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 talk had a functional, but deeply flawed, utility 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