The Zimba, the Portuguese, and Other Cannibals in Late Sixteenth-century Southeast Africa

Abstract

This article argues that Portuguese accounts of cannibalism in sixteenth-century southeast Africa reflect important but mostly unrecognised elements of the region's political and cultural history. The article analyses descriptions of the Zimba cannibals in Ethiopia Oriental, written by the Portuguese priest João dos Santos. Dos Santos's evidence figures significantly in scholarship for this period, and while many historians include his colourful descriptions of cannibalism, none has taken them seriously, largely dismissing them as a product of European myth-making. In focusing on the question of cannibalism, the article asks not whether the Zimba ate human flesh, nor why they might have, but how dos Santos came to believe that they did. Early modern European cultural outlooks had a role in producing such accounts, but the argument here focuses on how claims of cannibalism reflected African, rather than European, perspectives. Such claims were a vernacular expression of beliefs about, and critiques of, political power in the threatening and unsettled political environment of the time. In transmitting descriptions of cannibalism from African informants, dos Santos acted as an unwitting vehicle for this vernacular critique, conveying its meaning quite imperfectly to his readers.

Notes

¹ J. dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental (Lisboa, Bibliotheca de Classicos Portuguezes, 1891 [1609]), Volume 1, p. 229. Dos Santos's work has also been published, with accompanying translation, in G.M. Theal (ed.), Records of South-Eastern Africa, Volume 7 (Cape Town, C. Struik, 1964 [1901]), pp. 291–2. I have worked from the Portuguese, modifying or replacing the translations in Theal where I considered it appropriate to do so; here I offer references to both, except where the relevant passage has not been included in Theal's edition.

^*This article has gone through more than the usual number of iterations, and I would like to thank, besides four anonymous JSAS readers, Benedict Carton, Alan Cooper, Naomi Davidson, Robert Harms, Thomas McDow, and Bruce O'Brien for comments and suggestions. I should also mention especially Geoffrey Parker, who gave important encouragement and advice at an early stage.

² E.A. Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1975); E.A. Alpers, ‘The Mutapa and Malawi Political Systems to the Time of the Ngoni Invasions’, in T.O. Ranger (ed.), Aspects of Central African History (London, Heinemann, 1968), pp. 1–28; M.D.D. Newitt, ‘The Early History of the Maravi’, Journal of African History [JAH], 23, 2 (1982), pp. 145–62; M. Schoffeleers, ‘The Zimba and the Lundu State in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, JAH, 28, 3 (1987), pp. 337–55. But dos Santos's account also finds use as evidence for analysing the history of southeast African identities; see E. MacGonagle, Crafting Identity in Zimbabwe and Mozambique (Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2007).

³ M. Newitt, A History of Mozambique (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 61, emphasises the importance of these ecological factors in addition to the human ones. In his very brief mention of the Zimba, I. Pikirayi, ‘Palaces, Feiras and Prazos: An Historical Archaeological Perspective of African-Portuguese Contact in Northern Zimbabwe’, African Archaeological Review, 26, 3 (September 2009), p. 167, explains their activity solely in ecological terms.

⁴ See Alpers, ‘The Mutapa and Malawi Political Systems’; Newitt, ‘The Early History of the Maravi’; Schoffeleers, ‘The Zimba and the Lundu State’.

⁵ These questions are the heart of a debate in which Newitt and Schoffeleers find fault with Alpers' effort to locate regional underdevelopment in this history.

⁶ Alpers, ‘The Mutapa and Malawi Political Systems’, p. 21.

⁷ Alpers, ‘The Mutapa and Malawi Political Systems’; Newitt, ‘The Early History of the Maravi’, p. 156.

⁸ Newitt, ‘The Early History of the Maravi’; Schoffeleers, ‘The Zimba and the Lundu State’. Because Newitt (pp. 158, 162) doubts the importance of the ivory trade in local politics, he suggests that Zimba activity is better understood as an attempt by the Maravi state to seize land and command tribute.

⁹ Newitt, A History of Mozambique, p. 61. In this vein, Newitt echoes claims made by Joseph Miller, in his contributions to an analogous debate among historians of west-central Africa regarding a similarly militarised and cannibalistic group, the Jaga (or Imbangala, as they are alternatively called at times) of Angola. For that debate, see J.C. Miller, ‘Requiem for the “Jaga”’, Cahiers d'Études Africaines, 13, 1 (1973), pp. 121–49; J.C. Miller, ‘Thanatopsis’, Cahiers d'Études Africaines, 18, 1 (1978), pp. 229–31; A. Hilton, ‘The Jaga Reconsidered’, JAH, 22, 2 (1981), pp. 191–202; J.K. Thornton, ‘A Resurrection for the Jaga’, Cahiers d'Études Africaines, 18, 1 (1978), pp. 223–7.

¹⁰ G. Casale, ‘Global Politics in the 1580s: One Canal, Twenty Thousand Cannibals, and an Ottoman Plot to Rule the World’, Journal of World History, 18, 3 (September 2007), pp. 273–5.

¹¹ That few fail to mention the Zimba may be because ‘Cannibalism is so good to think about that the intellectual appetite is not easily satisfied’. W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York, Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 8.

¹² Alpers, ‘The Mutapa and Malawi Political Systems’, in Ranger (ed.), Aspects of Central African History, p. 21; Casale, ‘Global Politics’, p. 274; Miller, ‘Requiem for the “Jaga”’, pp. 124–5.

¹³ This argument is made most cogently in Miller, ‘Requiem for the “Jaga”’.

¹⁴ With apologies to D.B. Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho Migrants (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994).

¹⁵ I have borrowed the phrasing for this question from Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, p. 139. Arens' reconsideration of the matter underscores the difficulty – perhaps futility – of proving the existence or non-existence of cannibalism. W. Arens, ‘Rethinking Anthropophagy’, in F. Parker, P. Hulme and M. Iversen (eds), Cannibalism and the Colonial World (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 39–62. For an explanation of cannibalism as a response to protein deficiency, see M. Harner, ‘The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice’, American Ethnologist, 4, 1 (February 1977), pp. 117–35.

¹⁶ I take the phrase ‘cannibal talk’ from G. Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2005).

¹⁷ Six years after the publication of Ethiopia Oriental, the Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Alvares wrote an account of his time in West Africa, which he titled Etiópia Menor e Descripção Geográfica da Província da Serra Leoa [Ethiopia Minor and Geographic Description of the Province of Sierra Leone] (unpublished manuscript, c. 1615). This manuscript is held in the library of the Lisbon Geographic Society; an English translation is available in P.E.H. Hair, An Interim Translation of Manuel Alvares, S.J., Ethiópia Menor e Descripção Geográfica da Província da Serra Leoa [1615] (Liverpool, University of Liverpool, 1990). Hair offers an opening ‘Apologia’, in which he laments that his translation is in a ‘very crude, and inadequate, and inelegant, and therefore tentative form’. Hair, An Interim Translation, p. 1.

¹⁸ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 229 (Theal, Records, pp. 291–2).

¹⁹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 235 (Theal, Records, p. 296).

²⁰ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 232 (Theal, Records, p. 293).

²¹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 232 (Theal, Records, pp. 293–4).

²² Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 234 (Theal, Records, p. 295).

²³ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 236 (Theal, Records, p. 296).

²⁴ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 236 (Theal, Records, p. 296).

²⁵ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 237 (Theal, Records, p. 296).

²⁶ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 237 (Theal, Records, p. 296).

²⁷ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 238 (Theal, Records, p. 297).

²⁸ Mozambique here refers to the island settlement to the north of the Zambesi valley, from which the country gets its name.

²⁹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, pp. 238–40 (Theal, Records, pp. 297–9).

³⁰ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 241 (Theal, Records, p. 299).

³¹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 242 (Theal, Records, p. 300).

³² The figure of 15,000 that dos Santos provides here differs from the one of 20,000 he provides in another passage (Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, pp. 409–16) describing the Zimba attack further up the coast, where the Zimba engaged with Ottoman forces; hence the reference to ‘Twenty Thousand Cannibals’ in the title of Casale's essay, ‘Global Politics in the 1580s’.

³³ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 243 (Theal, Records, pp. 300–1).

³⁴ Ibid., p. 246 (Theal, Records, p. 302).

³⁵ Dos Santos's account of the Zimba is also partly about conflict and competition between the nascent Portuguese Estado da Índia, the Swahili city-states of the east African coast and the Ottoman Empire.

³⁶ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 247 (Theal, Records, p. 303).

³⁷ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 247 (Theal, Records, p. 303).

⁴¹ ‘Narrative by Father Francisco de Monclaro, of the Society of Jesus, of the Expedition to Monomotapa, led by Francisco Barreto’, in Documentos sobre os Portugueses em Moçambique e na África Central 1497–1840, Volume 8 (Lisbon, National Archives of Rhodesia and Centro de Estudos Históricos Ultramarinos, 1975), p. 351.

³⁸ A partial list includes Arens, The Man-Eating Myth; M.B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1988); Miller, ‘Requiem for the “Jaga”’; S.B. Schwartz, ‘Introduction’, in S.B. Schwartz (ed.), Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–19.

³⁹ A. Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 6.

⁴⁰ It is worth noting that dos Santos, in his discussion of the Ottoman Turks, a group of which he had considerable other knowledge, offers no such similar commentary on the bizarre.

⁴² C. Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 14.

⁴³ Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 13.

⁴⁴ Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, p. 16.

⁴⁵ Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, pp. 83, 85.

⁴⁶ Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 85.

⁴⁷ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 267 (Theal, Records, p. 315).

⁴⁸ Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, pp. 84–5.

⁴⁹ Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, p. 141.

⁵⁰ Miller, ‘Requiem for the “Jaga”’, pp. 133–4.

⁵¹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 68 (Theal, Records, p. 199).

⁵² Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 302 (Theal, Records, p. 318).

⁵³ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1

⁵⁴ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, pp. 302–3 (Theal, Records, pp. 318–9).

⁵⁵ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 303 (Theal, Records, p. 319). There is a parallel in contemporary accounts of the Jaga's activity in west-central Africa; F. Pigafetta, A Report of the Kingdom of Congo and of the Surrounding Countries, Drawn out of the Writings and Discourses of the Portuguese, Duarte Lopez (London, John Murray, 1881 [1591]), p. 97.

⁵⁶ A suggestion Miller makes regarding the Jaga; see Miller, ‘Requiem for the “Jaga”’, p. 126.

⁵⁷ Avramescu notes how this trope was taken up by some Enlightenment sceptics of religion, recounting Hume's vignette on transubstantiation: ‘A priest asks a Turkish prisoner in Europe, on the day after he has converted to Christianity and received the sacrament, “How many gods are there?” To which the Turk replies: “None at all. You have told me all along that there is but one God: And yesterday I ate him”’. Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, p. 153. For more on the notion of the Catholic Mass as ritual cannibalism, see M.L. Price, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York, Routledge, 2003).

⁵⁸ Bernault, in her discussion of a later colonial era in Equatorial Africa, remarks on the challenge Christian missionaries faced: those who insisted ‘on the presence of Christ's true blood and flesh at the Eucharist feared that it would encourage their converts to reflect on the parallels that existed between the pagan and the Christian economy of sacrifice’. F. Bernault, ‘Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa’, JAH, 47, 2 (2006), p. 227. Delius, also considering a much later period, reflects on the meaning, for missionaries, of the ‘cannibal-to-Christian narrative’. P. Delius, ‘Recapturing Captives and Conversations with “Cannibals”: In Pursuit of a Neglected Stratum in South African History’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 36, 1 (March 2010), pp. 17, 19.

⁵⁹ Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism, p. 14.

⁶⁰ This explanation may also make a good case for descriptions of the Jaga in Kongo Kingdom around the same time.

⁶¹ I am in some respects echoing a point in Casale, ‘Global Politics’, p. 268.

⁶² Schwartz, ‘Introduction’.

⁶³ Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, p. 145.

⁶⁴ See Miller, ‘Requiem for the “Jaga”’, pp. 133–5, for the persistence of this belief among Portuguese in Angola.

⁶⁵ J.C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, WN, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp. 4–5.

⁶⁶ Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, p. 139.

⁶⁷ P.E. Russell, ‘Veni, vidi, vici: Some Fifteenth-century Eyewitness Accounts of Travel in the African Atlantic Before 1492’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 66, 160 (June 1993), p. 126. Thanks to C. Kieko Matteson for this reference.

⁶⁸ As Miller notes, dos Santos was sometimes nearly 1,000 kilometres distant from the events he describes. Miller, ‘Requiem for the “Jaga”’, p. 125.

⁶⁹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 239 (Theal, Records, p. 298).

⁷⁰ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 234 (Theal, Records, p. 295).

⁷¹ Newitt, A History of Mozambique, chapter 6, describes this early Afro-Portuguese society. For more on the history of Zambesia's prazero community, see M.D.D. Newitt, Portuguese Settlement on the Zambesi: Exploration, Land Tenure and Colonial Rule in East Africa (New York, Africana Publishing Company, 1973); A.F. Isaacman, Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution: The Zambesi Prazos, 1750–1902 (Madison, WN, University of Wisconsin Press, 1972); A. Isaacman and B. Isaacman, ‘The Prazeros as Transfrontiersmen: A Study in Social and Cultural Change’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 8, 1 (1975), pp. 1–39.

⁷² Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 2, p. 195 (Theal, Records, p. 348).

⁷³ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 2, pp. 219–20, 255 (Theal, Records, pp. 353, 365). He does not provide figures for his baptismal work at Quelimane, Tete or Sena.

⁷⁴ P. Denis, The Dominican Friars in Southern Africa: A Social History (1577–1990) (Leiden, Brill, 1998), p. 12.

⁷⁵ In her fine-grained account of Ndau history, MacGonagle, Crafting Identity in Zimbabwe and Mozambique, pp. 4–5 gives a useful description of this linguistic landscape. Denis, The Dominican Friars, p. 13, suggests dos Santos may have spoken the language, but offers no direct evidence.

⁷⁶ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, pp. 224–5 (Theal, Records, p. 289).

⁷⁷ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, pp. 241–2, 260 (Theal, Records, pp. 299, 311).

⁷⁸ B. Isaacman and A. Isaacman, ‘Slavery and Social Stratification among the Sena of Mozambique: A Study of the Kaporo System’, in S. Miers and I. Kopytoff (eds), Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison, WN, University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), p. 115.

⁷⁹ Miller, Way of Death, p. 19.

⁸⁰ C. Skidmore-Hess, ‘Soldiers and Smallpox: The 1626 Portuguese Campaign against Njinga of Matamba in Angola’, in R.W. Harms et al. (eds), Paths Toward the Past: African Historical Essays in Honor of Jan Vansina (Atlanta, African Studies Association Press, 1994), p. 406.

⁸¹ Delius, ‘Recapturing Captives’, p. 19, notes this possible metaphorical sense of cannibalism as ‘capture and coerced incorporation into communities which to some extent subsisted through raiding’.

⁸² See, for example, D.N. Beach, The Shona and Zimbabwe, 900–1850: An Outline of Shona History (London, Heinemann, 1980), especially chapters 4–5; S.I.G. Mudenge, A Political History of Munhumutapa c 1400–1902 (Harare, Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1988); M.E.M. Santos, Viagens de Exploração Terrestre dos Portugueses em África (Lisboa, Centro de Estudos de Cartografia Antiga, 1978).

⁸³ This history is covered comprehensively by Newitt, ‘The Early History of the Maravi’; Schoffeleers, ‘The Zimba and the Lundu State’; and Newitt, A History of Mozambique, pp. 62–78.

⁸⁴ See Newitt, A History of Mozambique, chapters 2–3.

⁸⁵ Newitt, A History of Mozambique, p. 61, makes the most glancing of suggestions in this direction, noting that cannibalism ‘has a symbolic significance for understanding developments among the peoples’ in southeast and south-central Africa, but he does not elaborate.

⁸⁸ ‘Narrative by Father Francisco de Monclaro’, p. 395.

⁸⁶ A secondary goal was to revenge the killing of a Jesuit priest, Father Gonçalo da Silveira, early in the 1560s; the Portuguese believed that under the influence of Muslim traders who lived at the Monomotapa court, the rulers had put Silveira to death. See ‘Narrative by Father Francisco de Monclaro’, p. 327.

⁸⁷ The size of the expedition varied over time, especially as the Portuguese succumbed to disease, but accounts mention, at times, 650 soldiers and more than 2,000 slave porters.

⁸⁹ ‘Narrative by Father Francisco de Monclaro’, p. 397.

⁹⁰ Newitt, ‘The Early History of the Maravi’, p. 158. See also Schoffeleers, ‘The Zimba and the Lundu State’, p. 342.

⁹¹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, pp. 229–30 (Theal, Records, p. 292).

⁹² Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 260 (Theal, Records, p. 311).

⁹³ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, pp. 265–6 (Theal, Records, p. 314).

⁹⁴ Unless dos Santos kept an extraordinarily detailed journal, he may no longer have recalled such precise details when writing Ethiopia Oriental.

⁹⁵ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 240 (Theal, Records, p. 299).

⁹⁶ This would only be the case, though, when the vernacular critique was understood; it is unclear, and perhaps doubtful, that the Portuguese in Angola, for example, understood Africans' belief that they were cannibals.

⁹⁷ J. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, WN, University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); L. White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2000); A. Masquelier, ‘Of Headhunters and Cannibals: Migrancy, Labor, and Consumption in the Mawri Imagination’, Cultural Anthropology, 15, 1 (February 2000), pp. 84–126; Bernault, ‘Body, Power and Sacrifice’.

⁹⁸ Bernault, ‘Body, Power and Sacrifice’, and White, Speaking with Vampires, do so very convincingly. So too does Delius, writing of the terrible, unsettled world of post-mfecane southern Africa, on how accounts of cannibalism spoke of ‘the desperate dangers that lie in store if properly constituted authority is disrupted or overturned’. Delius, ‘Recapturing Captives’, p. 19.

⁹⁹ See especially J. Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 60, 2 (April 2003), pp. 273–94.

¹⁰⁰ See especially J. Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 60, 2 (April 2003), pp. 273–4.

¹⁰¹ See especially J. Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 60, 2 (April 2003), p. 275.

¹⁰² It is tempting to claim it is ubiquitous; that is unlikely, but the following select references suggest the geographic extent: P. Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (Charlottesville, VA, University of Virginia Press, 1997); Masquelier, ‘Of Headhunters and Cannibals’; Bernault, ‘Body, Power and Sacrifice’; Delius, ‘Recapturing Captives’. Related ideas that encompass cannibalism, vampirism, and zombies – embracing a full range of anxieties about power and consumption – are even more widespread. White, Speaking with Vampires, explores them across East and central Africa, from Kenya and Tanzania down through southern Congo and Zambia.

¹⁰³ Newitt, A History of Mozambique, p. 78.

¹⁰⁴ Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders’, pp. 277, 280.

¹⁰⁵ Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders’, p. 282.

¹⁰⁶ Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders’, p. 284.

¹⁰⁷ Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders’, pp. 288–9. For more on the Imbangala or Jaga, see J.C. Miller, Kings and Kinsmen: Early Mbundu States in Angola (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1976); B. Heintze, ‘The Extraordinary Journey of the Jaga through the Centuries: Critical Approaches to Precolonial Angolan Historical Sources’, History in Africa, 34 (2007), pp. 67–101.

¹⁰⁸ Thornton, ‘Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders’, p. 282.

¹⁰⁹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 241 (Theal, Records, p. 299).

¹¹⁰ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 241, p. 243 (Theal, Records, p. 300).

¹¹¹ Dos Santos, Ethiopia Oriental, Volume 1, p. 241, p. 244 (Theal, Records, p. 301).