Cannibalism in Africa

Nyamnjoh argues that, instead of trying to make such an implausible case, it is better to "accept and put cannibalism in perspective", which also means recognizing that there are ways of exploiting others that are hardly better than their physical consumption, even if leaving them "seemingly alive".

[10] Nyamnjoh also describes it as illogical that sceptics readily accept "state violence, bloody wars of genocidal proportions and violent encounters, slavery, colonialism and myriad forms of rabid imperialism" as part of the historical record, while rejecting the idea of cannibal practices that may well "have gone with or resulted from such conflicts".

[10] Other authors likewise observe a "strong ethnocentrism" in the idea that cannibalism could never have been a socially accepted custom, in that a taboo of our own society is silently (or explicitly) declared to be universal.

[11][12] Kajsa Ekholm Friedman notes that such an utter rejection of cannibalism as human possibility makes sense only if one implicitly considers it "the worst thing of all" – worse than any other behaviour people engaged in, and therefore uniquely suited to vilifying others.

[19] 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.

"[23] 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 ...

Other Muslim authors writing around that time also reported that cannibalism was practised in some West African regions and that slave girls were sometimes slaughtered for food since "their flesh is the best thing we have to eat.

[32] In 1895, a German missionary witnessed how Nembe warriors slaughtered more than 40 captives – foreigners working for the Royal Niger Company – in a village near Akassa:[34][35] Every moment, men, women and even children passed me.

[37][38] 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."

[39] 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".

[32][43] According to clergyman and archdeacon George 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.

[66] 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.

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.

[82] 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.

[84][85] 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.

"On the contrary, people expressed their strong appreciation" of the "meat that speaks" – as human flesh was often called[122] – "and could not understand the hysterical reactions from the white man's side", as Kajsa Ekholm Friedman remarks.

"[129] Torday and others noticed that people did "not distinguish between the practice of eating the flesh of goats and that of human beings" and hence failed even to understand complaints by other meat eaters about cannibal customs, rejecting them as illogical and hypocritical.

[131] At Bangala Station, when a local chief paid a visit to the Belgian colonial officer Camille Coquilhat, he had a large party of guests in his canoe, as well as "the remaining half of [a] steamed man in an enormous pot" – a slave who had been slaughtered and cooked in the morning.

[134]Hinde and other observers likewise note that slaves routinely had to "serve as food" in some areas and that the consumers explained this with a desire for "meat", apparently not considering the humanity of the eaten particularly important.

[89][135] Human flesh was, however, preferred for its taste,[89][136] and several Bangala men told Hinde that a proper feast had to have a whole prisoner or slave as its centrepiece, while other mammals and birds were considered more ordinary fare.

[137] Ekholm Friedman observes that Congolese cannibalism often seems to have been "strikingly profane", as many victims were not enemies eaten out of hatred, but "just meat bought at the market" or sometimes enslaved people "slain for refractory behavior", with no discernible distinction made between slaves and edible animals.

[146] Oral records indicate that already at a time when slavery was not widespread in the Congo Basin, people assumed that anyone enslaved and sold would likely be eaten "because cannibalism was common, and slaves were purchased especially for such purposes".

[147] In the 19th century, warfare and slave raids increased in the Congo Basin as a result of the international demand for enslaved people, who could no longer be so easily captured nearer to the coasts.

"[82] 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".

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.

[164] Other travellers heard persistent rumours that there was still an underground trade in enslaved people, 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.

[179][180][172] The oldest firm evidence of cannibalism comes from cut marks on bones uncovered in Turkana, Kenya, from 1.45 million years ago, indicating archaic humans were eating each other by this point.

The shinbone replaces an older Homo habilis or Australopithecus skull dated to about 2 million years ago that was more controversial as evidence of cannibalism, which has markings that are now suggested to be due to natural causes.

[182] A number of African oral history accounts and Portuguese documents mention a people known as Zimba, who around the 1590s invaded parts of northern Zambesia (today Zambia) and neighbouring regions.

The Dutch missionary and anthropologist Jan Matthew Schoffeleers writes that, because of the "striking overlaps" between written sources and local oral history, "one has to take such information seriously unless one has good reasons for not doing so".