If you’ve ever wondered why Egyptian mummies are so rare, it’s because wealthy Europeans ate them. Between the 12th and 17th centuries, while pilfering the continent for goods, resources, artifacts, and Africans themselves, colonizers also looted and exoticized Egyptian tombs. Mummies were ground up into medicines and consumed by the elite, believed to be a remedy for various ailments and an infusion of life-energy from the spirits of the dead. When Egyptian mummies became scarce after hundreds of years of eating them, corpses from other parts of North Africa and Guanche mummies from the Canary Islands were instead exported and sold to European apothecaries. But even as they engaged in cannibalism for their own selfish indulgences, one of the primary ways that Europeans demonized Indigenous peoples was by naming them all as savages and cannibals.
Colonizers have not limited their use of racial cannibalism to the medicinal. They have also used it punitively and vindictively. During the genocidal King Leopold II’s occupation of the Congo (1885-1908), Belgians massacred more than 10 million Africans. Most were forced to work for the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, and were severely punished if they did not meet their rubber quota. In Don’t Call Me Lady: The Journey of Lady Alice Seeley Harris, there is a black and white photo of a Congolese man named Nsala, seated at the edge of a porch. His eyes are fixed on the severed hand and foot of his 5 year-old daughter, Boali. The Belgian militia had cut them from her body before killing her and her mother. To further exact their cruelty, they ate Nsala’s wife and child. They did this because he had failed to meet his rubber quota for the day.
The thing about white supremacy is that it does not merely subsist through the consumption of the Other; it whitewashes by de-emphasizing and lessening these misdeeds and others. History looks very different when white people are not the protagonists in its retelling. A significant instance: the accepted and well-known white feminist narrative about the Salem Witch Trials of the 1600s is that it was a hysteria driven by rampant misogyny and a pointed persecution of white women, the survival of which they harken to as evidence of their historical resilience. I prefer to think of it, more accurately, as a community of racist, religiously-intolerant enslavers and colonizers of stolen Native land cannibalizing itself—and I wish it had finished its meal instead of begetting centuries of white people who would gorge on the lives and cultures of Black and Indigenous folks.
As the Donner Party traveled across the U.S. as part of a violent westward expansion in 1847, a small group that broke off from the larger party became stranded without food in a grueling wintery hellscape. So, they conspired to murder their two Native American guides, Salvador and Luis, for food. The two men ran away, but were found a few days later and were swiftly eaten, the only members of the party to be hunted and murdered before they were cannibalized. Salvador and Luis are rarely spoken of when the story is told to relay the suffering and survival of the people who ate them. In the version of the story that tells the truth about colonialism and the violence it requires, the Donner Party are the monsters, not the damsels.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a monstrosity of boundless proportions. Its enormity altered the world in a multitude of ways and none were/are more changed by it than Africans and their descendants. Many Africans believed—or, rather, knew—that white people were cannibals and feared that they would be taken away and consumed, like the others who had disappeared and not returned once white people began to arrive on African shores. Fear of white cannibalism on the ships carrying Africans to other lands was indeed palpable, and often led to attempted mutiny and escape or suicide by jumping into the waters below.
— Sherronda J. Brown, THE HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION AND THE CANNIBALISTIC NATURE OF WHITENESS
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