Converging on Cannibals. Jared Staller
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professional meetings. For their contributions to my thinking and support of this project, I’d like to acknowledge Paul Halladay, Brian Owensby, John Mason, Daniel Wasserman-Soler, Margaret Brannan Lewis, Mary Hicks, Noel Stringham, Ronnie Hsia, Matthew Restall, Paolo Aranha, Carlos Almeida, Peter Mark, Christina Mobley, Gerhard Seibert, Mariana Candido, and Rachel Herrmann. A bit more specifically, José da Silva Horta helped me navigate Portuguese archives and introduced me to staffs at the various repositories in Lisbon. Roquinaldo Ferreira provided more encouragement for this project at its infancy than he may be aware of, and he introduced me to the world of Brazilian scholarship that is offering significant insights to Atlantic histories like this one. Daren Ray became more compatriot than colleague. He deserves special acknowledgment and thanks for his patience and insightful commentary after reading so many drafts of these ideas.
This book would not have been written without the support of colleagues at Rice University where I lectured in the years 2013–2017. The professors in the history department who could speak with a deep knowledge on topics discussed in this book supplied me with an embarrassment of intellectual riches. I thank Alida C. Metcalf for stimulating conversations about cannibalism in Brazil and Africa. James Sidbury offered key insights into the complexities of thinking about race and descriptions of race in centuries when people identified much differently than we do now. Kerry Ward and Lora Wildenthal provided timely advice on my work and, more importantly, served as mentors helping me navigate the complexities of professional research, writing, and publishing. I would be remiss if I failed to mention the small but devoted group of students who enrolled in African history courses, both undergrad and graduate, who indulged my desire to talk about cannibalism and depictions of cannibalism in seminars and lectures. They are chiefly responsible for helping me clarify and transform the complex ideas as I first wrote about them for professionals into something more palatable for a broader audience.
After a decade of research, I owe a debt of gratitude to the staffs at numerous libraries and archives. For their professionalism and help, I thank the staffs of the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Archivo General de Simancas, and the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. While the internet now provides digital access to much of what I cite in this book, when I began working that was not the case. As many of the nineteenth-century Portuguese texts are still hard to find even online, I also thank the hardworking library staffs at the University of Virginia and the Fondren Library at Rice University who located and obtained rare works through their interlibrary loan programs. Anna Shparberg, the humanities librarian at Fondren Library, was especially helpful and enthusiastic in helping me access Portuguese-language primary sources.
The process of obtaining print-quality photographs has been a new experience for me, and I’m grateful for the people and archives who aided my efforts. Cécile Fromont facilitated a key contact in Italy, and Paolo Aranha helped me draft a letter of introduction in Italian. I appreciate the professionalism and expeditiousness of the staffs at the libraries at Princeton, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Arquivo Nacional de Torre do Tombo for contributing images. I am also grateful to Vincenzo Negro for graciously providing the images and permissions to reprint Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo’s watercolors.
Gillian Berchowitz and the editorial staff at the University of Ohio Press have been an absolute delight to work with. This book was drafted in Houston, Texas, and submitted to the press on August 24, 2017, about thirty hours before the rains from Hurricane Harvey inundated the city. My family had evacuated to Dallas before the downpour. We watched with the nation as the images of flooding, many of them from our neighborhood in Meyerland, spilled out of our hotel television screen. The challenges and vulnerability of being environmental refugees set in immediately. I developed a very personal sense of affiliation with many of the unnamed characters in this book who similarly found themselves in a world of upheaval and relying on whoever might lend a hand, and the staff at Ohio University Press has absolutely reached out to me. Everyone I have dealt with at OUP, including Samara Rafert, Sally Welch, Beth Pratt, and Zoë Bossiere, has been professional and admirably patient with an author whose materials and emails were submitted too slowly too often. The editors of the Africa in World History series have been similarly supportive. I thank Todd Cleveland and David Robinson for their encouragement and stimulating suggestions for revisions to the text. Their input has only strengthened the end product.
Finally, friends and family deserve more credit for producing this book than most of my scholarly writing. For a decade my parents, siblings, and friends have allowed me to discuss a gruesome history, often at the dinner table, and they never once let it ruin their meals. Kevin Rothgeb deserves special thanks for his wit and constant encouragement. Sometime over the last decade, Professor Joseph C. Miller ceased being my graduate school adviser and became my very good friend. It’s impossible to list all the ways that he contributed to this intellectual pursuit of mine to understand the human reality behind images of dehumanization, so it must suffice to say that he was there at its inception and remained the constant, sometimes gently shepherding, sometimes prodding hand as I finished. I owe my wife and son a debt I cannot repay. Michelle, I am grateful beyond words. This book is richer—and in fact exists—due only to your steadfast support. Your sacrifices to ensure I wrote this book are inspiring. Ignatius, this book was born, grew, and matured alongside you. Though you won’t remember it, when I felt famished and fatigued during the writing process, you nourished me.
CHAPTER ONE
An Introduction to Cannibal Talk
The problem with cannibalism is that even when it is “real” it is always “symbolic.”
—Marshall Sahlins
LATE IN the year 1599, the Imbangala war leader named Imbe Kalundula was looking for a way to carry his warriors across the Kuvo River and attack a group of agriculturalists on the other side. His men and boys were fierce, trained for war. They lived as a highly mobile armed band roaming the countryside, looking for lands to sustain themselves. Fueled by their affinity for an alcoholic drink made from palm tree sap, they stole cattle and besieged villages that would not submit to them. When they conquered a village they incorporated the younger boys of fighting age and some girls into their camp as slaves. A boy could earn his freedom, but only by committing to the military structure centered in the mobile camp (kilombo) and ultimately returning from battle with the head of a victim. Sometimes Kalundula’s victorious warriors cast enemy heads at his feet after battle as a sign of his great victory, and sometimes they brought the bodies of the deceased back to be eaten.
As Imbe Kalundula considered how to cross the Kuvo, he noted a small group of strange slave traders approaching. These traders were Portuguese and hailed from the city of Luanda farther north on the Atlantic Coast. Among their ranks was an English mercenary named Andrew Battell. Kalundula and his men introduced themselves to these traders as Guindas, though he likely did not know that the Portuguese traders translating for Battell referred to his group as “Jaga.” Kalundula promised to provide captives to them as slaves if they ferried his warriors across the river in their boats to attack the residents on the other side. The traders obliged and even actively participated in the attack by firing their muskets as they approached the banks to help Kalundula’s men drive the enemy out of their defensive positions. After a bloody battle, where many of the agriculturalists were killed and many others enslaved, some of the cadavers were brought to Kalundula by his warriors to be eaten. Years later, Battell, according to an Anglican preacher in England, rather coolly recalled the cannibal feast as “strange to behold.” This first attack near the Atlantic Coast of Angola on the Kuvo River set in motion a series of events that would eventually encourage Kalundula’s kilombo to strategically incorporate Battell as a slave-capturing brother-in-arms for about sixteen months in the years 1600–1601, during which time he claimed to have witnessed other such acts of flesh-eating in battle and during prewar rituals.1
Of Cannibals
I have never had a particular interest in the macabre. Though I have grown accustomed to the reality that I am writing a book on cannibalism, nothing about my initial interests in African history suggested that I would do so. So, what led me to create this work? Like many others