3 will narrate and assess alleged events of 1568 in the Kingdom of Kongo as a way to establish some of the key terms and contexts for the rest of the monograph. In that year, a mysterious group (allegedly) attacked a centralized, militarily powerful Kongo polity. The invaders reportedly (but only belatedly so) drove the Catholic king recognized by the Portuguese and his court from their capital of Mbanza Kongo, ransacked the countryside, and engaged in rampant anthropophagy before finally being driven out after a Portuguese military force from the nearby island of São Tomé arrived to save and reinstall the Kongo ruler. A Portuguese trader named Duarte Lopes was told this story still later, when he visited Kongo in the late 1570s. Upon Lopes’s return to Europe, a well-known Italian humanist named Filippo Pigafetta published his story in Rome in 1591 as Relatione del Reame di Congo, which in 1881 was translated into English by Margarite Hutchinson and published under the title A Report of the Kingdom of Congo. This supposed event—which some have argued was entirely fabricated—in Pigafetta’s hands made its Jaga invaders a paradigmatic troop of savage, anti-Christian cannibals in European intellectual circles and might have provided a paradigm for later Africans seeking to overthrow political authorities in other contexts. The term “Jaga” became useful to both Africans and Europeans as a sort of working misunderstanding that allowed interactions and interferences in political and economic endeavors, especially slaving.
Chapter 4 analyzes the uses of cannibalism by Imbangala groups operating in the area inland from Luanda in Angola in the first two or three decades of the seventeenth century. Many Africans engaged in trading with the Portuguese and Luso-Africans resident in Luanda or Old Benguela (near the Kuvo River). Increasingly these transactions included slaves, and more Africans began devising methods for procuring people to sell for the wine and other goods the Portuguese had to sell. Though most resident populations, like the Mbundu and the majority of Imbangala groups, produced captives for sale through small-scale raiding and through condemning growing numbers of debtors to be sold, some Imbangala groups resorted to a primary strategy of systematic, terrorizing violence. They developed innovative military technologies and strategies, violently recruited child-soldiers to maintain their numbers, stole other local resources, practiced infanticide among themselves, and used the threat of cannibalism as a tactic to immobilize their victims with fear. Imbe Kalundula, leader of the band whom Battell knew and reported about in his narrative, led one of the most dominating of these Imbangala groups. Kalundula’s group explicitly banned or grotesquely and tauntingly perverted practices basic to resident (and reproducing) communities, like child-rearing, motherhood, and commemorating ancestors. In their stead, he and his commanders awarded membership in their band based only on individual valor and victory in battle and rewarded material possession and consumption. As such, from local notions of cannibalistic witches, loners who inverted the practices that held communities together, Kalundula’s group portrayed themselves as man-eaters and destroyers in the disorienting world of Angola as it was being reconstructed by new political and economic strategies increasingly focused on slaving. The chapter recounts the terror that leaders like Imbe Kalundula inflicted on those they attacked and on their own young warriors. His band explicitly operated as cannibals within the local cannibal talk by insatiably wasting natural resources, destroying local populations, inverting normative practices for creating and reckoning kinship—including institutionalized infanticide—and capturing child-soldiers for his war band, known as a kilombo. The details of these dynamics of perpetual destruction were related by the English sailor Andrew Battell in his experiences as a participant observer of Kalundula’s alleged Jaga anthropophagy.
Chapter 5 follows the calculated cruelty of Queen Njinga of Matamba (1583?–1663) as she deployed cannibalism as a tactic to instill fear and gain political power on the ground in Angola. “Africa’s Warrior Queen” is now famous for resisting Portuguese colonial advances. She commanded Imbangala bands and claimed political authority in an area just east of the Portuguese military conquista (conquest) that was ruled for many years, finally converting to Catholicism as a trading partner of the Portuguese late in her life, when it became clear that the military power of the invaders was overwhelming and as her followers abandoned the intense demands of the Jaga warrior life. While her earlier battles against the Portuguese are now celebrated as anticolonial resistance struggles, sources at the time refer to those activities as a “Jaga” phase in her career. Demonizing images of a warrior Njinga as a Jaga cannibal served the Portuguese in justifying the enormous effort and expense of their long military struggle against her, but they also served Njinga as a terrorizing tactic both to keep the Portuguese at bay and to ensure loyalty from followers too terrified to challenge her. Njinga’s life story, in reality and in its narrative retelling by Italian missionaries, encapsulates the analytical trajectory of the Jaga strategy as a whole. She began using cannibalism as a fear tactic with the Portuguese before coming (back) to Catholic salvation and thereby establishing a relatively peaceful political order in her lands. Her narrative demonstrates how cannibalism as a set of ideas, symbols, and practices was socially constructed in contexts of the upheavals of slaving in the early 1600s but by the later 1600s faded to irrelevance as the chaos of the earliest decades of slaving gave way to routinized cruelty in business as usual.
Chapter 6 interrogates how people in Europe thought about rumors of Jaga invaders in Kongo and the decisions by Imbangala on the ground in Angola in terms of the only remotely related issues of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In the violence of the central African slaving frontier, Kalundula and other Imbangala (for example) found the image of cannibalism to be a useful tool for maximizing their material situations, while in Europe stories of cannibalism were more useful for intellectual exercises in ordering the chaos of new religious worlds of their own. This chapter ranges broadly across time to track how European compilers and publishers of travelers’ tales from around a vast new world of disorienting diversity revised and edited the stories told to them by claimed witnesses to Jaga cannibalism. Using evidence the editors left as they revised their presentations of these tales, the chapter argues that preachers and publishers in Europe used these terrifying stories of “inhuman” humans to think about the violence of confessional rivalries of the Counter-Reformation and the intellectual and political upheavals of the Renaissance then plaguing Europeans. Depicting faraway Africans as horrible, savage Jaga, and using their brutality to think about the dangers of turning away from a single omnipresent God, allowed the publishers to displace uncomfortable conversations of disturbances and upheavals at home onto peoples—in fact not even real people, but stereotyped myths—who posed no immediate threat to their readers. However, to create compelling drama in these morality tales and make them memorable for the readers, and hopefully prompt them to ponder the deeper truths of true religion, the publishers linked the distant “cannibals” to imminent threats in Europe like the Ottoman Turks who were then moving massive armies toward Vienna, capital of the Holy Roman Empire. In doing so, these editors and publishers elevated the “Jaga cannibal” from a figure in a cannibal talk that might have been relevant for about a century (roughly 1560 to 1660) in west-central Africa to a figure that has continued to inform Western narratives about Africans into the twenty-first century.
Chapter 7 revisits the parade of converging utilities of the Jaga for diverse interests on two continents with a focus on how an emphasis on “cannibalism” as a discourse, created in a time of violence and terror, can help modern scholars enrich their analyses of times of profound uncertainty and upheaval. The “cannibal Jaga” of Angola served as a local exclamation of the trauma of similarly dramatic upheavals in Europe and the New World, with one of the more infamous examples being the Salem witch hunts in 1692. With the increased engagements between strangers of the 1600s along the frontiers of homogenizing world systems of religion, culture, and economics, the resisters were to be feared and converted if possible, but brought to order at all costs. To the considerable existing literatures on these encounters, this history of the Jaga adds the insight that cannibalism was not just sensational and terrifying, but it was a necessary symbolic field for thinking about profound disturbance. By continuing to engage the Jaga, even today, scholars implicitly
