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.
Chapter 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