Cannibalism in Africa

Sale of human flesh in the late 16th century. Engraving by Theodor de Bry illustrating Filippo Pigafetta's Report of the Kingdom of Congo, which contains the oldest known account of cannibalism in Central Africa.

Acts of cannibalism in Africa have been reported from various parts of the continent, ranging from prehistoric times until the 21th century. The possibly oldest evidence of human cannibalism has been found in Kenya in eastern Africa. There is little evidence of later cannibalism in East Africa, but the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was reputed to practise it, and acts of voluntary and forced cannibalism have been reported from the South Sudanese Civil War. While the oldest known written mention of cannibalism is from the tomb of the Egyptian king Unas, later evidence from Egypt shows it to only re-appear during occasional episodes of severe famine.

The oldest records of cannibalism in West Africa are from Muslim authors who visited the region in the 14th century. Later accounts often ascribe it to secret societies such as the Leopard Society. Cannibal practices were also documented among various Nigerian peoples such as the Igbo. The victims were usually killed or captured enemies, kidnapped strangers, and purchased slaves. Cannibalism was practised to express hatred and to humiliate one's enemies, as well as to avoid waste and because meat in general was rare; human flesh was also considered as tastier than that of animals. While its consumption during peacetime seems to have ceased, cannibal acts are on record for civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone around the turn from the 20th to the 21st century.

In the late 19th century, cannibalism seems to have been especially prevalent in parts of the Congo Basin. While some groups rejected the custom, others indulged in human flesh, often considering it superior to other meats. Killed or captured enemies could be consumed, and individuals from different ethnic groups were sometimes hunted down for the same purpose. Slaves were also sacrificed for the table, especially young children, who were otherwise in little demand but praised as particularly delicious. In some areas, human flesh and slaves intended for eating were sold at marketplaces. While cannibalism became rarer under the colonial Congo Free State and its Belgium-run successor, colonial authorities seem to have done little to suppress the practice. Human flesh still appeared on the tables up to the 1950s and was both eaten and sold during the chaos of the Congo Crisis in the 1960s. Occasional reports of cannibalism during violent conflicts continue into the 21st century.

North of the Congo Basin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, dictator of the Central African Republic, seems to have eaten the flesh of opponents and prisoners during the 1970s. There are further reports of such acts from the civil war in the same country, which started in 2012.

North Africa

Early history

Sarcophagus and funerary chamber in the Pyramid of Unas, where the Cannibal Hymn was found

Cannibalism was occasionally practised in Egypt during ancient and Roman times, as well as later during severe famines. The oldest written reference to cannibalism known from anywhere in the world may be from the tomb of the ancient Egyptian king Unas (24th century BCE). It contained a hymn in praise of the king portraying him as a cannibal who eats both "men" and "gods", thus indicating an attitude towards cannibalism quite different from the modern one.

Cassius Dio recorded cannibalism practised by the bucoli, Egyptian tribes led by Isidorus against Rome. They sacrificed and consumed two Roman officers in a ritualistic fashion, swearing an oath over their entrails.

Middle Ages

In the early 13th century, the Arab physician Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi lived in Cairo when a severe famine, caused by the Nile failing to overflow its banks, devastated the country. According to his detailed description, the food situation became so dire that many people turned to cannibalism. He repeatedly saw "little children, roasted or boiled", offered for sale in baskets on street corners during a heavy famine that started in 1200 CE. Once he even saw "a child nearing the age of puberty, who had been found roasted"; two young people confessed to having killed and cooked the child.

In some cases children were roasted and offered for sale by their own parents; other victims were street children, who had become very numerous and were often kidnapped and cooked by people looking for food or extra income. Al-Latif states that "the guilty were rarely caught in the act, and only when they were careless." The victims were so numerous that sometimes "two or three children, even more, would be found in a single cooking pot." Al-Latif notes that, while initially people were shocked by such acts, they "eventually ... grew accustomed, and some conceived such a taste for these detestable meats that they made them their ordinary provender, eating them for enjoyment and ... [thinking] up a variety of preparation methods.... The horror people had felt at first vanished entirely; one spoke if it, and heard it spoken of, as a matter of everyday indifference."

West Africa

Middle Ages

When the Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta visited the Mali Empire in the 1350s, he was surprised to see sultan Sulayman give "a slave girl as part of his reception-gift" to a group of warriors from a cannibal region who had come to visit his court. "They slaughtered her and ate her and smeared their faces and hands with her blood and came in gratitude to the sultan." He was told that the sultan did so every time he received the cannibal guests. Though a Muslim like Ibn Battuta himself, he apparently considered catering to his visitors' preferences more important than whatever reservations he may have had about the practice. Other Muslim authors writing around that time also report that cannibalism was practised in some West Africa regions and that slave girls were sometimes slaughtered for food, since "their flesh is the best thing we have to eat."

Early modern and colonial era

A sculpture by Paul Wissaert depicting a leopard man, 1913

The Leopard Society was a cannibalistic secret society that existed until the mid-1900s and was active mostly in regions that today belong to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast. The Leopard men would dress in leopard skins and waylay travellers with sharp claw-like weapons in the form of leopards' claws and teeth. The victims' flesh would be cut from their bodies and distributed to members of the society.

Cannibal customs also were recorded among the Igbo and various other Nigerian peoples, by both colonial explorers and natives. Various people have memories of their own ancestors eating human flesh a few generations earlier. Up to the 1870s at least – and in some cases until the 1900s – killed or captured members of enemy groups were consumed after successful war campaigns, sometimes in large numbers. The flesh of enemies was eaten not only to celebrate one's victory, but also for reasons of efficiency. Since "feeding in the battle field was difficult", warriors were not inclined to waste edible matter. But there are also accounts indicating that captives were divided among the victors, who took them home to kill and eat them. In 1895, a German missionary witnessed the slaughter of more than 40 captives in a village near Akassa:

Every moment, men, women and even children passed me. One would be carrying a human leg on his shoulder, another would be carrying the lungs or the heart of some unfortunate Kroo-boy in his or her hands. Several times I myself was offered my choice of one of these morsels, dripping with gore."

A repeatedly expressed motive for consuming one's enemies was hatred: by reducing them to edible matter that was then digested one destroyed them completely, physically as well as symbolically, thus achieving the "ultimate revenge". In some regions, people also believed that a person's spirit would usually survive their physical body, but that the spirit had to die too if the body was completely destroyed, so cannibalism was employed to achieve the total annihilation that killing alone could not achieve.

Enemies were not the only victims, however. A number of reports indicate that kidnapped strangers or purchased slaves could be eaten too. In some areas, any lonely stranger was at risk of being kidnapped and either enslaved or else – especially if they were considered less valuable to sell – killed and consumed. Oral accounts indicate that at the start of the 20th century, though the open slave trade was by then a thing of the past, "people were still being kidnapped and either killed and eaten or sold away or sacrificed to one god or the other." The victims were often playing children or lonely travellers. In earlier times, when slavery was still an accepted institution, young children purchased from other regions were sometimes deliberately fattened, "kept in pens" much like animals, before being "killed and baked". Clergyman and archdeacon George Basden notes that slaves in general "had no rights of person" and that "in certain districts they were not uncommonly acquired in order to furnish a supply of meat", or when a victim for a human sacrifice was needed.

The consumption of kidnapped strangers or purchased slaves could hardly be due to hatred, and indeed the British anthropologist Charles Kingsley Meek found that the most frequent rationale he heard from cannibals or former cannibals in northern Nigeria was that human flesh was eaten "purely as meat". People did not want to waste an opportunity to eat good meat when they saw one, and the lives of enemies or outsiders were of no concern to them. His colleague Percy Amaury Talbot observed the same among the Igbo and other inhabitants of southern Nigeria: human flesh was eaten because of a "great longing for meat". Meat of any kind was a rare luxury for most people and they saw no reason to be squeamish about how they got it, as long as it did not come from relatives or friends. Moreover, human flesh was preferred over that of animals for gastronomic reasons: it was considered the tastiest of all meats because of its "succulence" and sweetness (followed by monkey meat as second best). Young children were most appreciated, since "the younger the person, the tenderer are the 'joints'".

An Igbo market, photographed by George Basden in the early 20th century

Missionaries and travellers report that human flesh was offered for sale at markets "in many parts of Nigeria". According to Basden, who spent more than 30 years in the country, in some southern regions it had a well-established market price and was sold much like any other commodity; it usually came from war captives, kidnapped strangers, and purchased or bartered slaves. While travelling near Onitsha around the year 1900, Basden found out that his servants and carriers had all repeatedly eaten human flesh. Once they were sure that he bore them no ill will, they talked freely about the custom, including their preferred body parts. He notes that these and other former cannibals he met were often "quite good-natured folk", but also that in traditional Igbo society, cannibalism and human sacrifices were accepted as normal, uncontroversial practices – people did not see them as sinful or wrong.

Royal canoe of the Kingdom of Bonny, 1890

King George Oruigbiji Pepple of the Kingdom of Bonny (ruled 1866–1883) embarrassed his British allies by "celebrat[ing] the anniversary of his father's death with a cannibal feast". When the British reproached him, he replied that he had merely upheld a time-honoured "custom of his country", also practised by his forefathers.

20th century to present

In the 1980s, Médecins Sans Frontières, the international medical charity, supplied photographic and other documentary evidence of ritualized cannibal feasts among the participants in Liberia's internecine strife preceding the First Liberian Civil War to representatives of Amnesty International. Amnesty International declined to publicize this material; the Secretary-General of the organization, Pierre Sane, said at the time in an internal communication that "what they do with the bodies after human rights violations are committed is not part of our mandate or concern". The existence of cannibalism on a wide scale in Liberia was subsequently verified.

A few years later, reported of cannibal acts committed during the Second Liberian Civil War and Sierra Leone Civil War emerged.

Northern central Africa

20th century to present

Jean-Bédel Bokassa, self-crowned emperor suspected of cannibalism

Cannibalism has also been reported from the Central African Republic. Jean-Bédel Bokassa ruled the country from 1966 to 1979 as dictator and finally as self-declared emperor. Tenacious rumours that he liked to dine on the flesh of opponents and political prisoners were substantiated by several testimonies during his eventual trial in 1986/1987. Bokassa's successor David Dacko stated that he had seen photographs of butchered bodies hanging in the cold-storage rooms of Bokassa's palace immediately after taking power in 1979. These or similar photos, said to show a walk-in freezer containing the bodies of schoolchildren arrested in April 1979 during protests and beat to death in the 1979 Ngaragba Prison massacre, were also published in Paris Match magazine. During the trial, Bokassa's former chef testified that he had repeatedly cooked human flesh from the palace's freezers for his boss's table. While Bokassa was found guilty of murder in at least twenty cases, the charge of cannibalism was nevertheless not taken into account for the final verdict, since the consumption of human remains is considered a misdemeanor under CAR law and all previously committed misdemeanors had been forgiven by a general amnesty declared in 1981.

Further acts of cannibalism were reported to have targeted the Muslim minority during the Central African Republic Civil War which started in 2012.

Congo Basin

Early modern and colonial era

A German map published in 1893 depicting the distribution of human cannibalism as seen by the publishers.
Pink areas thought to still be "fully" cannibalistic at that time; light green areas considered formerly or rarely cannibalistic.

Cannibalism was practised widely in the some parts of the Congo Basin, though it was by no means universal. Some peoples, such as the Bakongo, rejected the practice altogether. In some other regions human flesh was eaten "only occasionally to mark a particularly significant ritual occasion, but in other societies in the Congo, perhaps even a majority by the late nineteenth century, people ate human flesh whenever they could, saying that it was far tastier than other meat", notes the anthropologist Robert B. Edgerton.

Many people not only freely admitted eating human flesh, but were surprised when they heard that Europeans did not eat it. Emil Torday observed: "They are not ashamed of cannibalism, and openly admit that they practise it because of their liking for human flesh", with the primary reason for cannibalism being a gastronomic preference for such dishes. Torday once received "a portion of a human thigh" sent as a well-intended gift, and other Europeans were offered pieces of human flesh in gestures of hospitality. People expected to be rewarded with fresh human flesh for services well performed and were disappointed when they received something else instead.

In addition to enemies killed or captured in war, slaves were frequent victims. Many "healthy children" had to die "to provide a feast for their owners". Young slave children were at particular risk since they were in low demand for other purposes (and hence cheap), while their flesh was widely praised as especially delicious, "just as many modern meat eaters prefer lamb over mutton and veal over beef". Such acts were not considered controversial – people did not understand why Europeans objected to the killing of slaves, while themselves killing and eating goats; they argued that both were the "property" of their owners, to be used as it pleased them.

Further information: Child cannibalism § The Congo Basin

A third group of victims were persons from other ethnic groups, who in some areas were "hunt[ed] for food" just like animals. Many of the victims, who were usually killed with poisoned arrows or with clubs, were "women and children ... who had ventured too far from home while gathering firewood or fetching drinking water" and who were targeted "because they were easier to overpower" and also considered tastier than adult men.

Trade in human flesh and people for consumption

In some regions there was a regular trade in slaves destined to be eaten, and the flesh of recently butchered slaves was available for purchase as well. Some people fattened slave children to sell them for consumption; if such a child became ill and lost too much weight, their owner drowned them in the nearest river instead of wasting further food on them, as a French missionary once witnessed. Human flesh not sold the same day was smoked, so it could be "sold at leisure" during subsequent weeks. Europeans were often hesitant to buy smoked meat since they knew that the "smoking of human flesh to preserve it was ... widespread", but once meat was smoked, its origin was hard to determine.

Instead of being killed quickly, "persons to be eaten often had both of their arms and legs broken and were made to sit up to their necks in a stream for [up to] three days, a practice said to make their flesh more tender, before they were killed and cooked." Both adults and children, and also animals such as birds and monkeys, were routinely submitted to this treatment prior to being slaughtered.

Various reports indicate that living slaves were exposed on marketplaces, so that purchasers could choose which body parts to buy before the victim was butchered and the flesh distributed.

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

This custom, reported around both the central Congo River and the Ubangi in the north, seem to have been motivated by a desire to get fresh rather than smoked flesh, since without refrigeration there was no other way to preserve flesh from spoiling quickly.

War cannibalism

Prisoner about to be beheaded among the Boloki near the Ruki River. In this area, captured enemies were usually ransomed, sold into slavery, or else killed and eaten.

Killed or captured enemies made another sort of victims, even during wars fought by the colonial state. During the 1892–1894 war between the Congo Free State and the Swahili–Arab city-states of Nyangwe and Kasongo in Eastern Congo, there were reports of widespread cannibalization of the bodies of defeated combatants by the Batetela allies of the Belgian commander Francis Dhanis. In April 1892, 10,000 Batetela, under the command of Gongo Lutete, joined forces with Dhanis in a campaign against the Swahili–Arab leaders Sefu and Mohara. After one early skirmish in the campaign, Dhanis's medical officer, Captain Sidney Langford Hinde, "noticed that the bodies of both the killed and wounded had vanished." When fighting broke out again, Hinde saw his Batetela allies drop human arms, legs and heads on the road; now he had to accept that they had really "carried them off for food", which he had initially doubted.

According to Hinde, the conquest of Nyangwe was followed by "days of cannibal feasting" during which hundreds were eaten, with only their heads being kept as mementos. During this time, Lutete "hid himself in his quarters, appalled by the sight of thousands of men smoking human hands and human chops on their camp fires, enough to feed his army for many days." Hinde also noted that the Batetela town Ngandu had "at least 2,000 polished human skulls" as a "solid white pavement in front" of its gates, with human skulls crowning every post of the stockade.

A Congolese man, Nsala, looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, cooked, and cannibalized by members of the Congo Free State's Force Publique in 1904

Soon after, Nyangwe's surviving population rose in a rebellion, during whose brutal suppression a thousand rioters were killed by the new government. One young Belgian officer wrote home: "Happily Gongo's men ... ate them up [in a few hours]. It's horrible but exceedingly useful and hygienic.... I should have been horrified at the idea in Europe! but it seems quite natural to me here. Don't show this letter to anyone indiscreet". Hinde too commented approvingly on the thoroughness with which the cannibals "disposed of all the dead, leaving nothing even for the jackals, and thus sav[ing] us, no doubt, from many an epidemic." Generally the Free State administration seems to have done little to suppress cannibal customs, sometimes even tolerating or facilitating them among its own auxiliary troops and allies.

Further information: Congo Free State § Cannibalism

In August 1903, the UK diplomat Roger Casement wrote from Lake Tumba to a consular colleague: "The people round here are all cannibals.... There are also dwarfs (called Batwas) in the forest who are even worse cannibals than the taller human environment. They eat man flesh raw! It's a fact." He added that assailants would "bring down a dwarf on the way home, for the marital cooking pot.... The Dwarfs, as I say, dispense with cooking pots and eat and drink their human prey fresh cut on the battlefield while the blood is still warm and running. These are not fairy tales ..., but actual gruesome reality in the heart of this poor, benighted savage land."

Origins and connections to international trade

The origins of Congolese cannibalism are lost in time. The oldest known references to it can be found in Filippo Pigafetta's Report of the Kingdom of Congo, published in the late 16th century based on the memories of Duarte Lopez, a Portuguese trader who had lived for several years in the Kingdom of Kongo. Lopez reported that farther up the Congo River, there lived a people who ate both killed enemies and those of their slaves which they could not sell for a "good price".

Oral records indicate that, already at a time when slavery was not widespread in the Congo Basin, people assumed that anyone sold as a slave would likely be eaten, "because cannibalism was common, and slaves were purchased especially for such purposes". In the 19th century, warfare and slave raids increased in the Congo Basin as a result of the international demand for slaves, who could no longer be so easily captured nearer to the coasts. As a result, the consumption of slaves increased as well, since most of those sold in the Atlantic slave trade were young and healthy individuals aged from 14 to 30, and similar preferences existed in the Arab–Swahili slave trade. However, many of the captives were younger, older, or otherwise considered less saleable, and such victims were often eaten by the slave raiders or sold to cannibals who purchased them as "meat".

Most of the accounts of cannibalism in the Congo are from the late 19th century, when the Atlantic slave trade had come to a halt, but slavery still existed in Africa and the Arab world. Various reports indicate that around the Ubangi River, slaves were frequently exchanged against ivory, which was then exported to Europe or the Americas, while the slaves were eaten. Some European traders seem to have directly and knowingly taken part in these deadly transactions, while others turned a blind eye. The local elephant hunters preferred the flesh especially of young human beings – four to sixteen was the preferred age range, according to one trader – "because it was not only more tender, but also much quicker to cook" than the meat of elephants or other large animals.

Eyewitness accounts

While sceptics such as William Arens sometimes claim that there are no credible eyewitness accounts of cannibal acts, there are numerous such accounts from the Congo. David Livingstone "saw human parts being cooked with bananas, and many other Europeans" – among them Hinde – "reported seeing cooked human remains lying around abandoned fires." Soldiers of the German explorer Hermann Wissmann saw how people captured and wounded in a slave raid were shot by a Swahili–Arab leader and then handed over "to his auxiliary troops, who ... cut them in pieces and dragged them to the fire to serve as their supper".

"A cannibal scene with human flesh roasting over the fire" – drawing by Herbert Ward (1891)

Visiting a village near the Aruwimi River, the British artist Herbert Ward saw a man "carrying four large lumps of human flesh, with the skin still clinging to it, on a stick", and soon afterwards "a party of men squatting round a fire, before which this ghastly flesh, exposed on spits, was cooking"; he was told that the flesh came from a man who had been killed a few hours before. Another time, when "camping for the night with a party of Arab raiders and their followers", he and his companions felt "compelled to change the position of our tent owing to the offensive smell of human flesh, which was being cooked on all sides of us."

The Belgian colonial officer Camille Coquilhat saw "the remaining half of [a] steamed man" – a slave who had been purchased for consumption and slaughtered a few hours earlier – "in an enormous pot" and discussed with the slave's owner, who at first thought that Coquilhat was joking when he objected to his cannibalistic customs. Near the Ubangi River, which formed the border between the Belgian and the French colonial enterprises, the French traveller Jacques d'Uzès saw local auxiliaries of the French troops kill "some women and some children" after a punitive expedition, then cooking their flesh in pots and "enjoy[ing]" it.

Among the Mangbetu people in the north-east, Georg A. Schweinfurth saw a human arm being smoked over a fire. At other occasion, he watched a group of young women using boiling water for "scalding the hair off the lower half of a human body" in preparation for cooking it. A few years later, Gaetano Casati saw how the roasted leg of a slave woman was served at the court of the Mangbetu king. More eyewitness accounts could be added.

20th century to present

Reports from the Belgian Congo indicate that cannibalism was still widely practised in some regions in the 1920s. Hermann Norden, an American who visited the Kasai region in 1923, found that "cannibalism was commonplace". People were afraid of walking outside of populated places because there was a risk of being attacked, killed, and eaten. Norden talked with a Belgian who "admitted that it was quite likely he had occasionally been served human flesh without knowing what he was eating" – it was simply a dish that appeared on the tables from time.

Other travellers heard persistent rumours that there was still a certain underground trade in slaves, some of whom (adults and children alike) were regularly killed and then "cut up and cooked as ordinary meat", around both the Kasai and the Ubangi River. The colonial state seems to have done little to discourage or punish such acts. There are also reports that human flesh was sometimes sold at markets in both Kinshasa and Brazzaville, "right in the middle of European life." Norden observed that cannibalism was so common that people talked about it quite "casual[ly]": "No stress was put upon it, nor horror shown. This person had died of fever; that one had been eaten. It was all a matter of the way one's luck held."

The culinary use of human flesh continued in some cases even after World War II. In 1950, a Belgian administrator ate a "remarkably delicious" dish, learning after he had finished "that the meat came from a young girl." A few years later, a Danish traveller was served a piece of the "soft and tender" flesh of a butchered woman. During the Congo Crisis, which followed the country's independence in 1960, body parts of killed enemies were eaten and the flesh of war victims was sometimes sold for consumption. In Luluabourg (today Kananga), an American journalist saw a truck smeared with blood. A police commissioner investigating the scene told her that "sixteen women and children" had been lured in a nearby village to enter the truck, kidnapped, and "butchered ... for meat." She also talked with a Presbyterian missionary, who excused this act as due to "protein need.... The bodies of their enemies are the only source of protein available."

In conflict situations, cannibalism persisted into the 21st century. During the first decade of the new century, cannibal acts have been reported from the Second Congo War and the Ituri conflict in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to UN investigators, fighters belonging to several factions "grilled" human bodies "on a barbecue"; young girls were boiled "alive in ... big pots filled with boiling water and oil" or "cut into small pieces ... and then eaten." A UN human rights expert reported in July 2007 that sexual atrocities committed by rebel groups as well as by armed forces and national police against Congolese women went "far beyond rape" and included sexual slavery, forced incest, and cannibalism. In the Ituri region, much of the violence, which included "widespread cannibalism", was consciously directed against pygmies, who were believed to be relatively helpless and even considered subhuman by some other Congolese.

UN investigators also collected eyewitness accounts of cannibalism during a violent conflict that shook the Kasai region in 2016/2017. Various parts of killed enemies and beheaded captives were cooked and eaten, including their heads, thighs, and penises.

East Africa

Prehistory

The oldest evidence of potential human cannibalism comes from cut marks on bones uncovered in Turkana, Kenya from 1.45 million years ago, indicating hominins were eating other hominins by this point. However, at this time and place multiple species of hominins coexisted, so whether this was strictly speaking cannibalism is not certain. More extensive evidence of Human bones that have been "de-fleshed" by other humans goes back 600,000 years. The oldest Homo sapiens bones (from Ethiopia) show signs of this as well.

20th century to present

In the 1970s, the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was reputed to practise cannibalism. More recently, the Lord's Resistance Army has been accused of routinely engaging in ritual or magical cannibalism. There are also reports that witch doctors in the country sometimes use body parts of children in their medicine.

During the South Sudanese Civil War, cannibalism and forced cannibalism have been reported from South Sudan.

See also

• Cannibalism in Asia
• Cannibalism in Europe
• Cannibalism in Oceania
• Cannibalism in the Americas
• Child cannibalism
• Idi Amin, Ugandan dictator who is alleged to have consumed humans
• List of incidents of cannibalism

Bibliography

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• Burns, Alan (1963). History of Nigeria (6 ed.). London: George Allen and Unwin.
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