for peoples from vastly different cultures as a way to interact in limited but mutually comprehending ways. Specifically, Europeans and African had shared taboos about flesh-eating, but the particular beliefs, symbols, and practices that they would have associated with the image varied a great deal. In fact, these specifics varied so profoundly as to be mutually unintelligible. Further complicating this issue was that even people within the large modern categories of “African” (e.g., Kongo and Imbangala) and “European” (e.g., Portuguese and Italians and English) might have had very different beliefs and practices regarding cannibalism among themselves. This book analyzes how people converged both wittingly and unwittingly within the differences of their own cannibal talk to form this new Jaga cannibal discourse.
Many of the historical working misunderstandings noted in this book arise from the problems of language, not unlike the problem of translation in the form of Battell’s “strange adventures.” The primary sources here often record Africans rather vaguely as saying they “ate” or “consumed” others. The verb meaning “to eat” food in fact has a much broader semantic field covering any sort of “taking in,” so an allegation of “eating flesh” might have been deployed to mean they killed, imprisoned, or enslaved people. Europeans unfamiliar with Bantu languages mistakenly interpreted the expression literally in their own terms to mean “man-eating.” An example from the early 1900s shows how tricky linguistic and ideological translations can be. A rather astute linguist, named Dennett, worked with the Vili people in Loango (a region north of the Congo River, just north of the region this book analyzes) in the late 1800s and noted a chance killing of a boy by a leopard in the village where he was staying. The chief called on the local healers to use magic to identify who had sent the jaguar. A man from a neighboring village, an outsider, was determined to have sent the magical retribution that killed the boy. Once the perpetrator was identified, the father of the slain son stated, “Very well; now I want to know who ate the flesh of this man.” Dennett translated the phrase “ate the flesh” to mean “done him an injury.” There was no cannibalism involved in this incident, but there was a discourse among the Vili for interpreting seemingly magical attacks by outsiders that consumed the flesh and lineage of villagers as “flesh eating.”4 Dennett was clever and experienced enough to realize the intricacies of translating such language and ideas; the Africans and (especially) Europeans analyzed in this book took allegations of man-eating much more literally.
Anthropologist Wyatt MacGaffey adeptly called these sorts of shared and double misunderstandings “dialogues of the deaf,” which is a wonderful metaphor for the miscommunication happening in real time.5 When such double misunderstandings converged to produce an outcome that both sides considered positive (e.g., a successful trade for slaves), I will refer to them as convergences. Over time, these convergences could become more strategic uses of the ambiguities among differing cannibal talks that astute cultural observers might use to their advantage. So, again, to take a generic example of instances found in the sources, if European slavers showed up in an African village looking for “cannibals” (whom they could enslave legally), the villagers might send the Europeans in the direction of another nearby village of peoples who raided them frequently to solve the problem at others’ uncomprehending expense.
To illustrate this game of chance in a more relevant example, some Africans may have performed as cannibals (according to their own cannibal talk) in the presence of Europeans by engaging in the violent, greedy business of slaving, expecting their performance to benefit them somehow; however, different Europeans might have interpreted their performances as cannibals in contradictory ways at different times. The historical narrative of the Jaga story tracked in the chapters that follow highlights the varied ways in which Jaga and/or Catholic Africans and Europeans interpreted and acted upon cannibal performances as they converged, collaborating and contesting, around such encounters as trade, religion, and political authority. Sometimes people living a jaga life managed to perform as cannibals in ways that encouraged the Portuguese to hire them as mercenaries in their slave-raiding wars; at other times cannibal performances ended in payments for war captives as slaves; and at still other times the cannibal performances resulted in resolute European attacks against such “savagery.”
I assume that cannibal talk was a strategy of terrorizing others, and the chapters that follow will work out the specific ways in which some people in Angola used this particular African discourse of cannibalism—Jaga cannibalism—as they interacted in a churning world of uncertainties, terror, and trauma. One statement must be clear from the beginning when thinking about cannibal stories as historical strategies. First, the word cannibalism in this context cannot carry the connotations of a story about man-eating at the same time that it designates real instances of man-eating. I therefore follow convention in the broader scholarship on cannibalism and refer to any instance or practice of eating human flesh either as anthropophagy, an English word derived from the Greek words for “eating humans,” or as man-eating. In contrast, I will use the term “cannibalism” only to refer to discourses, practices, symbols, or rituals that invoke the taboo of flesh-eating, regardless of whether or not they involved ingesting human flesh. For example, the Catholic ritual of Holy Communion is said to be cannibalistic in this metaphorical sense because of the belief that the wine and bread are transubstantiated into the body of Jesus Christ and then eaten by the coreligionists as a symbolic reaffirmation of their oneness with one another and with Christ; however, the Eucharist is not anthropophagy because Catholics are in fact eating wafers and drinking wine.
This book is a narrative of people who chose to live and behave as Jaga that takes context and their motivations into account, focusing in particular on the usefulness of terror. The Jaga story told here that echoes the cannibal and witch hunts elsewhere throughout the world Europeans knew in the sixteenth century begins with a study of the Kongo polity that was attacked in 1568, as narrated by the Kongo victims. It then focuses on the quite distinct—but similarly designated—Imbangala gangs who rampaged in northern Angola at the turn of the seventeenth century. Next, it shows how these gangs resolved into the violent political machinations of Queen Njinga as she took on the mantle of a “Jaga” to establish her power. The narrative tracked here is of African peoples who confronted worlds unknown as cannibals, how they ordered the world around them as cannibals, and how they were themselves brought to order by a world of commercial slaving that was equally cannibalistic in its consumption of human lives.
Chapter Overviews
Chapter 2 begins the analysis of cannibal talk with an extended anecdote from Kongo more than a half century before the first mentions of “Jaga” cannibals in west-central Africa. In 1509 a scion of the ruling family in Kongo fought a rival challenger for political authority in the area and won. In the process the victor, the self-styled Catholic king Afonso I of Kongo, altered history as he directed prestige and authority in Kongo through the idioms of Catholicism. He required those who wanted to affiliate with him to accept baptism, and the elite of his own family might even have been trained to read and write Latin and Portuguese in Afonso’s Catholic school. But in the process of attempting to create a Catholic kingdom, Afonso and the Portuguese missionaries and traders he allowed in his presence were accompanied by evils that would plague the region for more than a century.
First, Afonso cultivated his connections with Portugal and the broader Catholic world by allowing Europeans to purchase slaves in Kongo. Though he had briefly banned the practice in the 1520s because it was causing strife in Kongo, he would go to his grave in ca. 1542–1543 sanctioning the practice. And second, by privileging Catholicism in Kongo, Afonso helped foster stories that identified Africans who did not convert as epitomes of evil. In African terms they were witches, a categorization that allowed for draconian punishments, including capture and sale into slavery. For the Europeans, branding people as “enemies of Christendom” provided the legal cover for their enslavement. Though the cannibal story is not specifically mentioned in Afonso’s narrative, his choices of politics and religion set the stage for the story’s exploitation by others who invented “cannibals” where none existed.
