a variety of reports indicates. When Festetics de Tolna visited Manus Island, in addition to the commercial offerings of human flesh and bodies, he received offerings of the same kind with no price attached. A local ruler came to welcome the foreign guests, bringing “not only . . . yams, taros and obsidian; he also honored me with human limbs, a particularly honorable gift by which he showed that I was with him in a relationship of power to power.”74

Fearing to offend the “king,” Festetics not only purported to gladly accept these “gloomy consignments” but also reciprocated with some gifts of his own (of which kind he does not say). He ordered a Fijian sailor who supposedly “as a former savage had less horror than the other sailors of those bloody slices . . . to remove the flesh and to dry the bones in the sun to preserve them.” But the seemingly friendly acceptance of the gifts seems to have convinced the generous ruler that Festetics and his crew were cannibals, and so he was motivated to repeat his gifts until the Europeans had collected “so many severed limbs that our steerage resembled a lecture hall of anatomy.”75

Festetics, it might be mentioned in passing, had indeed eaten human flesh on at least one occasion, as he admits elsewhere in his works. He had already come at least close to cannibalism during a day trip into the interior of Espiritu Santo, the largest island of Vanuatu. He and his two companions had neglected to take any provisions. When they reached a village, they were attracted by a “tempting scent” coming out of an earth oven. They were assured that the oven contained “yams and pig,” but when they unwrapped several of the bundles taken out of the oven, they found not only “ yams and taros” but also a still clearly identifiable “human foot” and other human body parts.76

Festetics, who was quite hungry, admits that he “felt more disappointment than horror” at this discovery. He decided that he and his companions would eat of the yams and taros, leaving the flesh to their hosts. They ate with good appetite, though realizing that it was “a human sauce that glazed the yams, and the jelly that filled the taros had the same origin.” The villagers joined in the meal and, while Festetics saw them eat pieces of meat of clearly human origin, he found them to be very friendly and hospitable. “In a short time we were the best friends in the world,” he concludes.77

While this might be a borderline case, he clearly became a cannibal when visiting Roviana (Rubiana), one of the Solomon Islands. “The savages had gathered in considerable numbers and held a cannibal banquet in our honor. They made us eat with them.” Festetics, who “found them looking a little worrying,” considered it unwise to ignore the invitation.78 And it seems this was not even the only cannibal meal held in his honor. In a village in Malaita, the young chief who showed him around, proudly

> showed me, locked up in a house, a group of young girls who had been caught on another island and who were kept and fattened for the next cannibal feast. It had just been decided that this feast would take place the same day on the occasion of our presence in Malaita. The girls were no doubt aware that their last hour was soon to come. . . . They seemed to accept the situation with great resignation.79

Festetics then immediately jumps away from the scene—if he made any attempt to save the unfortunate girls, he does not say so.

The British captain and geographer Wilfred Powell took a much stronger stance when it came to turning down cannibal offerings. At the beginning of the three years he spent in New Britain in the late 1870s, he acquired land from a local chief in order to build a house. “When everything was finished, we had a big feast and a dance by way of house-warming.” Tor-Rarrabay, the chief who had given the land, “asked me if he should provide a human body for the feast”—apparently a well-meant offer, but decidedly rejected by Powell.80 Soon after, he heard that Tor-Rarrabay’s fighters had won a battle, “obtain[ing] two bodies, which of course were eaten.” Powell told the chief that he found such small-scale battles quite ridiculous, boasting instead “about the white men’s fighting; upon which he asked me what was done with all the bodies[;] when I told him they were buried, he turned away, evidently in disgust at such a waste.”81

Again, as in the case of the Duke of York Islanders we have encountered earlier,82 it is notable that the non-consumption of killed enemies was considered wasteful—human flesh was a resource too valuable to let spoil. Though not all flesh, as dead community members were not eaten, with the exception of (foreign-born) widows without strong ties into the community, who could be deliberately murdered for a cycle of cannibalistic gift giving that continuously created new obligations and hence required new victims, as we have seen.83

In parts of neighboring New Guinea, the status of foreign-born children was equally precarious, with some of them ending up as gifts sent for consumption to friendly villages.84 That human flesh was regarded as a suitable present in parts of this island also came to the attention to the Scottish missionary James Chalmers (1841–1901) when his wife was given “a piece of a human breast, wrapped in leaves, and carried in a basket” from a well-meaning donor who seems to have sincerely believed that she would appreciate it for her kitchen.85

An exchange of human body parts as gifts for consumption has also been reported from Vanuatu. Several sources indicate that the corpses exchanged in this way were often “produced” in warfare. Referring to Ambae Island in the north of this archipelago, Speiser writes that “the corpses [of enemies killed in war] were sent to all the villages in the neighbourhood, where a dance was performed round them before they were eaten. Or if there was a surplus, the corpses were cut into pieces and portions were sent to villages with which friendship existed.”86

The Scot John G. Paton (1824–1907) spent a large part of his adult life in Vanuatu as a Protestant missionary. In his autobiography he writes that in 1861, a few years after his arrival in Tanna Island (in the south), a war broke out on the island—driven by “old bitter grievances,” but also by the question of whether the missionaries should be allowed to stay or whether they should be killed or driven away.87 The conflict continued for months, with periods of largely passive hostility interrupted by occasional outbreaks of deadly fighting: “As many as ten men, they said, were sometimes killed in one day and feasted on by the warriors.”88 While the fighters were men, anyone unable to flee could fall victim to such attacks: “all the sick, the feeble, and the children who fell into their hands were reported to us to be murdered, cooked, and eaten,” writes Paton about an attack on a friendly village.89

Repeatedly chiefs involved in these fights alluded to the custom of sending body parts of killed enemies to friendly villages for consumption,90 and indeed it seems that such a behavior was expected. After a fight in which a hostile “district” had been “burned with fire,” Paton heard Nowar, the local chief and his protector, complain: “When so many children are being killed, why do they not send one for food to me and my family? They are as tender and good as the young fowls!”91

In 1934/35, the British anthropologist Tom Harrisson (1911–1976) spent about a year in the north of Malakula (one of the largest islands of Vanuatu), living among several native peoples.92 He notes that small acts of warfare and war cannibalism still took place at that time. Usually, a random individual from a hostile village was ambushed and killed; if possible, the body was then taken home, “cut into large pieces, wrapped in leaves and put to cook in a native oven.” The body was then eaten by all the men in the village, except for those parts that were sent elsewhere: “Bodies are always divided and sent out to other villages on all cannibal occasions. The recipient of a portion has, of course, to reciprocate it in due course or lose face; this is the cause of many apparently pointless wars; it has also caused the sudden murder of unsuspecting whites.”93

Such gifts were a means of establishing mutual friendship and support—if you engaged with others in processes of mutual gift exchange, you could feel reasonably safe that they would not suddenly turn against you and attack you. But gifts had to be reciprocated or the mutual trust would suffer, and the other party would feel exploited.

There is also a nonmutual form of gift giving in which the given object (or person) might be more properly regarded as a tribute, given to a superior power in order to ensure them of one’s loyalty and goodwill. In Fiji, east of Vanuatu, we have already encountered the practice of giving human tributes—often children or young women—to powerful rulers who then ate them or distributed their flesh among their followers.94

Several sources indicate that similar practices existed in Vanuatu. Speiser writes that when a group of villages desired to make peace with a stronger opponent, they had to “surrender . . . human beings or pigs” to the victorious side. Living people given as tributes were often killed and eaten, while in other cases they were kept alive and “assimilated into the social unit” that took them—but the donors had no control over their future fate. Dead bodies were also accepted as tributes: “If there was no desire to sacrifice a fellow villager, there remained the possibility of killing someone in a third village and handing him over to the adversary as an atonement”—but in such cases there was the danger of triggering a new conflict with the “third village” and starting a new cycle of warfare and deadly revenge.95

The Irish naval officer and ethnographer Boyle T. Somerville (1863–1936) records a specific instance of this custom. A missionary employed in Uripiv (a small island next to Malekula) told him of “a vendetta between two villages which had been closed” by the weaker party “sending . . . a small boy as sacrifice” and peace offering; the boy was subsequently butchered and eaten. More usual, he adds, was the “payment of pigs” in such cases.96

In some regions powerful men seem to have been able to request human offerings even in times of peace. Speiser writes that in Ambrym, an island situated east of Malekula, “a man of high rank demanded in turn from one or the other village in his domain a human being for roasting—a demand which no one dared to refused. Children or well-nourished youths had to be delivered to him, bound to poles like pigs.”97 The Presbyterian missionary Robert Lamb reports this as well, based on the firsthand account of a missionary who worked on that island.98 We may assume that most of the victims had been captured or maybe purchased elsewhere, with people giving up their own children only if they really had no other choice.

Gift giving was a way to assure mutually friendly relations (if symmetrical) or to confirm a hierarchy of power and superiority (if not). But why had human flesh and bodies become suitable gifts? The sources indicate that cannibalism was often a side effect of war and of acts possibly considered self-defense: vanquishing one’s enemies and getting rid of potentially dangerous strangers produced dead bodies, and not to utilize these dead bodies would have been wasteful. Because enemies or strangers had to be overpowered first, access to human flesh also became a sign of power: in order to be able to consume others, you had to be stronger and more successful than they.

Festetics de Tolna, who not only had participated in at least two cannibal meals (see above), but who had also seen the consumption of human flesh at several other occasions,99 comments that cannibalism was driven not only by the “need to vary the animal food in a country where no other edible mammal than the pig is known,” but that “it is also a symbol. It is a sign of victory.”100 Moreover, whether because of this association with victory or for other reasons, human flesh was considered “particularly tasty” and “much better than pork,” as Speiser and other observers noted.101 These factors likely contributed to make human flesh not just one gift among many, but a particularly prized one.

Section: Concluding Remarks

To return to the commercial aspects of cannibal practices in Melanesia and Africa, it is notable that such practices differed considerably from our modern notions of trade and commerce. In the modern world, meat production is a large-scale and highly industrialized process. Even in preindustrial societies, when meat appeared on the markets, it usually came from deliberately bred domesticated animals, much rarer from hunted animals, and hardly ever from carrion (dead animals not deliberately killed for consumption). But people, as far as we know, have never been deliberately bred for consumption. Nor were there “people hunters” who made a living by hunting or kidnapping and killing people in order to sell their flesh.

Commercial cannibal was shaped by the availability of victims—victims who, in contrast to animals, were not deliberately bred or systematically hunted. Depending on the local situation, captured enemies, kidnapped foreigners, convicted criminals, or otherwise hard-to-sell slaves could be slaughtered in order to sell their flesh. But since such victims could only be secured under certain circumstances and from time to time, nobody “made a living” just by selling human flesh. Therefore, the commercial trade in human flesh could exist only as a side activity connected to other practices such as warfare and slavery.

The regular exchange of corpses documented for parts of Central Africa likely was the most institutionalized practice investigated in this chapter, considering that in certain regions nearly every corpse seems to have been used for this purpose. In contrast to the sale of the flesh of enemies, victims of kidnapping, criminals, or slaves, this was (in general) a nondeadly practice. Often based on the notion of mutual gift exchange rather than money-based trade, it was also less commercial that many of the other practices examined in this chapter.

In Melanesia, on the other hand, a regular exchange of human flesh and corpses as gifts has also been documented, but here such flesh usually came from deliberately killed victims. While a gift exchange on the basis of mutuality is not a commercial transaction, it likewise creates an obligation in the recipient—who does not have to pay immediately but is expected to follow up later with a suitable counter-gift. In Melanesia, the cannibalistic gift exchange served to secure relationships of trust and friendship between influential men and maybe whole communities—at the cost of outsiders and weaker members of the society, such as captured strangers or foreign-born widows.[/s]