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Cannibals, Witches, and Slave Traders in the Atlantic World
John Thornton
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TESTIFYING
before an ecclesiastical inquest in 1659 Jose Monzolo,
1
the small marquisate of Nzolo in the extreme east of the Kingdom
of Kongo,
2
then enslaved and residing in Cartagena, described some of his reactions
to his passage across the Atlantic. He noted the fear that his fellow
slaves had in crossing the sea, for "when they left their own country,
they believed that the Spanish, whom they called the whites,
3
brought them to kill them and to make the flags for the ships from
their remains, for when they were red it was from the blood of the
Moors, and desperately fearing this many threw themselves in the
sea on the voyage."
4
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These bloody fears were nearly ubiquitous
among Africans forced to cross the Atlantic during the years of
the slave trade.
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Olaudah Equiano's account of his own terror at the thought that
he would be eaten is perhaps the best known of these stories from
among Igbos in what is now southern Nigeria, though there are others.
6
Isabela Folupo, a slave from the "Rivers of Guinea" (modern Guinea-Bissau)
testifying in the same inquest as Jose Monzolo, noted that she believed
such things, and slaves coming from other places believed it as
well, including those she met from Allada (now Benin).
7
It was this chilling fear of being killed, eaten by white cannibals,
crushed to make oil, or ground to make gunpowder that drove some
of the human cargo on the ship that bore Jose Monzolo to Cartagena
to jump into the sea. Perhaps the same fear caused a young Kongolese
woman, slave to a Kongolese master in a village of the marquisate
of Damma, not far from Jose Monzolo's birthplace, to take her own
life in July 1695.
8
According to the Capuchin missionary Luca da Caltanisetta, who was
visiting at the time, the woman overheard a conversation between
her master and an agent of the Luanda-based Portuguese merchant
Francisco Pereira Bravo, who wanted to purchase the woman and her
infant son, still nursing at her breast. When she suspected the
sale would result in her transfer to America, she "seized the child,
and angrily threw him against a stone, and then grabbed some arrows
from the hands of a man, and wrathfully used them to pierce her
own breast, in this manner she desperately died."
9
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