Zappo Zap
The Zappo Zaps were a group of Songye people from the eastern Kasaï region in what today is the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
[2] According to the missionary William Henry Sheppard, the Zappo Zap people all had tattooed faces and had filed their teeth to sharp points.
[9][10] In the Kasaï region, the Songye, and especially the Zappo Zaps, were widely admired for their power, which allowed them to both capture and consume considerable numbers of slaves.
The group were thriving through slave raiding and trading with caravans from the Arab and Swahili towns on the Lualaba River to the east and from Bihe in Angola to the southwest.
[14] In 1883 Zappo Zap felt strong enough to challenge the king of the Ben'Eki, leading to a civil war that drew in all the slavers of the region.
He met the Congo Free State commander Paul Le Marinel near Lusambo, with Chief Mukenge Kalamba of the Lulua, both retreating westward from the Lualaba.
Lapsley gave Zappo Zap a gift of brass wire and cloth, and received some young slaves in return.
On the other hand, with their plucked eyebrows and eyelashes, filed teeth and traditions of slaving and cannibalism they were stereotypes of the Western view of African savages.
[1] Even in the employ of the state, they continued their cannibal customs, "raping and eating" the inhabitants of villages that failed to deliver the large amounts of rubber demanded as taxes.
[2] Sheppard's journal of 14–15 September 1899 describes how he pretended to be friendly and through asking casual questions of Mulumba Nkusu, whom he knew, obtained the story of what had happened and was shown the remains.
[21] Sheppard counted eighty-one right hands that had been cut off and were being dried before being taken to show the state officers what the Zappo Zaps had achieved.
[22] The missionaries protested, and to their surprise the Free State officials responded, ordering the release of the women prisoners and the arrest of Mulumba.
[23] In January 1900 a member of the Executive Committee for Foreign Missions acknowledged receiving reports and letters about the Zappo Zap atrocities from the missionaries, but reminded the mission of "the necessity of the utmost caution, in making representations regarding these matters to those in authority, or in publishing them to the world, to observe all proper deference to 'the powers that be,' and to avoid anything that might give any color to a charge of doing or saying things inconsistent with its purely spiritual and non-political character".
[18] When Mark Twain published his King Leopold's Soliloquy five years later, he mentioned Sheppard by name and referred to his account of the massacre.
[26] Despite the help the Zappo Zaps had given, it was not until 1910 that Leopold's successors, the colonial authorities of the Belgian Congo, had brought the Kuba Kingdom under control and established a state post in the royal capital.
