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 and epileptics paid to drink it fresh.
For over five hundred years, from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, European physicians prescribed human remains as medicine. They ground up Egyptian mummies into powder and sold it at apothecaries. They also soaked corpses in alcohol and turned blood into marmalade. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this practice was at its peak and powerful people including Kings and scientists participated. At the same time, European missionaries and colonisers were labelling African and Indigenous peoples as “cannibals” to justify their conquest and enslavement.
What Actually Happened: The African Evidence
Let’s start with the hard truth. 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 took localised practices and made them a continental identity. Although practices involving human flesh existed only in particular communities and contexts, as they did elsewhere in the world, colonial discourse recast Africa itself as a continent defined by cannibalism. The entire continent was reduced to a single image of the man-eater in the jungle and the savage standing over the cooking pot.
This was deliberate. As the historian Marcus Rediker documented in The Slave Ship, 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 carried legal consequences in earlier centuries because peoples accused of cannibalism 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. From where Africans stood, the evidence was hard to argue with. Ships arrived, loaded people, and none came back. The suspicion that they were literally eating the people they took was widespread across coastal West Africa.
The researcher Luise White has documented how rumours of vampires and cannibals in East and Central Africa often reflected Africans’ attempts to make sense of the extractions and invasions they were experiencing. In 1952, a Kenyan politician recalled a man who had been missing since 1927. His neighbours had assumed he was slaughtered by the Nairobi Fire Brigade, and his blood taken by the Medical Department to treat Europeans with anaemic diseases. In colonial Kampala, the police were said to keep Africans in pits beneath the station, draining their blood. 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.” These were Africans making sense of a world in which colonial doctors drew their blood, colonial scientists collected their skulls, and colonial authorities took their bodies for autopsy without consent.
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
Colonial portrayals of African barbarism become harder to sustain when viewed alongside practices embedded within European society itself.
Medical cannibalism in Europe operated within mainstream society and carried the approval of major institutions and powerful elites. The Roman physician Galen, whose influence shaped Western medicine for over a millennium, prescribed remedies made from human remains, including burned bone. By the sixteenth century it had become industrial. The German-Swiss physician Paracelsus, helped popularise remedies involving fresh human 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 parts of Germany, France, and England sold blood, fat, bones, skulls, and other human remains from the scaffold for medicinal use. 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 mummy trade was particularly staggering in scale. Thousands of ancient bodies were looted from Egyptian tombs, ground into powder, and sold across Europe as cures for internal bleeding, headaches, heart attacks, plague, and bruising. Demand so outstripped supply that an entire industry of counterfeit mummies emerged. In 1564, Guy de la Fontaine, physician to the King of Navarre, visited a merchant in Alexandria and asked about ancient embalming. The merchant reportedly admitted that the “mummies” sold to Europeans were often made from the bodies of slaves, criminals, and unclaimed dead of all ages, prepared in large batches without concern for how the individuals had died.
Medical cannibalism in Europe existed openly within recognised medical practice and carried little social stigma among physicians and elites. As the scholar Louise Noble observes, European debates often focused less on whether human flesh should be consumed than on which forms of it possessed the greatest medicinal value.
The French essayist Michel de Montaigne noticed the hypocrisy as early as the sixteenth century. In his essay “Of Cannibals,” he noted that European physicians made routine use of dead human bodies, and pointed out that every society calls barbaric whatever it does not practise itself.
A Global Practice, a Selective Label
Cannibalism was never an exclusively African phenomenon. The Finnish anthropologist and sociologist Edvard Westermarck, in his study of moral ideas, identified it as particularly prevalent in the South Sea Islands, Australia, Central Africa, Central and South America, North America, parts of Asia, and many parts of Europe. Saint Jerome, writing in the fourth century AD, reported cannibalistic practices among the Attacotti, a tribe in what is today Scotland. Spanish conquistadors arriving in Mexico found ritual cannibalism on a large scale. Archaeological evidence strongly suggests 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 numerous human body parts as medicinally useful, including flesh 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, whether European, Chinese, Japanese, or American, carries the enduring stigma of being labelled a “cannibal culture” in the way Africa does. The stigma attached to Africa has always been about who got to decide what counted as civilisation, and who got counted out.
The Stigma That Won’t Die
Even after the colonial period, the cannibal myth remained alive in modernised forms.
In 1997, a book published under Pauline Hanson’s name, titled The Truth, accused Aboriginal Australians of cannibalism and used that accusation to argue they had no legitimate claim to land rights. Critics argued that such depictions reinforced older colonial ideas that peoples associated with “savagery” possessed weaker claims to land or sovereignty. Frantz Fanon identified a similar dynamic in Black Skin, White Masks, writing that “Face to face with white man, 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.”
In popular culture, the image of the African cannibal remains stubbornly alive. It surfaces in films, in literature, in the assumptions of tourists, and in the frameworks that shape international media coverage. The cannibal remains one of the Western imagination’s oldest figures of African dehumanisation, repeatedly resurfacing during moments of conflict as the ultimate symbol of savagery.
The Cameroonian anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh has argued that accusations of cannibalism, whether justified or not, have long functioned as a tool of “othering.” Such accusations establish perceived cultural superiority by associating non-Western peoples with a practice widely treated as existing at the furthest 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, since acknowledging it means accepting the colonial narrative of African savagery. However, telling the truth is a more powerful response in reframing the conversation entirely.
The truth is that cannibalism was a global practice, documented on every inhabited continent, including Europe, where it was institutionalised as medicine and consumed by kings. The truth is also that where it occurred in Africa, it was localised, context-specific, and subject to indigenous moral frameworks that most African societies used to condemn it. Additionally, the truth is that the accusation was the legal and ideological tool used to justify the slave trade, the Scramble for Africa, forced conversion, and the systematic destruction of African institutions. And, to sum it up, the truth is that the double standard in the story is that when Europeans consumed human remains, it was called medicine, but when Africans did the same, it was called barbarism.
The history of cannibalism in Africa is real, but the idea that this practice defined the continent, and that it was uniquely and characteristically African, is one of the most successful lies in the history of colonialism. It was told to justify slavery, conquest and enduring forms of contempt. A complete account includes powdered skulls in English medicine, human blood sold in German apothecaries, and Egyptian mummies consumed across Europe as remedies.
