10 Incidents of Cannibalism
By Sami on July 29th, 2009
Most of the stories we grew up hearing about Africans, Polynesians, and other “savages” eating colonists were exaggerated blood libels used to justify enslaving them. The following are 10 incidents of cannibalism. They delve into the cultures that practiced it, tell the stories of a few murdering cannibals, and also of some extreme situations where people were driven to eat their fellow man in order to survive.
1. Aghori
The Aghori are Hindu sadhus who believe immortality is attainable by spending 12 years bringing oneself closer to everything that is unclean in society. Most sadhus are content to roam around India smoking hash, but Aghoris smear themselves with cremation ash, drink wine and urine from human skulls, and practice cannibalism. They collect corpses that have been ceremonially disposed of by family members in the Ganges and consume them after praying. Aghoris believe that the proper combination of prayer and cannibalism gives them powers such as levitation and the ability to control weather.
2. Anyoto
Also known as the Human Leopard Society, the Anyoto was an 18th century West African secret society that practiced cannibalism. Each member had to murder a loved one to join, and had to provide a fresh victim every four years thereafter. They believed that a victim’s body fat allowed wishes to be granted. Members dressed in leopard skins and attacked travelers with weapons resembling a leopard’s claws and teeth. The flesh of victims was cut from the body, distributed to members, and consumed in a ceremony. Edgar Rice Burroughs based Tarzan’s Leopard Men on the Anyoto.
3. watuSimba
Today, watuSimba (were-lion) stories are used to scare misbehaving children. But in the ’40s, the watuSimba were young women who had been enslaved by East African witch doctors. They were forcefully addicted to drugs to make them compliant, forced to live in tight cages, and had their foot tendons reshaped to give them the gait of a stalking lion. The witch doctors would then send them out as assassins. The watuSimba wore the skin of a lion and were outfitted with prosthetic claws while hunting. Most shockingly, they were primarily fed the meat of their victims. They killed approximately 300 people over the course of four years and continued to kill even after the witch doctors were captured and hanged.
4. Fritz Haarmann
Fritz Haarmann’s victims were young refugees that he picked up at train stations in a post-World War I Germany. Similar to the watuSimba, Haarmann killed by gnawing through the throats of his victims until they were decapitated. He then sold their flesh as horse meat, ate what he couldn’t sell, and disposed of the bones in the Leine. In 1924, Haarmann was caught and charged with 27 murders after some local boys discovered human skulls while fishing. He was Germany’s first experience with a serial killer and it was just their luck that he would also be history’s most prolific cannibalistic murderer. Some investigators believe he killed many more people, with estimates reaching as high as 600 people in one year alone.
5. Albert Fish
Albert Fish was a pedophile who described the flesh of children as the “sweetest.” He claimed the idea came from a deck hand who described a trip to Hong Kong during a famine when children were being sold as meat. Fish was caught when he sent a letter to the mother of his final victim, a 10-year-old girl, six years after she vanished. In the letter he gave graphic details about using her body to make a stew, complete with bacon strips, carrots and onions. Fish spent the next nine days locked in his room, eating his stew and compulsively masturbating. Fish was a religious maniac who punished himself by inserting needles into his groin. These needles caused Sing Sing’s electric chair to short circuit during the first attempt to execute him.
6. The Siege of Suiyang
Fish wasn’t entirely off the mark when he claimed that the Chinese had resorted to cannibalism during a famine. He was, however, wrong about the time and place. In 757 AD, the Tang army was fending off a siege by the Yan army in the city of Suiyang. The Tang were vastly outnumbered and placed their hopes on outlasting the Yan. A local governor forced Suiyang to share supplies with surrounding fortresses, causing supplies to run out after a few months. Unwilling to give themselves up to the Yan, the people of Suiyang eventually resorted to cannibalism. A total of 20,000-30,000 people were eaten. In reference to this, The Old Book of Tang eerily states: “People always remained loyal.”
7. The Siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan
In 1098, the city of Ma’arrat al-Numan, in what is modern-day Syria, was besieged by a group of defeated crusaders who had run out of supplies. They massacred a large portion of the Muslim population after they surrendered, but quickly discovered that the city was not as rich as they had hoped. By winter, supplies were dwindling again and the crusaders resorted to cannibalizing the remaining Muslim population. One of the crusader commanders wrote to Pope Urban II: “A terrible famine racked the army in Ma’arra, and placed it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Saracens.”
8. Richard I of England
The Siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan was not the last time crusaders resorted to cannibalization. Richard I of England, better known as Richard the Lionheart, was one of the main architects behind the Third Crusade, a move to reclaim the Holy Lands. But Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, earned the crusaders’ respect by being too shrewd, organized, and powerful to defeat. The best Richard could do was to negotiate a peace treaty that gave Christians the right to visit Jerusalem’s holy places, and he remained very bitter about the defeat. In spite, he invited some of Saladin’s ambassadors to attend a banquet and reputedly dined on the curried head of a Muslim warrior in their presence.
9. Idi Amin
Idi Amin was Uganda’s military dictator from 1971 to 1979. (He is also a frequent subject on this site.) Over those eight years he managed to wipe out a fairly large portion of Uganda’s population for fairly tenuous reasons. Basically, if he hated you, you died. When he first rose to power he had the military leadership rounded up and decapitated. He then sat on a pile of their heads and chastised them while taking bites from their flesh. Amin was a member of the Kakwa tribe. They believed that if you ate a section of a man you killed then his spirit could not return to haunt you. Amin ate a lot of his enemies before switching to oranges.
10. Joshua Blahyi
In the ’90s, Joshua Blahyi was one of many Liberian warlords who killed thousands of people. What separated Blahyi from the rest was that went by the nickname “General Buck Naked” and believed his nakedness protected him from bullets. His group routinely performed human sacrifices that involved cannibalism before battle. A quote from Blahyi said:
So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we’d looted from civilians. We’d slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people – so many I lost count.
Blahyi now works as a minister, talk about an amazing career transition. There is a documentary about him in the works.
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