Eat Thy Neighbour (5 page)

If this ritualistic approach to cannibalism seems much more purposeful than most of the examples cited above, it should also be noted that among the Doe tribe of Tanzania it was customary as late as 1900, when a chief died, that a stranger to the tribe was ritually killed and eaten in memory of the fallen chief. The unwitting parallel to Christian communion can hardly be missed.

Tragically, cannibalism for pure enjoyment survived in Africa until very recently. During the reign of Emperor Bokassa of the Central African Empire between 1976 and 1981, the imperial table was frequently graced with dishes made from the bodies of infants stolen from the families of Bokassa’s political opposition. When Paul Bokassa was overthrown, his freezer was found to hold the bodies of dozens of field-dressed babies; whether Bokassa preferred baby meat or just saw it as one more way to terrorise his countrymen is a moot point. Almost simultaneous to Bokassa’s reign, President Idi Amin kept Uganda in a constant state of terror with his continual ‘ethnic cleansings’ and political purges that reportedly took the lives of 300,000 to 500,000 of his own people. Like Bokassa, when Amin was overthrown in 1979, his presidential freezer was found to contain items more appropriate to a morgue than a food storage facility.

Continuing our anthropophagic safari eastwards, we move from Africa to the Far East. As we learned in chapter two, some of the earliest archaeological evidence of cannibalism has been unearthed at Dragon Bone Hill outside Beijing, China, but at half a million years of age Peking Man can scarcely be classified as Oriental and there are certainly no first-hand accounts of his dietary preferences. For that we must move to the north China kingdom of the Huns during the fourth century
AD
. There, during the reign of Shihu, dinner guests were served delicacies made from the most beautiful members of the king’s harem. To demonstrate to his guests that he had not simply selected an ugly discard from among his many wives, Shihu had the girl’s head displayed on the table during the festivities.

Half a millennium later, during the ninth and tenth centuries, Arab travellers returned from China with reports that human meat was routinely to be found in public marketplaces. The habit of cannibalism may have been fairly widespread among the tribes of China, because when Genghis Khan and his Mongols invaded Europe in 1242, they, too, were reported to be eaters of human flesh. Christian chronicler Ivo of Norbonne wrote that the Mongols ate their captives ‘like so much bread’. Another chronicler reported that the Mongols ate nearly everyone captured in battle, male and female alike; the finest young women going to the officers’ mess, lesser trophies going to the enlisted men. Evidently, the Mongols were not above eating each other when the necessity arose. John Pain del Carpine reported that when a Mongol army was under siege, one in ten of the enlisted men were sacrificed to feed the rest. Like the Arabs before him, Carpine also claimed that human flesh was a common dietary component throughout northern China during the Sung dynasty and that in the capital, Hankow, there were restaurants specialising in dishes prepared with human meat. Some of these reports must be taken with a pinch of salt, however. Most early travellers wildly exaggerated their experiences in foreign lands, and the fear of the Mongols was so great during their invasion of Eastern Europe that any claim – no matter how wild – would have been considered valid propaganda. Still, as recently as the 1890s, it was widely reported that Chinese soldiers fighting the French, in and around the Gulf of Tonkin, routinely ate French captives in the belief that it would stimulate their courage.

There must have been some validity in the reports of Chinese cannibalism because the practice is documented as having taken place on a fairly wide scale as recently as Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Anyone who had, or was suspected of having, any education at all was subjected
to the most unspeakable torture and execution because they were ‘enemies of the people’. After the hapless victim had met his grisly end, his liver was cut from his body and eaten raw by members of Mao’s Red Guard as a public display of political correctness. Even as late as the 1990s, it was reported that physicians recommended that women having abortions, many of which were carried out in the seventh and eighth months of pregnancy under draconian one-family–one-child population control laws, should use the foetus as food for their families.

Some oriental cannibalism took place far from the vastness of China, cropping up in the isolated islands of the China Sea and the Pacific, so it seems only fitting that we now look at the dietary habits of the Pacific islanders who were among the most virulent cannibals in the world. From the reports of the earliest explorers we know that cannibalism was practised in the Solomon Islands, the Melanesians, New Guinea, New Caledonia, the New Hebrides, Guadalcanal, Bougainville and Fiji to such an extent that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries explorers simply referred to the area as the ‘Cannibal Islands’. To understand the customs of the area it is only necessary to look at reports on the people of one island, Fiji.

It may be significant that, with the exception of ocean fish, the Fijians’ diet was distinctly lacking in animal protein and this may have been a factor in the rise of cannibalism. It is equally true, however, that the Fijians ate their enemies out of revenge, their neighbours out of preference and were notoriously brutal to captives. Our earliest report, here, comes from the Revd David Cargill, a Methodist missionary working out of Rewa, Fiji. His diary entry for 31 October 1839 runs as follows:

This morning we witnessed a shocking spectacle. Twenty dead bodies of men, women and children were brought to Rewa [where] they were distributed among the people to be cooked and eaten. The children amused themselves
by mutilating the body of a little girl. Mutilated limbs, heads, and trunks of bodies of human beings have all been floating about in every direction.

The following day, the Revd Cargill’s entry said:

About 30 living children were hoisted up to the mastheads as flags of triumph. The motion of the canoes . . . soon killed the helpless creatures . . . Other children were taken, alive, to [the island of] Bau that the boys [there] might learn the art of Feegeean warfare by firing arrows at them and beating them with clubs. For days they have been tearing and devouring [the bodies] like wolves and hyenas.

Five years later, in 1844, another Methodist missionary named Jaggar made the following observation on the inhabitants of Bau who had so abused the young prisoners in the tale above. ‘One of the servants of the king a few months ago ran away. She was soon, however, brought back to the king’s house. There, at the request of the queen, her arm was cut off below the elbow and cooked for the king, who ate it in her presence.’ Later, the Revd Jaggar recounted an equally horrible incident:

The men doomed to death were made to dig a hole in the earth for . . . an oven . . . to roast their own bodies. Sern, the Bau chief, then had their arms and legs cut off, cooked and eaten, some of the flesh being presented to [the prisoners]. He then ordered a fish-hook to be put into their tongues, which were then drawn out as far as possible before being cut off. These were roasted and eaten to the taunts of ‘We are eating your tongues!’ As life in the victims was still not extinct, an incision was made in the side of each man and his bowels taken out. This soon terminated their sufferings.

Numerous other stories of the Bau islanders could be added to these but, instead, we will move on to an account given by Alfred St John, an adventurer who visited Fiji in 1883. ‘Such inordinate gluttons were some of these chiefs that they would reserve the whole . . . human body . . . for their own eating, having the flesh lightly cooked time after time to keep it from going putrid. So great was their craving for this strange flesh that when a man had been killed in one of their many bruits and quarrels, and his relations had buried his body, the Fijians frequently enacted the part of ghouls and, digging up his body . . . cooked it and feasted thereon.’ It would seem, from St John’s account, that the Fijians had a taboo against eating those who had died from natural causes, possibly as a precaution against whatever disease or bewitchment had killed the person.

In a rare epicurean insight, St John relates how the Fijians prepared human flesh for the table. ‘The [body] was either baked whole in the ovens, or cut up and stewed in large earthenware pots. Certain herbs were nearly always cooked with the flesh . . . The cooks who prepared it and placed it in the ovens filled the inside of the body with hot stones so that it would be well cooked all through.’ From St John’s full accounts we gather that at least some victims were offered to the gods of battle, but this was not necessarily the case. In most instances people were just eaten because they were convenient. Still, whenever a special occasion arose, someone always seemed to be on the menu: ‘No important business could be commenced without the slaying of one or two human beings as a fitting inauguration. Was a canoe to be built, then a man must be slain for the laying of its keel; if the man for whom the canoe was being built was a very great chief, then a fresh man was killed for every new timber that was added.’ Inevitably, it seems, even St John had to comment on the goings-on at Bau. ‘At Bau there used to be a regular display of slaughter, in a sort of open arena . . . In this space was a huge “braining stone”, which was used thus: two strong natives seized
the victim . . . and, lifting him from the ground, they ran with him head foremost – at their utmost speed – against the stone, bashing out his brains; which was fine sport for the spectators.’

As was true of Fiji, the people of Papua New Guinea were long known as dedicated cannibals. From as early as the 1500s we have an account from Portuguese sailor Jorge de Meneses, who discovered the island and named it Ilhas dos Papuas (Land of the Fuzzy-haired People), that something was not quite right here. But Papua New Guinea was so remote and inhospitable that it was not until the mid-1800s that white men established coastal communities and began pushing into the rugged interior.

Unlike many of their South Pacific neighbours, the Papuans seemed to have well-established rituals surrounding the consumption of human flesh. Enemies killed in battle were eaten to keep their spirits from returning and haunting those who had killed them, and also to absorb their fighting prowess. In some instances, the heads of slain enemies were hung above the door of the village ‘spirit house’ to drive away evil spirits and serve as a reminder to the womenfolk that they were not to enter the lads’ clubhouse.

At the end of the nineteenth century, H.W. Walker, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote, ‘The Papuans do not as a rule torture their prisoners for the mere idea of torture, though they have often been known to roast a man alive – for the reason that his meat is supposed to taste better thus.’ After this enlightening culinary insight, Mr Walker went on to explain more of the Papuans’ treatment of prisoners destined for the pot: ‘In [battle] they always try to wound slightly, and capture a man alive, so that they can have fresh meat for many days. They keep the prisoners tied up . . . and cut out pieces of flesh just when they want them; we were told that, incredible as it seems, they sometimes manage to keep them alive for a week or more . . .’

In another account, the practices of a New Guinean tribe known as the Doboduras are described as follows: ‘When they
capture an enemy, they slowly torture him to death, practically eating him alive. When he is almost dead, they make a hole in the side of the head and scoop out his brains with a kind of wooden spoon. These brains, which are often warm and fresh, were regarded as a great delicacy.’ A similarly grim account from the nineteenth century describes the funereal customs of an unnamed Papuan tribe: ‘One of the tribes has the custom of taking out its grandparents, when they have become too old to be of any use to the tribe, and tying them loosely in the branches of a tree. The populace will then form a ring around the tree and indulge in an elaborate dance . . . As they dance, they cry out . . . “The fruit is ripe! The fruit is ripe!” Then . . . they close in on the tree and violently shake its branches, so that the old men and women come hurtling to the ground below, there to be seized and devoured by the younger members of the tribe.’

An equally bizarre custom was passed on to a western visitor by an old cannibal from the Purari Delta area. ‘If I kill a man or a woman, someone else bites off his nose. We bite off the noses of people that others have killed. We bite them off, we do not cut them off. It is not our custom to eat a person we have killed ourselves,’ he explained, saying that you could only eat someone who had been killed by another person. There seemed, however, to be a bizarre exception to this rule. ‘If, after killing a man, you go and sit on a coconut, with also a coconut under each heel, and get your daughter to boil the man’s heart, then you may drink the water in which the heart was boiled. You may eat a little of the heart also, but you must be sitting on the coconuts all the time.’

Cannibalism in New Guinea survived well into the twentieth century. In the 1950s, Tom Bozeman worked as a volunteer for a religious mission among the Papuans and reported a scene where one tribe paraded the body of a slain enemy in front of his friends and relatives, chanting ‘We’re going to eat him!’
which, to the shrieks and lamentations of the man’s clan, they did. Another, similar report was given in 1956 by Jens Bjerre who noted that the Papuans were so protein-deprived that after burning the wild grass off a field, they would scurry around, snatching up the charred corpses of rats, mice, lizards and even smaller vermin, popping them into their mouths. As late as 1992 an ageing Papuan reminisced fondly about his days as a cannibal, insisting that human meat was ‘better than pig or chicken . . . babies tasted like fish, the flesh was very soft’.

As the largest islands in the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand seem to merit individual attention, particularly since the fierce Maori of New Zealand are among the best-known cannibal tribes in the world. The Maori seemed to have almost as many reasons to eat people as they had ways of preparing them. Dead relatives were consumed in solemn funereal rites and enemies were endlessly humiliated and tortured before being carved up, parboiled and consumed to ingest their fighting spirit and cunning. The first white man to take notice of the Maori was none other than that intrepid explorer Captain James Cook, who anchored his ship, the
Endeavour
, at Tasman Bay in 1769. In his log, Cook wrote, ‘Soon after we landed we met with two or three of the natives who not long before must have been regaling themselves on human flesh for I got from one of them the bone of the forearm of a man or woman, which was quite fresh . . . which they told us they had eaten. They gave us to understand that but a few days before they had taken, killed and eat[en] a boat’s crew of their enemies . . .’