The Zimba, the Portuguese, and other cannibals in late sixteenth-century Southeast Africa.

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Portuguese accounts of cannibalism in sixteenth-century southeast Africa reflect important but mostly unrecognised elements of the region's political and cultural history. The article analyses descriptions of the Zimba cannibals in Ethiopia Oriental, written by the Portuguese priest Joo dos Santos. Dos Santos's evidence figures significantly in scholarship for this period, and while many historians include his colourful descriptions of cannibalism, none has taken them seriously, largely dismissing them as a product of European myth-making. In focusing on the question of cannibalism, the article asks not whether the Zimba ate human flesh, nor why they might have, but how dos Santos came to believe that they did. Early modern European cultural outlooks had a role in producing such accounts, but the argument here focuses on how claims of cannibalism reflected African, rather than European, perspectives. Such claims were a vernacular expression of beliefs about, and critiques of, political power in the threatening and unsettled political environment of the time. In transmitting descriptions of cannibalism from African informants, dos Santos acted as an unwitting vehicle for this vernacular critique, conveying its meaning quite imperfectly to his readers.