Cannibalism

"Early on Sunday morning the cooked human flesh was carried past the Mission house in a canoe.... Truly the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty."

"This morning we witnessed a shocking spectacle. 20 dead bodies of men, women, & children were brought to Rewa as a present to Tui Dreketi from Tanoa. They were distributed among the people to be cooked and eaten.... The children amused themselves by ... mutilating the body of a little girl.... Human entrails were floating down the river in front of the mission premises, mutilated limbs, heads and trunks of the bodies of human beings have been floating about, & scenes of disgust and horror have been presented to our view in every direction."

"You foreigners have salt beef to eat when you sail about; we have no beef, and therefore make use of human flesh."

"Cannibalism is a luxury, not an ordinary practice; but Buckley mentions a tribe called the Pallidurgbarrans, who eat human flesh whenever they get a chance, and employ human kidney fat, not as a charmed unguent for the increase of their valour, but as a sort of Dundee marmalade, viz., "an excellent substitute for butter at breakfast." These gentlemen are the colour of "light copper, their bodies having tremendously large and protruding bellies." They ate so many natives at last that war was declared, and some inglorious Pelissier drove a few hundred of them into a cave, and setting fire to the surrounding bush, suffocated them with great success."

"This village (Kuras) is the place where they were cooking a man a few yards distant from the place where I was sitting on my first visit here."

"It will give some idea of the state of these people if I give a story which was told me on April 3 in the most matter-of-fact way, as though it was something of quite ordinary occurrence. It was reported without any feeling of reprobation on the part of my informant. He said that some time ago a poor man drifted to this island in a canoe. The chief saw him outside, and went off and rescued him. He was in a very deplorable state from starvation and exposure; but the chief took him to his home, gave him food, and, some time afterwards, when he was recovered, took him to the place where the dances were usually held, and where one was being carried on at the time. As the people were dancing the poor castaway asked one of them, "Why is this dancing? Is there some pig to be eaten?" "Oh no," they replied, "there is no pig, but we are going to eat you after the dance." And they did so that same day!"

"I stopped to gratify my curiosity, there being a fleshy smell rising from an oven. I opened the latter, and there saw a female child half roasted. The skull had been stove in, the whole of the inside cleaned out and refilled with red hot stones. The hideous habit of murdering, and eating, the little girls is carried on far more in these jungles than in any other part of the colonies, which accounts for the female children being so scarce. One of the Mourilyan aborigines informed me that they catch the unsuspecting child by the legs and bash its head against a tree; also that a piccaninny makes quite a delicious meal – he had assisted in eating many."

"The expression "long pig" is not a joke, not a phrase invented by Europeans, but one frequently used by the Fijians, who looked upon a corpse as ordinary butcher's meat, and call a human body puaku balava, "long pig", in contradistinction to puaka dina, or "real pig". The flesh was never eaten raw, but was either baked whole in the ovens, or cut up and stewed in the large earthen pots that they use for cooking.... If a man was to be cooked whole, they would paint and decorate his face as though he were alive, and ... the corpse ... was placed in a sitting position, and ... handed over to the cooks, who prepared it and placed it in the oven, filling the inside of the body with hot stones, so that he would be well cooked all through."

"Sometimes even the victim was not killed, but was placed bound and alive in the oven; and their fiendish revenge, not being satisfied by the mere death of its object, tortures too horrible to describe were often inflicted – frequently a living man having to eat part of his own body before death was allowed to end his sufferings.... Women were not allowed to partake of the awful banquet, yet women were considered better for cooking than men, and the thighs and arms the best portions. So delicious was human flesh considered, that the highest praise that they could give to other food was to say, "It is as good as bakolo.""

"They made no secret of their relish for human flesh. At one place of call where we were landing ..., the savages brought down quite a quantity of the flesh of a young woman whom they had just cooked. In offering parts for sale, they said that if we white men did not like to eat it possibly some of our native boatmen would enjoy it."

"Mr. Gillan, the missionary at Uripiv, told me that he knew of a vendetta between two villages which had been closed, not as is usual by the payment of pigs, but by the sending of a small boy as sacrifice; and who, he concluded, was afterwards eaten."

"He showed me, locked up in a house, a group of young girls who had been caught on another island and who were kept and fattened for the next cannibal feast. It had just been decided that this feast would take place the same day on the occasion of our presence in Malaita. The girls were no doubt aware that their last hour was soon to come.... They seemed to accept the situation with great resignation."

"He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month."

"Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras."

"But why does Tararo frown and look so angry?" said I."Because the girl's somewhat obstinate, like most o' the sex, an' won't marry the man he wants her to. It seems that a chief of some other island came on a visit to Tararo and took a fancy to her, but she wouldn't have him on no account, bein' already in love, and engaged to a young chief whom Tararo hates, and she kicked up a desperate shindy; so, as he was going on a war expedition in his canoe, he left her to think about it, sayin' he'd be back in six months or so, when he hoped she wouldn't be so obstropolous. This happened just a week ago; an' Tararo says that if she's not ready to go, when the chief returns, as his bride, she'll be sent to him as a long pig.""As a long pig!" I exclaimed in surprise; "why what does he mean by that?""He means somethin' very unpleasant", answered Bill with a frown. "You see these blackguards eat men an' women just as readily as they eat pigs; and, as baked pigs and baked men are very like each other in appearance, they call men long pigs. If Avatea goes to this fellow as a long pig, it's all up with her, poor thing."

"I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized."

"In 1894 a friend of mine shipped as a deck hand on the Steamer Tacoma, Capt. John Davis. They sailed from San Francisco for Hong Kong China. On arriving there he and two others went ashore and got drunk. When they returned the boat was gone. At that time there was famine in China. Meat of any kind was from $1 to $3 a pound. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under 12 were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under 14 was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and ask for steak – chops – or stew meat. Part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girls behind which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet brought the highest price. John staid [sic] there so long he acquired a taste for human flesh."

"First I stripped her naked. How she did kick – bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her though I could of [sic] had I wished. She died a virgin."

"I came home with my meat. I had the front of his body I liked best. His monkey and pee wees and a nice little fat behind to roast in the oven and eat. I made a stew out of his ears, nose – pieces of his face and belly. I put onions, carrots, turnips, celery, salt and pepper. It was good. Then I split the cheeks of his behind open, cut off his monkey and pee wees and washed them first. I put strips of bacon on each cheek of his behind and put them in the oven. Then I picked four onions and when the meat had roasted about 1/4 hour, I poured about a pint of water over it for gravy and put in the onions. At frequent intervals I basted his behind with a wooden spoon. So the meat would be nice and juicy. In about two hours, it was nice and brown, cooked through. I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his sweet fat little behind did. I ate every bit of the meat in about four days. His little monkey was a sweet as a nut, but his pee-wees I could not chew. Threw them in the toilet."

"I told her, "Mother, we had to eat our dead friends", ... and she said, "That's okay, that's okay, sweetie"."

"Hunger turned some people into cannibals. This was a much more common phenomenon than historians have previously assumed. In the Bashkir region and on the steppelands around Pugachev and Buzuluk, where the famine crisis was at its worst, thousands of cases were reported. It is also clear that most of the cannibalism went unreported. One man, convicted of eating several children, confessed for example: "In our village everyone eats human flesh but they hide it. There are several cafeterias in the village – and all of them serve up young children." ... People ate their own relatives – often their young children, who were usually the first to die and whose flesh was particularly sweet... Hunting and killing people for their flesh was also a common phenomenon. In the town of Pugachev it was dangerous for children to go out after dark since there were known to be bands of cannibals and traders who killed them to eat or sell their tender flesh."

"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. It was so nearly like good, fully developed veal that I think no person with a palate of ordinary, normal sensitiveness could distinguish it from veal. It was mild, good meat with no other sharply defined or highly characteristic taste such as for instance, goat, high game, and pork have. The [rump] steak was slightly tougher than prime veal, a little stringy, but not too tough or stringy to be agreeably edible. The [loin] roast, from which I cut and ate a central slice, was tender, and in color, 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."

"My passion is so great. I want to eat her. If I do she will be mine forever. There is no escape from this desire."

"Mr. Harris has already intimated to you in a letter of his that while he was down at Jikau, ... a horrible case of murder and cannibalism on the part of rubber sentries occurred in this district. It was of a shocking nature, and has greatly distressed us. On Sunday morning, May 15, just after eight o'clock, I had gone across to Mr. Harris's house, ... when two boys rushed breathlessly in, and said that some sentries had killed a number of people, and that two men had gone by to tell the rubber white men, and that they also had some hands to show him, in case he did not believe them... Shortly afterwards the two men came along the path, and we heard the boys calling to them to come and show us; but they seemed afraid, and so we went out quickly and overtook them, and asked them where the hands were. Thereupon one of them opened a parcel of leaves, and showed us the hand and foot of a small child, who could not have been more than five years old. They were fresh and clean cut. It was an awful sight, and even now, as I write, I can feel the shudder and feeling of horror that came over me as we looked at them, and saw the agonised look of the poor fellow, who seemed dazed with grief, and said they were the hand and foot of his little girl. I can never forget the sight of that horror-stricken father. We asked them to come into the house and tell us about the affair, which they did, and the following is the story they told us—"The father of the little girl said his name was Nsala, and he was a native of Wala, which is a section of the Nsongo District... On the previous day, although it was three days before they were due to take in the rubber, fifteen sentries came from Lifinda, all except two being armed with Albini rifles, and they were accompanied by followers. They began making prisoners and shooting, and killed Bongingangoa, his wife; Boali, his little daughter of about five years of age; and Esanga, a boy of about ten years. These they at once cut up, and afterwards cooked in pots, putting in salt which they had brought with them, and then ate them.""

"Only twice in the course of my trip have I had conversation with a man who actually admitted having eaten human flesh, though I have spoken to many who have seen it done, and both of them spoke of the present prohibition [of cannibalism] with regret and utterly without shame or real consciousness of wrongdoing, as one speaks of the "drink" prohibition of the United States! One of them, an old man whom I fell into conversation with later, on the road between Wei and Tappi... told me that among his people, the Jocquellehs, a woman's flesh was highly esteemed and that in the old days it had been the custom to give the upper part of the body to the crowd but that the thighs were reserved for the Chief."

"As recently as 1950, a Belgian administrator was served a meal of "porcupine meat" that he found remarkably delicious. Not until he had finished was he told that the meat came from a young girl."

"In 1961 in Uganda, a man offered to sell me human fingers that had been smoked. When I declined in horror, he offered to return with a smoked slab of a young woman's buttocks, a truly "choice cut", as he put it."

"Qiaoxian town officials treated me to lunch. On that day, the main course was sautéed pig's liver. I tried very hard not to vomit as I swallowed two pieces. I then quickly turned away from the table.... During the previous few days, I had encountered nothing but stories about the cutting out of human livers, boiling human livers, consuming human livers, and barbecuing human livers. My tolerance had reached its limit."

"When people do not respect our [traditions], they become enemies, and we don't consider our enemies to be human any more. They become animals in our eyes. And the Dayaks eat animals."

"It was considered a great triumph among the Marquesans to eat the body of a dead man. They treated their captives with great cruelty. They broke their legs to prevent them from attempting to escape before being eaten, but kept them alive so that they could brood over their impending fate. Their arms were broken so that they could not retaliate in any way against their maltreatment. The Marquesans threw them on the ground and leaped on their chests so that their ribs were broken and pierced their lungs, so that they could not even voice their protests against the cruelty to which they were submitted. Rough poles were thrust up through the natural orifices of their bodies and slowly turned in their intestines. Finally, when the hour had come for them to be prepared for the feast, they were spitted on long poles that entered between their legs and emerged from their mouths, and dragged thus at the stern of the war canoes to the place where the feast was to be held. With this tribe, as with many others, the bodies of women were in great demand."

"One morning very early, the news came that Nyan-ngauera had left the camp, taking a fire-stick and accompanied by her little girl. No one would follow her or help to track her. For twelve miles I followed the track unsuccessfully, but Nyan-ngauera doubled many times and gave birth to a child a mile west of my camp, where she killed and ate the baby, sharing the food with the little daughter. Later, with the help of her sons and grandsons, the spot was found, nothing to be seen there save the ashes of a fire. "The bones are under the fire", the boys told me, and digging with the digging-stick we came upon the broken skull, and one or two charred bones, which I later sent to the Adelaide Museum."

"When the Yumu, Pindupi, Ngali, or Nambutji were hungry, they ate small children with neither ceremonial nor animistic motives. Among the southern tribes, the Matuntara, Mularatara, or Pitjentara, every second child was eaten in the belief that the strength of the first child would be doubled by such a procedure."

", n. A gastronome of the old school who preserves the simple tastes and adheres to the natural diet of the pre-pork period."

"Man came into being through cannibalism – intelligence can be eaten."

"In ancient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather hazy about it. I tried to look this up, but my history has no chronology, and scrawled all over each page are the words: "Virtue and Morality". Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night, until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words – "Eat people"."

""But if you eat this chap who's God", said Llewelyn stoutly, "how can it be horrible? If it's all right to eat God why is it horrible to eat Jim Whittle?""Because", said Dymphna reasonably, "if you eat God there's always plenty left. You can't eat God up because God just goes on and on and on and God can't ever be finished. You silly clot", she added and then went on cutting holly leaves."

"... Now, in my opinion, you can't find a nicer piece of meat, marbled but firm, than a buck [boy] tempered [castrated] not older than six, then hung at twice that age." "No one asked your opinion", Memtok answered. "Their Charity's opinion is the only one that counts. They think that sluts [young women] are more tender."

"Hugh tried to keep his eyes [off] the contents of the meat storage room. Most of the meat was beef and fowl. But one long row of hooks down the center held what he knew he would find – human carcasses, gutted and cleaned and frozen, hanging head down, save that the heads were missing. Young sluts and bucks, he could see, but whether the bucks were tempered or not was no longer evident.... Memtok paused on the way out and patted the loin of a stripling buck carcass. "That's what I would call a nice piece of meat. Eh, Hugh?""

"I despised him long before I found out about his having young girls butchered and served for his dinner.... Ponse always ate girls. About one a day for his family table, I gathered. Girls about the age and plumpness of [14-year-old] Kitten." "But— But— Hugh, I ate the same thing he did, lots of times. I must have— I must have—" "Sure you did. So did I. But not after I knew. Nor did you." "Honey... you better stop the car. I'm going to be sick."

"The ocean's dying. Plankton's dying. It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing, they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them!"

"Soylent Green is people!"

"The harvest had yielded no grain. Gradually, even tree bark and plant stalks had grown scarce. Soon, markets selling human flesh had begun to appear... The two men were tearing off the little girl's clothes... The girl looked like she was somewhere around ten years of age... It soon became evident that most of the customers were interested in the little girl, because many complained that the older woman's flesh was no longer quite so fresh as the girl's... [Stabbed in the chest with a knife, t]he little girl gasped. Her screams gave way to a lingering sigh... He... rapidly sliced apart her body with the help of the cashier before handing the pieces one by one to the people waiting outside the shed... The little girl had already been completely dismembered, and the proprietor was leading the woman from the corner of the shack over to the stump. Not daring to watch any more, Willow turned and made his way down an alley. But he was pursued by the dull sound of the proprietor's ax cutting into the woman's flesh, by the woman's lacerating shriek. He shook uncontrollably, and it was only when he had rushed out of the alley and into another part of town that the sounds began to recede behind him. But, try as he might, he was unable to expel the scene he had just witnessed from his mind."

"A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone."

"A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. [Slurps]"

"Members of the civilian population, including those captured by the militia, had to witness acts of anthropophagy, mutilation, amputation and decapitation.... Thus, in the tshiota [initiation house], in front of the civilian population often forced to watch, they cut off the penises of many men, including village chiefs they considered traitors, who had just been beheaded, and sometimes then held a ceremony to eat them after preparing them, which, according to their belief, gives them power, or threw them into the fire.... In another case, a woman at the tshiota witnessed militiamen eating the abdominal part of her son, who had just been decapitated."

"A boy captured in Kamonia territory, Kasaï province, in December 2016 by the militia and forcibly assigned to chores explains: "They sometimes brought us human thighs that we had to cook, and cans of blood." ... Finally, a 14-year-old girl forcibly integrated into the Kamuina Nsapu militia in May 2017 in the province of Kasaï Oriental explains: "The militiamen cut off the genitals of soldiers who had been killed, but it was more often the genitals of senior soldiers that they cut off. Then the genitals were grilled and eaten. The boys cut off the genitals and gave them to the girls. The victims' blood was drunk..."."

"Some witnesses described seeing people cutting, even cooking and then eating human flesh, including penises cut from living men and corpses, notably of FARDC members, and drinking human blood."

"But if you're gonna dine with them cannibals Sooner or later, darling, you're gonna get eaten."

"They'd taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry."

"He lies down in the hammock and tries to sleep. A commercial plays again and again in his mind. A woman who's beautiful but dressed conservatively is putting dinner on the table for her three children and husband. She looks at the camera and says: "I serve my family special food, it's the same meat as always, but tastier." The whole family smiles and eats their dinner. The government, his government, decided to resignify the product. They gave human meat the name "special meat". Instead of just "meat", now there's "special tenderloin", "special cutlets", "special kidneys". He doesn't call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product. To the number of heads to be processed, to the lot waiting in the unloading yard, to the slaughter line that must run in a constant and orderly manner, to the excrement that needs to be sold for manure, to the offal sector. No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food."