Among the Cannibals: Adventures on the Trail of Man's Darkest Ritual

288 Pages·2008·2.84 MB·English

by  Paul Raffaele

A M O N G T H E

Canni bals
Adventures
on the Trail of
Man’s Darkest Ritual

Paul Raffaele
To Catherine and Cecilia
Contents
Preface 1

7
Sleeping with Cannibals
The Korowai of New Guinea

65
Saintly Cannibals of the Ganges

125
Tonga’s Warrior Cannibals

173
Suffer the Little Children
Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army

229
La Muerte es Grande
Cannibalism and the Barbaric Aesthetes
Epilogue 259
Index 263
About the author
credits
Cover
copyright
About the publisher

Preface
C
annibals: one of the most compelling, and repelling, words in the
English language. Of all humanity’s known taboos through the mil-
lennia, eating human flesh is the most repugnant and forbidding. And, yet,
the enormous worldwide popularity of the books and movies about Han-
nibal Lecter, the cannibal monster, shows how we are drawn irresistibly to
tales about this deep and terrible perversity of human nature. Few of us
ever want to be cannibals, but most of us want to hear stories about them.
Cannibalism comes in several forms. There are countless morbid true
stories of psychopaths like Lecter, deeply aberrant people who defied social
custom by indulging their hunger for human flesh. Recent examples in-
clude the Japanese Issei Sagawa, who ate his Parisian girlfriend in 1981,
and Marc Sappington in Kansas, who axed to death a sixteen-year-old boy,
and ate part of his leg in 2001. Jeffrey Dahmer of Milwaukee, from 1978
to 1991, killed and ate seventeen men. He claimed that he liked them so
much that he ate them so they would become part of him.
Not all cannibals are psychopaths. In many warrior societies, fight-
ers honored or insulted those they had slain by eating their flesh in ritual
feasts, while in some rural hamlets of China and also in some Amazon vil-
lages people ate the body parts of beloved relatives to remember them. The
most prevalent role of cannibalism throughout history has been as a pow-
erful and pivotal part of religious ceremonies, but the only form that has
ever proved socially acceptable to outsiders has been “lifeboat” cannibal-
ism. This arises from the fierce will to survive when starving during famine
1
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or warfare, or when lost on land or at sea. One famed example followed the
aftermath of the plane crash in the Andes of Uruguayan Air Force Flight
571 in 1972, when surviving passengers stayed alive until rescued by eating
the flesh of passengers who died. This formed the plot for a major book,
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read, published in 1974
and released as a motion picture in 1993.
Cannibalism has likely been with us for almost as long as humans have
walked the Earth, even though most cultures have made the eating of
human flesh taboo and condemned it as evil and demonic. “Worldwide
folklore, oral traditions, sacred writings, anthropological narratives, war
stories, urban police records, clinical psychological sources and tales of lost
or helpless wanderers and explorers tell of cannibal peoples and cannibal
events,” wrote American anthropologists Christy and Jacqueline Turner in
their book Man Corn. “Cannibalism has occurred everywhere at one time
or another.”
Going back at least until Paleolithic times, tribal cannibalism lingered
until two centuries ago in some isolated South Pacific cultures, notably in
Tonga and Fiji. Remnant cannibal cults survive today, and this book is an
account of my quest to seek them out. For decades I have wandered the
remote reaches of our planet, making journeys to the edges of the world,
to be with tribes such as the Korubo of the Amazon and the Dani of New
Guinea, tribes that appear to have changed little over thousands of years.
Within a generation or two most of these cultures will disappear into the
globalized monoculture, thrust into oblivion by the enormous appeal of
Western ways once exposed to them.
It was on this search a decade ago that I encountered a tribe of treehouse-
dwelling cannibals deep in a remote New Guinea rainforest on the much
wilder Indonesian western side of the island. They call themselves the Ko-
rowai and they inhabit one of the world’s most pestilent jungles, about
one hundred miles inland from the Arafura Sea. It is not far from where
Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson, disappeared in headhunter and can-
nibal territory while collecting funerary totem poles for the Metropolitan
Museum of Art almost five decades ago.
My first visit had been brief, as my Korowai guide would not take me
beyond “the pacification line”—the line separating the Indonesian-con-
trolled territory that was once under the influence of Dutch colonialism,
and the area in which the Korowai practice a shocking form of ritual can-
PREFACE 3
nibalism. My guide knew of the tribesmen’s threat to kill any outsider
who dared enter their territory, and so he would not take me any further
inland than his treehouse near a government settlement. This time I have
gone beyond the pacification line in an effort to meet Korowai, who are
among the last tribal cannibals on Earth, and to ask them why they eat
each other.
I have visited several continents and large islands on the quest. In India
the holy men of an ancient Hindu sect are fervent cannibals. They live at
the cremation ghats by the sacred river Ganges in the holy city of Benares,
and eat charred human flesh from the pyres as a demonstration of their
saintliness. I went on to Tonga in the South Pacific where cannibalism is
no more, but where until recently the kingdom’s fierce giant warriors ate
the flesh of their slain enemies. The Tongans even lined up Captain James
Cook for the steaming oven when he sailed into their waters two and a half
centuries ago.
In these three places the man-eating is and was condoned and even
encouraged by their communities for specific, and, to them, honorable rea-
sons. The Korowai kill and eat devil-men who haunt their treehouses, and
they like the taste. The Tongan warriors humiliated slain foes by eating
them, and they also liked the taste. The Hindu holy men use cannibalism
as a way of reaching spiritual enlightenment, and even they are partial to
the taste.
But I also traveled to Uganda, in eastern Africa, where cannibalism
stemmed from a rebel leader more demonic than Hannibal Lecter. He has
forced hundreds of boys and girls as young as six to eat human flesh after
abducting them at night from their villages. The result is deep shame for
a sickening purpose, to alienate the children forever from their families.
The leader turns the boys into soldiers and the girls into sex slaves for his
troops.
My last stop was Mexico where the sixteenth-century Aztecs have a
deserved reputation for practicing mankind’s most repulsive habit, even
though they were a people of high artistic achievement. The Aztecs were
enthusiastic cannibals, barbaric aesthetes. Central to their view of the world
was the horrific need for daily human sacrifice and occasional cannibalism.
In and around the great temple Tenochtitlán, at the center of what is now
Mexico City, countless thousands of men, women, and even children were
sacrificed to the Aztecs’ bloodthirsty gods and then partially eaten.
4 AMONG THE
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Just thirty miles to the northeast is the mysterious two-thousand-year-
old pyramid complex of Teotihuacan, where the genesis of much of Me-
soamerican culture was sparked. I met a Mexican physical anthropologist
who examined piles of human bones from fifteen-hundred-year-old gar-
bage dumps there seeking to prove or disprove the traditional belief that
the Teotihuacans were not cannibals. In diligently stripping away the flesh
of cadavers in his laboratory with Aztec-style obsidian knives he has seen a
marked similarity to butchers’ cut marks on the ancient human bones.
There is more to my quest than just an adventurer’s wanderings. In 1979,
American anthropologist William Arens published a book, The Man-eating
Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy, which immediately became highly
influential in the often hostile tribal-and-ritual-cannibalism debate. Arens
argued strongly that tribal and ritual anthropophagy—man-eating—had
never existed: “I have been unable to uncover adequate documentation of
cannibalism as a custom in any form for any society. Rumors, suspicions,
fears and accusations abound, but no satisfactory first-hand accounts.”
Arens gathered some convincing evidence for his case. The word “can-
nibal” comes from a corruption of the name of a tribe called the Carib,
whom Columbus encountered during his epic voyage to America in 1492.
An enemy tribe told Columbus that they were eaters of human flesh, a
dubious proof. Columbus called them “caribales,” which the Spanish later
adapted to “canibales.”
During Columbus’s second voyage, in 1493, he supposedly found evi-
dence of cannibalism, human bones in a hut according to the fleet doctor,
Diego Alvarez Chance. Peter Martyr d’Anghera, the Spanish Royal Chron-
icler at the time of Columbus, and tutor in the court of Ferdinand and
Isabella, had face-to-face access to the great explorer. He embellished the
gruesome tale above by adding that there were also chunks of human flesh
roasting on a spit, and a young boy’s head hanging from a ceiling beam,
still dripping blood.
Arens’s refutation of such stories emboldened many anthropologists
who refused to believe there was any evidence of tribal and ritual cannibal-
ism. Typically, they claimed it was all a deception, lies put about by Western
explorers, missionaries and colonizers to demonize the reputation of native
peoples and so make it easier to exploit, enslave and convert them.
The bellicose Tolai of Papua New Guinea would scoff at Arens’s disbe-
lief. They were well aware of their cannibal ancestors’ taste for human flesh.