that the Jaga in his story had invaded Kongo from still farther to the northeast in 1568, a decade or so before he arrived on the scene. Kongo kings also placed Jaga near their territory. Moreover, about thirty years after Battell, Portuguese visitors in Angola such as the Jesuit Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, who spent time around the self-declared Jaga queen Njinga of Matamba, wrote extended, seemingly first-person, narratives of their history. According to them, Njinga adopted Jaga military and cultural practices, including cannibalism, for a time as part of her rise to power, before eventually reconverting to Catholicism late in her life. The first generation of scholarship about the Jaga ran out of steam once all groups in the stories seemed properly identified and the scholars determined that instead of a “Jaga” ethnic group, jaga (lowercase “j”) was a strategy of mobile raiding and warfare that anyone living in the broad region around the Congo River could adopt, and many did, as the chaos of slaving flared everywhere.
Since about 1990 or so, scholars, especially younger historians trained in Brazil and Portugal, have returned with renewed interest to what I will call the “Jaga story.” This second wave of scholars, native speakers of Portuguese, the language of the great bulk of the relevant documentation, is a bit more diverse than the first, but one method that binds them is a strong return to the European texts as primary sources, in contrast to privileging the African oral traditions, which have died out in the intervening thirty years of civil war in independent Angola. As such, some of us in this second wave have focused on interrogating the production of the European texts to understand exactly what sort of European biases might lurk in them, and then correcting for those to discern the worlds of the Africans whom we seek to understand. Others have sought to supplement the major Jaga narrative from Lopes, Battell, and Cavazzi by finding many other references to Jaga in lesser-known accounts by various European traders, Portuguese officials, and Catholic missionaries who lived in or visited Angola. Still others see the alleged cannibalism in the primary sources as an early form of modern witchcraft discourses in Africa that condemn social, political, and economic inequalities and oppression.
In modern contexts, African politicians and businessmen who are seen as greedy might be labeled “bad witches” and require counterwitchcraft from those whom they oppress as a means of leveling the playing field. Noting links in many African traditions between bad witchcraft and cannibalism, these scholars have returned to the Jaga story as evidence of an African narrative critiquing the violence, greed, and inequalities of transatlantic slaving in which raiders like Imbe Kalundula and traders like Andrew Battell participated. For much of the more recent scholarship, the point is to understand how Europeans, especially the Portuguese in Angola, manipulated and were manipulated by these mobile warrior groups living as Jaga. This newer scholarship tends to consider the Jaga story as a challenge to broader interests in historical methods or the narratives of Portuguese military occupation of the region and the long and tragic tale of slavery there.
Converging on Cannibals builds on these earlier works with the specific aim of centering the analysis on cannibalism as the heart of the Jaga story. It sets the many inadvertent converging components of this myth against the African histories that it distorts. Whatever else the accounts of Lopes, Battell, and Cavazzi might tell us about African history, they became important and popular in their day because they related sensational stories about cannibalism. Perhaps cannibalism was not the only reason they were popular, but it was a significant contributor to the fact that Lopes’s account could be found, translated into multiple languages, in nearly every major library in Europe, and why Battell’s “adventures” have been republished at least once a century since it first appeared. Continuing into our own times, I will argue in the conclusion that one of the reasons modern scholars have returned to these documents so frequently for the last half century is also because the cannibalism continues to resonate even today. It must be made clear at the outset that accusations of cannibalism also mattered and matter still to Africans. Western scholars must engage the myth of cannibalism because the enduring presence of cannibalism in local witchcraft beliefs and oral traditions dictates that any authentically local history consider it. This book interrogates cannibal talk during the opening era of violence and transatlantic slavery in Angola by focusing on the Jaga story as told primarily by Lopes and Pigafetta, Andrew Battell, and the Capuchin priest Antonio Cavazzi, who wrote at length about Queen Njinga. It is the story of the invention of cannibalism in sixteenth-century Kongo and seventeenth-century Angola.
Specifically this book contributes to scholarship on the Jaga story by placing it in historical and academic contexts broader than those considered by scholars until now. Perhaps because other historians have been so interested in writing decidedly “African” history, the scholars who have written about the Jaga story have done so by referencing other cannibal events only in Africa and scholarship written only by Africanists. But in fact, the Jaga story is part of a broader pattern of cannibal narratives told by Europeans about indigenous peoples throughout the world, from Jews in Europe to the Huron in North America to the Tupinambá in Brazil. The Jaga story also flourished during the height of witch crazes in many colonial spaces where Europeans sought to control the wilderness (environmental and human) they confronted by exterminating practices and beliefs that their fears provoked them to consider dangerous. The Salem witch trials of 1692–1693 are perhaps the most famous of these panics, but other activities ranging from the Spanish Inquisition to the witch-hunting craze in seventeenth-century Germany all bear suspicious similarities to narratives of Jaga cannibalism. Even more often than drawing these specific historical comparisons, I will rely on the rich and extensive literature about cannibalism produced by anthropologists, literary critics, and historians working on regions of the world beyond Africa. While much of this literature interrogates stories about cannibalism as part of Eurocentric myths about the world, many excellent studies show the ways in which various peoples throughout the world used cannibal stories to their own advantage as they confronted Europeans intent on conquest and slavery.
Misrepresentations and Deceptions
Situating the Jaga story within these broader historical and academic contexts demonstrates the specific ways in which the myth grew as a product of interactions on the ground between (mostly) Africans and (a few) Europeans. And at that encounter, we have, finally, arrived at the crux of the argument. The Jaga story traced here is the product of a particular time and place, as peoples interacted and strategized in their own interests according to their own differing logics. If we return to the initial conversation between Battell, his Portuguese companions, and Imbe Kalundula, it becomes clear how uncertain and opportunistic those interactions were—for the participants on both sides.
Much of the broader scholarship on cannibalism is more theoretical than what I need to engage to trace the convergence of misunderstandings that created the Jaga myth, but it includes the useful point that discourses of cannibalism—“cannibal talk” as one scholar put it—are a common enough feature in many, if not all, human communities that it served as a point of reference for everyone involved, anywhere.3 In some, probably very few, cases, people may have ingested the flesh of other people, but members of the different mutually uncomprehending cultural groups much more often manipulated the nearly universal fears and taboos about such activity as they interacted warily with one other. Telling cannibal stories or presenting themselves in ways that emulated the inhuman brutes in those stories created opportunities to, for example, instill such fear in enemies that they might be unwilling to counter an attack, which Imbe Kalundula admitted was his strategy. In the case of Europeans, both the Spanish and the Portuguese Crowns passed laws in the early 1500s that limited legal enslavement to cannibals. Is it mere coincidence that the majority of cannibal stories written by Portuguese visitors to Africa date to the years between 1580 and 1640, when the Portuguese Crown was joined with the Spanish Crown, giving Portuguese slavers unprecedented rights and demand for their human cargoes in the silver-rich colonies of Spain in the New World? Probably not. The context of mutual misapprehension, as well as miscommunication, is the fertile ground from which “cannibals” sprouted. The “Jaga cannibals,” which were coproduced by Europeans and Africans during the so-called Age of Discovery and immediately after, were not only products of the human psyche but also creations of a specific historical context—encountering strangers.
Cannibal
