The west has begun to believe in African cannibals again. We had gotten past it and gone back to ignoring or exploiting the continent but in the last year the once forgotten image of dark jungles and darker men has remerged as viable. It comes from stories about human heart barbeques on the streets of Harare, UN peacekeepers finding harvested organs in remote areas of the Congo, Rwandan death squads feasting on their victims, and the child victims of a Nigerian tribal cult ending up washing up on the Thames. These stories come from sources we should believe like the Associated Press or the London and New York Times. But there is little evidence to suggest that cannibalism ever existed and if it did, it was for the same reasons why any one eats human meat —namely insanity (Jeffery Dahlmer) or emergency situations where the decision becomes eating or dying (The Donner Party). The history of Africa has been filled with these kinds of stories (look at Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or H. Rider Haggard's She) this recent reoccurrence of them suggests that little has changed.
These tales cannot be proven true and originate in old thoughts resurrected for political convince. The whole history of Africa in the west is a history of destruction—because of European wealth and blindness the continent has reaped what we have sewn. Africa is a mess of tribal warfare, hatred, hunger and disease. The history makes it our fault. We stole gold from Ghana and Mali in the 1500s, art and land from Benin in the 1600s and People in the 1700 and 1800s. If we did not steal things, we slaughtered them in wars that marked our love of colonialism. Our wealth has come from the backs of slaves stolen from the Gold Coast, and when that failed to work other measures were taken. This continues throughout the 20th Century. In 1905 European nations got together in Berlin to carve up Africa on geographical lines ignoring the nations that were there already. This lasted until the liberation of most African nations in the 1960s and 70s, where whole nations moved between Communism and Capitalism depending on which side of the Iron Curtain the bribes were coming from. Today, large multinationals take resources away from home to feed the west. Look at De Beers sponsoring wars in Angola’s for diamonds or Nigeria executing political dissidents as a favour to Shell.
How does this relate to the Cannibals? To admit that we have lived off of the wealth and privilege of nations that cannot afford it should give us a sense of collective guilt so strong that the feelings will become unlivable. But as long as we have food in our bellies, the ethics of where that food comes from does not seem to matter. The noise has to become so loud that ignoring it will be done to our peril, and in Africa this has occurred. The only problem is that we hear the wrong signal, or we do not want to hear the signal we have heard. If we keep passing around the stories of cannibals we make them not human, and if they are not human we can be forgiven for not making any efforts. As well, if we construct them as savages then we are not responsible. It is a continuation of the paternalism that marks colonial extension, but with less subtly. If we believe that they eat human flesh then they cannot be made into civilized people. We are not responsible for the past, because that kind of people cannot learn from the west anyways, and we are not responsible for the future because those kinds of people are incapable of change.
Perhaps as well, it is the west ignoring how parasitic we are. We consume humans with a monstrous efficiency. Eating their time, effort, resources and capital means that we are eating them. Symbolically we are cannibals. By moving this symbol into the real and then reversing it, we continue our disassociation. They are not human and we are doing nothing wrong is the message and that message is so loud that we allow ourselves to ignore all others.


gateway