A university lecturer once recalled the cannibalistic tendencies among a certain tribe in Western Kenya. "This was long ago when communities still waged wars against each other," she told an attentive class deviating from the normal literature lectures. "In this community, well endowed women were and are still highly regarded," she said. During times of war and in the event of famine the women were often forced to slice off a part of their fatty bodies to feed the warriors. "In this way they had share of the ultimate victory because they fed the warriors," she said.

Sometime ago a documentary titled, "Feeding on the Dead" was released that focused on a secretive sect of the Hindu ascetics who eat corpses. Their belief is that ingesting the dead flesh makes them ageless and gives them supernatural powers.

The 10-minute documentary delves into the little known world of the Aghori sect, whose holy men pluck bodies from the Ganges River in Northern India. Others like the Binderwurs of Central India ate their sick and aged in the belief that the act was pleasing to their goddess, Kali.

A P Rice, in The American Antiquarian gives an interesting account about Papua New Guinea. One of the New Guinea Papuan tribes has the custom of taking out its grandparents, when they have become to old to be of any use to the tribe, and tying each of them loosely to the branches of a tree. The populace will then form a ring round the tree and indulge in an elaborate dance, which has some affinity with the traditional Maypole dance. As they dance, they cry out in chorus a refrain that has a somewhat sinister double-barrelled meaning: ‘The fruit is ripe! The fruit is ripe!’ Then, having repeated this cry, they close in upon the tree and violently shake its branches, so that the old men and women come hurtling to the ground below, there to be seized and devoured by the younger members of the tribe.

These might sound like things that crawl out of one’s nightmares.

Yet the question remains: Is cannibalism fact or fiction? Are there people who salivate at the very thought of roasted human flesh?

Allegations of cannibalism fly thick and fast among the Bagisu, the Kisii and some tribes in the Congo forest, regions of civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Asia and Latin America.

A photographer and one of the writers once accompanied police on the trail of a suspected cannibal who had exhumed a corpse buried on August 9, 2006 in Malanga Village of South Uyoma, Bondo District.

Led by the Bondo Officer Commanding Police Division Mr Golucha Roba, the police nabbed the suspect.

Villagers stared in disbelief as the class six dropout was arrested with human brain in a bottle and the private parts of the deceased in a handbag.

The suspect said he had been advised by a traditional herbalist in Seme that human brain and private organs would cure his skin disease.

His explanations were spine chilling. "If I mix human brain and local herbs, I will be cured. Killing is a crime but exhuming a dead body is not. I have never killed people but I exhume a corpse after two months," he confessed.

The man later confessed before a Siaya Magistrate’s Court that he had been exhuming and eating the brains and other body parts. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

There have been reports in the local Press of people caught in various parts of Kisii in possession of hands, legs and other body parts.

"They eat the entire human body but keep the hands to stir local brews such as Busaa in the belief that the brews get tastier, attracts clients and sells fast," a Kisii resident says.

In June, the BBC reported that four men in Doha, Qatar, were charged with murder and cannibalism. The incident came to light when one of them suffered severe reactions after eating human flesh and was subsequently rushed to the hospital. When X-rays showed what appeared to be a human finger in the man’s stomach, doctors called police.

On January 13, Danish artist Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party for his most intimate friends. The main meal was agnolotti pasta, topped with a meatball made with the artist’s own fat, removed earlier in the year in a liposuction operation.

In September last year, Australian television crews from 60 Minutes and Today Tonight attempted to rescue a six-year-old boy who they believed would be ritually cannibalised by his tribe, the Korowai, from Papua, Indonesia.

In March 2001 in Germany, Armin Meiwes posted an Internet ad asking for "a well built 18 to 30-year-old to be slaughtered and consumed".

After killing and eating one Jurgen Armando Brandes, Meiwes was convicted of manslaughter and later, murder. The song "Mein Teil" by Rammstein is based of this.

In the Middle Ages, thousands of Egyptian mummies preserved in bitumen were ground up and sold as medicine. And the practice developed into a wide-scale business, which flourished until the late 16th century.

Two centuries ago, mummies were still believed to have medicinal properties against bleeding, and were sold as pharmaceuticals in powdered form.

In Europe during the Great Famine of 1315–1317, at a time when Dante was writing one of the most significant pieces of literature in Western history and the Renaissance was just beginning, there were widespread reports of cannibalism throughout Europe.

Cannibalism was also reported in Mexico, the flower wars of the Aztec (man eating tribes from South Mexico) whose empire was considered a massive manifestation of the practice.

Research accounts indicate that cannibalism was practiced among prehistoric human beings, and it lingered into the 19th century in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in Fiji and in Arabia.

Nothing is shocking as the gory details prior to 1931, when a New York Times journalist, William Buehler Seabrook obtained from a hospital intern at the Sorbonne a chunk of human meat from the body of a healthy human killed in an accident, and cooked and ate it. He reported:

"It was like good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef. It was very definitely like that, and it was not like any other meat I had ever tasted… The roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in colour, texture, smell as well as taste, strengthened my certainty that of all the meats we habitually know, veal is the one meat to which this meat is accurately comparable."

The cross-cultural evidence for cannibalism among societies in Papua New Guinea, such as the Gimi, Hua, Daribi, and Bimin-Kuskusmin, suggests cannibalism is linked to the expression of cultural values about life, reproduction, and regeneration. Flesh is consumed as a form of life-generating food and as a symbolic means of reaffirming the meaning of existence.

In other areas of Papua New Guinea, the same cultural themes are expressed through pig kills and exchanges. Cannibalism was a means of providing enduring continuity to group identity and of establishing the boundaries of the moral community. But it was equally a form of violence meted out to victims deemed amoral or evil, such as witches who brought death to other people.

According to a BBC report on Cannibalism in war torn areas of Africa: "Typically, cannibalism is apparently done in desperation, as during peacetime cannibalism is much less frequent. Even so, it is sometimes directed at certain groups believed to be relatively helpless, such as Congo Pygmies."

It is also reported by some that witch doctors sometimes use the body parts of children in their medicine.

At the height of a famine in 1996, defectors and refugees reported that cannibalism was sometimes practised in North Korea.

Despite cannibal records some people have even acquired celebrity status. For instance, Issei Sagawa met a 25-year-old Dutch student called Renee Hartevelt in Paris, who eventually went back to his appartment where he shot and ate her in 1981. He was caught, and because of injury to the prefrontal cortex was judged legally insane and unfit to stand trial. He was eventually deported back to Japan in 1986 where he still lives in Tokyo. He is now a Japanese celebrity.

Paul Raffaele, an intrepid reporter on a cannibals trail mixed with New Guinea natives who say they still eat their fellow tribesmen.

It is, however, not clear whether he ate or saw them feasting on human flesh from his tale, despite the fact that today the Korowai are among the very few tribes believed to eat human flesh.

The French philosopher Michel Montaigne long ago disabused society of the Western-centered notion that eating human flesh is somehow barbaric and exotic:

"I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than eat him dead," he wrote

How one interprets cannibalism is thus always circumscribed and inflected by a culturally shaped morality.

For many researchers, then, the issue of whether cannibalism was ever a socially sanctioned practice is of secondary importance.

From available evidence, scholars have gleaned a seemingly reliable historical account of how cultures have constructed and used their concepts of cannibalism to provide a stereotype of the "other."

Many historical texts are compromised by Western prejudices, so that cannibalism emerges more as colonial myth and cultural myopia than as scientifically attested truth.

Source: The Standard 

Average user rating

Display 4 of 4 comments