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Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509–1670

2022; Michigan State University Press; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14321/jwestafrihist.8.2.0141

2327-1876

Christopher Blakley,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

Western Europeans and West Central Africans cast aliens and themselves as cannibals in early modern texts for diverse reasons. Europeans characterized themselves as civilized in opposition to their imagined double, the cannibal. Atlantic Africans claimed through speech to be either the perpetrators or targets of cannibals. Jared Staller asks how multiple communities in Angola used “cannibal talk,” or claims of anthropophagy, to terrorize enemies or dehumanize foreigners from the late fifteenth century until the end of the seventeenth century. Converging on Cannibals draws on an archive of printed and manuscript material to explore cannibal stories and their storytellers, including letters, traveler's accounts, missionary reports, heraldic iconography, engravings, maps, and paintings that enable them to reconstruct depictions of cannibals that circulated between the “Kongo composite”—a term encompassing the political regions that later made up the Kongo Kingdom such as Nsundi and Mbata—and its neighboring polities like Ndongo in Angola and Europe. Moreover, Staller adds to a longstanding conversation within historiography and cultural anthropology over the real and imagined existence of cannibals as disputed by William Arens, Gananath Obeyesekere, and Marshall Sahlins. Staller organizes the book in seven chapters that examine the role that cannibalism claims played in the origins of the Kingdom of Kongo under Afonso I and Álvaro I, the rise of Imbangala kilombos, the political history of Njinga of Ndongo and Matamba, and printed accounts of cannibalism that reflected the political theological views of early modern Europeans.Afonso I of Kongo narrated his victory against his half-brother Mpanzu a Kitima at the Battle of Mbanza Kongo in 1509 to insert himself within the history of Christendom as a valiant defender of the faith against its enemies—both “infidels” and idolaters. Later, as mani Kongo, Afonso cracked down on non-Christian Kongo people by razing sacred palm groves and building atop graveyards, destroying minkisi, and persecuting banganga and witches. Attacks by allegedly nomadic raiders, later called “Jagas” and the defeat and exile of Álvaro I of Kongo in 1568 continued to shape the Jaga myth in West Central Africa. While exiled on an island in the Congo River, Álvaro, via Duarte Lopes, conjured the belief that the Jagas were cannibals. Jesuits sent from Portugal like João Ribeiro Gaio exclaimed that the Jaga were “men who ate human flesh” as a means of contrasting them against Álvaro and his Catholic allies who recommitted themselves to Portugal as their faithful vassals. Writers like Gaio transformed these purported invaders, actually Kongo rivals of Álvaro, into Jagas to assert Portugal's moral and legal claims to slaving in Angola.Imbangala kilombos terrorized towns and villages throughout the Kongo composite ranging from the region south of the Congo River and north of the territory of Ndongo between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through careful reading of Andrew Battel's account of his travels with the kilombo led by Imbe Kalundula in the region near the Kuvo River in the 1580s, Staller links the origins of these kilombos to climate change, particularly severe drought, which afflicted numerous polities south of the Kwanza River in the early sixteenth century, including Nyaenka speakers in the Quilengues region, likely the ancestors of the Imbangalas that Battel encountered. Mobile Imbangala warbands roved along the Atlantic coast, pillaging towns and plundering the countryside for captives to sell to Portuguese slavers. Battel's description of Imbangala life included invented or exaggerated details of flesh eating, infanticide, rape, and sexual violence. Staller frames Battell as an “amateur ethnographer” in his telling who used his career in West Central Africa for his own ends. In England, Battell used stories gleaned from his time among the kilombo to portray himself as a “benevolent savior” rescuing a “servant boy,” whom Staller estimates was enslaved, from the “savagery” of cannibal Africans and the African environment. Unlike previous scholars such as Joseph Miller and Beatrix Heintze, who argues that the “Jaga” who invaded Kongo in 1568 were Tio peoples from around Malebo Pool, Staller puts forth that attempts to empirically identify the “Jaga” in this period are of “a centuries-long wild-good chase.” Instead of joining the chase, Staller sees a more fruitful analysis of the Jaga in interpreting documents like Filippo Pigafetta's Relatione del reame del Congo (1591) and others that employ the term “Jaga” as part of a myth about invaders that “succeeded in deflecting readers’ energy away from an investigation of internal Kongo political violence.”Shocking stories of cannibalism served West Central African rulers and European thinkers alike. Njinga's reign between 1624 and 1633 involved her embrace of Imbangala tactics, including the use of terror-inducing cannibalism stories and rumors. European publishers and compilers of travel accounts like Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Samuel Purchas capitalized on cannibal narratives to bolster their own claims to empiricism and to demonize non-Christian societies. Indeed, in addition to castigating Atlantic Africans as cannibals, Europeans described and illustrated allegedly cannibalistic societies such as the Taíno and Arawak of Ayiti and throughout the Caribbean, the Tupínamba of Brazil, and the indigenous people of Alor Island in the Indonesian archipelago. Purchas also framed the Jagas as akin to the Ottoman Empire, claiming that Imbangala child soldiering tactics resembled the Janissaries mobilized by Sultan Orhan in 1328.Jaga fables continue to haunt the present via popular conceptions of Africans as cannibals propagated through film, television, and internet media. In a concluding chapter, Staller compares “cannibal performances” made by West Central Africans and European-produced Jaga stories, and considers, vis-à-vis the claims made by Frank Lestringant and others, the “necessary” function played by cannibals in Western intellectual narratives of modernity, as cannibals came to stand in for the inhuman and savage African foils of a civilized Europe. Staller's focus does not privilege cannibal stories as part of a Eurocentric paradigm, but rather a narratological strategy that West Central Africans like Imbe Kalundula and Njinga developed for their own purposes.Converging on Cannibals is a valuable addition to early modern scholarship on Angola and the narratological devices that West Central Africans and Europeans employed to horrify their enemies and contrast themselves against an alien Other. A key challenge of Staller's methodology is balancing how to interpret African and European narration of Jagas, and the book spotlights figures like Purchas due to the wealth of available textual materials. Staller's outstanding narratological dissections of European texts are nevertheless insightful. Moreover, the book overall is a welcome example of methodological transparency, and Staller includes an essay on methodology as an appendix.Although Staller discusses his exegetical approach to comparing multiple editions and competing accounts of historical events, a more theoretical appraisal of narratology, memory, and cultural semiotics could have improved this section given that Staller characterizes his subjects as recasting events, such as Afonso's claims to fight under the brilliant white cross of Saint James at the Battle of Mpanzu a Kitima, in reference to the Bible and ancient Rome. Teacher-scholars will find the appendices of the book—which contains transcribed letters by Afonso I of Kongo, and excerpted accounts by Duarte Lopes, Filippo Pigafetta, and Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi—worthwhile as archival selections for inviting undergraduates to think about early Angolan history.