and sometimes they brought the bodies of the deceased back to be eaten.
As Imbe Kalundula considered how to cross the Kuvo, he noted a small group of strange slave traders approaching. These traders were Portuguese and hailed from the city of Luanda farther north on the Atlantic Coast. Among their ranks was an English mercenary named Andrew Battell. Kalundula and his men introduced themselves to these traders as Guindas, though he likely did not know that the Portuguese traders translating for Battell referred to his group as “Jaga.” Kalundula promised to provide captives to them as slaves if they ferried his warriors across the river in their boats to attack the residents on the other side. The traders obliged and even actively participated in the attack by firing their muskets as they approached the banks to help Kalundula’s men drive the enemy out of their defensive positions. After a bloody battle, where many of the agriculturalists were killed and many others enslaved, some of the cadavers were brought to Kalundula by his warriors to be eaten. Years later, Battell, according to an Anglican preacher in England, rather coolly recalled the cannibal feast as “strange to behold.” This first attack near the Atlantic Coast of Angola on the Kuvo River set in motion a series of events that would eventually encourage Kalundula’s kilombo to strategically incorporate Battell as a slave-capturing brother-in-arms for about sixteen months in the years 1600–1601, during which time he claimed to have witnessed other such acts of flesh-eating in battle and during prewar rituals.1
Of Cannibals
I have never had a particular interest in the macabre. Though I have grown accustomed to the reality that I am writing a book on cannibalism, nothing about my initial interests in African history suggested that I would do so. So, what led me to create this work? Like many others before me, I read Andrew Battell’s narrative from his “strange adventures” because I was fascinated by this moment in history when total strangers from Europe showed up on the shores of lands unknown to them and tried to carve out lives for themselves among the indigenous peoples. And after the initial contacts were made, how did peoples from completely different cultural backgrounds, with radically different religious beliefs, patterns of government, family structures, and economic strategies, work together to begin creating what became the modern world system of which I am an inheritor? As we will see, some of my initial questions were based on misunderstandings, the very sort of misunderstandings that I write this text to clarify.
Returning to Battell, his story is interesting in this analytical regard as well as “strange” to behold. As a professional historian, I read a lot of—how can I put this kindly—bland documents: letters from one king to another asking for priests, complaints about unfair trade agreements or imprisonments, baptismal records, and so on. Battell’s narrative, on the other hand, was intriguing: He described animals like manatees as if they were unreal monsters. He told stories of capture, escape, deadly fevers, slave raiding, infanticide, a boy raised by a gorilla, a crocodile that ate a group of slaves chained together but then drowned from the weight of the chains in its stomach, and, of course, cannibalism. Like the Science Fiction Hall of Fame writer Robert Silverberg, who adapted Battell’s story as the basis for his novel Lord of Darkness and many others, I found Battell’s account seductively entertaining.2
Andrew Battell’s account also seemed disarmingly simple. His narrative was recorded only after he returned to England, sometime between 1607 and 1611, by the Anglican minister Samuel Purchas. Purchas published small bits of interviews that he seems to have conducted with Battell in 1613, made revisions to it in 1614 and 1617, and published a full account that was represented as in Battell’s own words in 1625. Questions about this rather obsessive production of the Battell texts will be dealt with at length in the chapters that follow, but here let’s examine one seemingly simple interaction from his story as an example of what is at stake for historians who want to tell African history as Africans lived it, as I do, when they read Battell’s account.
When Imbe Kalundula met the trading party that included Battell, we find out in the full version from 1625 that they called themselves Guindas, or Jaga, and that they were newcomers to this area from their homeland in Sierra Leone thousands of miles to the northwest. In fact, nearly every word in that statement is an equivocation or a misunderstanding, and every single word is a translation of recollections fifteen or so tumultuous years after the event. Neither Kalundula nor the Portuguese were speaking in English, which is the language of Battell’s narrative. And Battell does not note the language of the conversation. Did Kalundula’s group speak Portuguese that they might have picked up in earlier trading interactions? Did someone translate Kalundula’s native language into Portuguese, which Battell assuredly spoke at that time, after several years in Portuguese jails and infantry lines? Might they all have spoken the creole compound of Portuguese and African languages from the Gulf of Guinea island São Tomé that was used at this time as the general trading language throughout the Atlantic Coast of Africa? Beyond whatever might have been lost in at least one and potentially two translations, other statements are simply false. Kalundula’s group was not from Sierra Leone. They were an evolving group of men, known collectively as Imbangala, who hailed from the central highlands of Angola, though this specific band could have included Guindas who had joined the kilombo. Also, Kalundula almost certainly did not refer to himself as “Jaga,” which was a term of fear applied by other Africans and Portuguese to these warrior kilombo communities. If we cannot trust Battell even on his identification of Imbe Kalundula’s group, what are we to make of the much more complicated problems that arise from his recollections of slaving, infanticide, or cannibalism?
The scholars who have used Battell’s narrative most often are Africanists trying to reconstruct the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history of the region of modern-day Angola as it became the site of rampant raiding for captives to enslave. From these violent beginnings, it became the largest single exporter of people as property in the subsequent Atlantic trade in slaves. The vast majority of these historians analyze these texts while specifically seeking African history as opposed to the history of Europeans in Africa, and I intend this book to do the same, because we cannot assess what Battell reported, or the accounts of several other Europeans on the scene, unless we understand how the Imbangala and other Africans themselves viewed what they were doing.
The first generation of scholars in what we’ll call the modern study of Angola, from roughly 1960 to 1990, were entirely skeptical about narrating authentically African history while relying on sources written by Europeans quite ignorant of what they were seeing. Instead, these scholars preferred oral traditions, which they recorded in painstaking research on the ground during the Angolan civil war that started in the 1960s. Alien accounts such as Battell’s were used only sparingly to corroborate what they gleaned from African informants. Even those who privileged the written documents sought to interpret them through the analytical categories denoted by Africans. This book relies confidently on these pioneers—Jan Vansina, Joseph C. Miller, John Thornton, and Beatrix Heintze, among others—and their names appear repeatedly in the notes. This first generation of scholars assumed that the bulk of texts such as Battell’s were flawed by European biases, what scholars call Eurocentrism, and therefore spared relatively little analytical attention for something as embarrassing as cannibalism. They busied themselves with the more respectable tasks of detailing the rise and fall of states, trading networks, and, of course, the throbbing drums of violence and warfare necessary to produce the slaves sent across the Atlantic to the New World. When scholars examined Battell’s narrative in particular, they stuck with the mundane questions it raised. Above all, they tried to clarify Battell’s contradictory statements about who the “Jaga” might have been: Guindas, Mane or Sumba from Sierra Leone, Imbangala, or—especially—Jaga. In modern terminology, they sought to identify this elusive warrior band with modern or historical ethnic groups.
Battell’s is not the only narrative of an allegedly coherent Jaga group. They appear also in a text written by a Portuguese man named Duarte Lopes who had visited the Kingdom of Kongo during the years 1578 to 1584, two decades before Battell’s strange encounter, and who gave an account that was published in Rome by an Italian aristocrat, Filippo Pigafetta. The Kingdom of Kongo lay just on the south side of the Congo River, far to the north
