In 1634, Joseph Hall, the Bishop of Exeter, delivered a sermon raging against “bloody Turks, man-eating cannibals, mongrel troglodytes feeding upon buried carcasses.” He was condemning non-European peoples for practices he considered the mark of barbarism. At the time he spoke, his own king, Charles II, was sipping a tincture called “The King’s Drops” — a concoction made from powdered human skulls dissolved in alcohol. The 1618 London Pharmacopoeia, the official catalogue of approved medicines in England, listed “mummy” among its essential remedies. Across Europe, executioners sold vials of warm blood from the scaffold. Epileptics paid to drink it fresh.
This is not a fringe curiosity. For over five hundred years, from the twelfth century to the eighteenth, Europeans routinely consumed human flesh, blood, fat, and bone as medicine. They ground up Egyptian mummies into powder. They soaked corpses in alcohol. They smeared human fat on wounds. They turned blood into marmalade. Royalty, priests, and scientists participated. And at the exact historical moment when this practice was at its peak — the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — European explorers, missionaries, and colonisers were labelling African and Indigenous peoples as “cannibals” to justify their conquest and enslavement.
The story of cannibalism in Africa is real, complicated, and inseparable from the story of who got to define civilisation and who got defined out of it.
What Actually Happened: The African Evidence
Let’s start with the hardest part. Cannibalism did exist in parts of Africa. Denying it entirely, as the American anthropologist William Arens attempted in his 1979 book The Man-Eating Myth, requires ignoring too much evidence — including oral histories told by Africans themselves.
Among certain Igbo communities in southeastern Nigeria, oral traditions record the consumption of human flesh as part of ritual practices, including the investiture ceremonies for titled men. The practice was attested by both colonial observers and by indigenous accounts passed down within families. In the Congo Basin, cannibalism associated with warfare and ritual was documented extensively, and some forms persisted into the mid-twentieth century. Among the Azande of Central Africa, specific clans, such as the Apambia, practised the consumption of enemies. Among the Maka of southeastern Cameroon, the Dutch anthropologist Peter Geschiere learned from elderly informants that eating strangers was once considered normal — though eating one’s own kin was strictly taboo and associated with witchcraft.
In the Zulu Kingdom and adjacent areas of southern Africa, cannibalism occurred during periods of extreme famine and social disruption, particularly during the Mfecane — a period of widespread warfare and displacement in the early nineteenth century. In West Africa, after military victories, the consumption of defeated enemies was in some cases both a celebration of triumph and a practical response to the logistical challenge of feeding warriors in the field.
These practices varied enormously in form, frequency, and meaning. Some were ritual: connected to spiritual beliefs about absorbing the power of enemies, honouring ancestors, or protecting the community. Some were strategic: acts of psychological warfare designed to terrify opponents, as with the Jaga/Imbangala military bands of Central Africa, whose real or threatened cannibalism proved so effective that other groups mimicked it. Some were circumstantial: responses to extreme hunger, conflict, or social collapse. And some were deeply localised — practised by specific communities within larger populations that found the practice abhorrent.
What none of them were was universal. At no point in African history was cannibalism a continent-wide norm. The vast majority of African societies considered the consumption of human flesh to be a profound moral violation — the ultimate act of witchcraft, the behaviour of the spiritually corrupt, not of the civilised. The distinction between exocannibalism (eating enemies or strangers) and endocannibalism (eating one’s own kin) was widely recognised, and the latter was almost universally condemned.
The Myth-Making Machine
The problem was never the existence of some cannibalistic practices in some African communities. The problem was what Europeans did with that fact.
From the earliest contact, European explorers, missionaries, and traders transformed localised, context-specific practices into a continental identity. Africa was not described as a place where some communities, in some circumstances, consumed human flesh — as was equally true of parts of South America, Polynesia, and Europe itself. Africa was described as a land of cannibals. The entire continent was tarred with a single image: the man-eater in the jungle, the savage at the cooking pot.
This was not innocent ignorance. It was strategic. As the historian Marcus Rediker has documented, Europeans had long justified the slave trade and slavery by arguing that Africans were savage man-eaters who needed to be civilised through exposure to Christian Europe. The label of cannibal served a legal function: in earlier centuries, peoples deemed cannibalistic could be lawfully enslaved. Later, it served an ideological function, framing colonisation as a rescue mission — saving Africans from their own barbarism.
The irony is breathtaking. In many cases, it was Africans who accused Europeans of being the real cannibals. Slave-trading Europeans, after all, had an insatiable appetite for human beings. They arrived on ships, seized people, and carried them away forever. From the African perspective, the Europeans were consuming human bodies on an industrial scale — and the suspicion that they were literally eating the people they took was widespread across coastal West Africa. When the American anthropologist William Arens arrived in Tanzania to do fieldwork in the 1960s, locals called him mchinja-chinja — a Swahili term meaning “blood-sucker.” The researcher Luise White has documented how rumours of vampires and cannibals in colonial Africa often reflected Africans’ attempts to make sense of the extractions and invasions they were experiencing: blood drawn by colonial doctors, bodies taken for autopsy, skulls collected by European scientists.
The cannibalism accusation, in other words, was always bidirectional. Europeans accused Africans of eating people to justify colonising them. Africans accused Europeans of the same thing because, from where they were standing, the evidence was overwhelming.
The Cannibals of Europe
Here is where the story becomes genuinely damning — not for Africa, but for the moral architecture of European civilisation.
Medical cannibalism in Europe was not a marginal practice. It was mainstream, institutional, and endorsed by the most powerful figures in society. The Roman physician Galen, whose influence shaped Western medicine for over a millennium, endorsed remedies made from burned human bones. The sixteenth-century Swiss physician Paracelsus advocated drinking fresh blood. The 1618 London Pharmacopoeia — the official medical reference for English physicians — listed powdered mummy as an essential medicine. King Charles II of England personally formulated his own skull-based tincture. Executioners across Germany, France, and England sold blood, skin, teeth, hair, and skulls from the scaffold. The poor, who could not afford apothecary preparations, stood at executions and paid a small fee for a cup of the still-warm blood of the condemned.
The trade in Egyptian mummies was particularly staggering in scale. Thousands of ancient bodies were looted from tombs, ground into powder, and sold across Europe as a cure for internal bleeding, headaches, heart attacks, plague, and bruising. Demand so outstripped supply that an entire industry of counterfeit mummies emerged: bodysnatchers and merchants turned fresh corpses — including executed criminals, enslaved people, and unclaimed dead from poor neighbourhoods — into artificial “mummies,” embalming them with salt and drugs, drying them in ovens, and selling the powder to apothecaries. A French physician visiting Alexandria in 1564 watched merchants prepare forty fake “ancient” mummies in a single batch.
This practice was not hidden. It was not shameful. It was not called cannibalism. It was called medicine. As the scholar Louise Noble has observed, the question for Europeans was never “Should you eat human flesh?” It was “What sort of flesh should you eat?”
The French essayist Michel de Montaigne noticed the hypocrisy as early as the sixteenth century. In his essay “Of Cannibals,” he pointed out that European physicians made “no bones of employing dead carcasses to all sorts of use,” and observed that “everyone gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.” But Montaigne’s was a lonely voice. The double standard persisted for centuries and, in many ways, persists still.
A Global Practice, a Selective Label
Cannibalism was never an exclusively African phenomenon. The Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck, in his comprehensive study of moral ideas, identified it as “particularly prevalent” in the South Sea Islands, Australia, Central Africa, and Central and South America — and noted that it had also been documented among North American peoples, in parts of the Malay Archipelago, in Asia, and across Europe. Saint Jerome, writing in the fourth century AD, reported witnessing cannibalistic practices among the Attacotti, a tribe in what is today Scotland. Spanish conquistadors documented large-scale ritual cannibalism in Mexico. Archaeological evidence has confirmed the practice among the Anasazi of the American Southwest and in multiple European prehistoric sites.
In China, the influential sixteenth-century medical text Bencao Gangmu catalogued thirty-five human body parts as medicinally useful, including flesh (prescribed for tuberculosis) and blood. During the Cultural Revolution, hundreds of documented incidents of politically motivated cannibalism occurred. In Japan, during World War II, Japanese soldiers consumed the flesh of prisoners of war and civilians in multiple documented cases. In the Soviet Union, cannibalism was widespread during the famines of the 1920s and 1930s and the Siege of Leningrad.
And yet none of these societies — European, Chinese, Japanese, American — carries the stigma of “cannibal culture” in the way that Africa does. The label was never about the practice. It was about who held the power to define who was civilised and who was not.
The Stigma That Won’t Die
The cannibal myth did not end with colonialism. It mutated.
In the 1990s, the Australian politician Pauline Hanson published claims about Aboriginal cannibalism in her book The Truth, deploying the accusation to argue that Indigenous Australians did not deserve special rights. The message was transparent: people who were once flesh-eaters have no legitimate claim to land or sovereignty. Frantz Fanon identified this dynamic in Black Skin, White Masks: “Face to face with white men, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a vengeance to exact; face to face with the Negro, the contemporary white man feels the need to recall the times of cannibalism.” The accusation is always available, always ready to be deployed whenever African people or their descendants assert their humanity, their rights, or their dignity.
In popular culture, the image of the African cannibal remains stubbornly alive. It surfaces in films, in literature, in the casual assumptions of tourists, and in the unspoken frameworks that shape international media coverage. When conflict erupts in parts of Africa, the Western imagination reaches instinctively for its oldest and most dehumanising trope. The cannibal is the ur-savage — the figure that makes all other forms of contempt possible.
The Cameroonian anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh has traced how accusations of cannibalism — whether justified or not — have always functioned as a tool of “othering”: a way of establishing perceived cultural superiority by associating non-Western peoples with the one practice that sits at the absolute edge of moral acceptability. Even scholars who advocate cultural relativism become uneasy when asked to extend that relativism to cannibalism, which is why the accusation retains its power.
What Africa Should Say About It
The temptation is to deny that cannibalism ever existed in Africa. This is understandable — the stigma is so toxic that any acknowledgment feels like handing ammunition to racists. But denial is both historically dishonest and strategically weak. It concedes the framework: that cannibalism is uniquely African, and that acknowledging it means accepting the colonial narrative of African savagery.
A more powerful response is to reframe the conversation entirely. The facts support this reframing:
First: cannibalism was a global phenomenon, practised on every inhabited continent, including Europe, where it was institutionalised as medicine, endorsed by physicians, and consumed by kings. The notion that it is a distinctly African practice is a colonial fabrication.
Second: where cannibalism did occur in Africa, it was context-specific, localised, and subject to indigenous moral frameworks that distinguished sharply between permissible and impermissible forms. Most African societies condemned it. Many of the oral traditions that record it do so with revulsion, not nostalgia.
Third: the colonial exploitation of the cannibal label was far more destructive than the practice itself. The accusation of cannibalism was used to justify the Atlantic slave trade, the Scramble for Africa, forced conversion, and the destruction of indigenous institutions. It was, as one scholar has put it, the alibi for a history of racial oppression.
Fourth: the double standard is the real story. Europeans consumed human remains on an industrial scale for centuries while simultaneously condemning Africans as savages for doing the same thing in far more limited contexts. The difference was never moral. It was political. Cannibalism, when practised by Europeans, was called medicine. When practised by Africans, it was called barbarism. The classification had nothing to do with the act and everything to do with who held the pen.
And fifth: the persistence of the cannibal stigma is itself a form of ongoing harm. Every time the trope is invoked — in a film, a joke, a political argument, a news headline — it reinforces a hierarchy of humanity that was designed to justify exploitation and that continues to shape how Africa and Africans are perceived globally. Confronting this requires not silence but context, specificity, and the willingness to turn the mirror back on those who wielded the accusation.
The history of cannibalism in Africa is real. But the myth of the African cannibal — the idea that this practice defined the continent, that it was uniquely and characteristically African, that it marked Africans as less than human — is one of the most successful lies in the history of colonialism. It was told to justify slavery. It was told to justify conquest. And it is still being told, in subtler forms, to justify contempt.
The counter-narrative is not denial. It is completeness. Tell the whole story — including the parts about powdered skulls in English wine, blood marmalade in German apothecaries, and Egyptian mummies ground up for profit — and the moral geography shifts entirely.
