Author: Robert Wilson Shufeldt
Publisher: Theclassics.Us
Published: 2013-09
Total Pages: 78
ISBN-13: 9781230361635
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... APPENDIX Note 1. Page 42. One of the best accounts of African cannibalism known to me is given in The Ethiopian, " The Human Leopard Society," by J. Cameron Grant. (Charles Carrington, publisher, Paris, 1900.) As further illustrating this point, I here insert a clipping from The Evening Star, of Washington, D. C. (Thursday, December 5, 1895, p. 10), which reads as follows: -- MEN WORSE THAN APES The Revolting Cruelties Practiced by Many of the Ferocious African Tribes. (From the London Saturday Review.) The cannibalism of the black secret society known as the Human Leopards, in the country near Sierra Leone, disclosed by the recent trial, brings forcibly before us the difference between the East African and the West African habits of eating human flesh. The Sherbro cannibals waylaid and killed their victims, and afterward feasted on their flesh. The cannibalism of the east coast is of a very different kind. The flesh of the old people -- the grandfather and grandmother of a family -- is dried and mixed with condiments; and a portion of this is offered, with a dim sort of sacramental meaning, to travelers who become guests of the family. To refuse it would be a deadly insult. To accept it is a passport to the privileged position of a friend of the house. Many of our travelers in East Africa have eaten thus sacramentally of the ancestors of some dark-skinned potentate. The cannibalism of the west coast is, as has just been seen, of a more horrible kind. The Sherbro case seems to be connected with fetichism, the worst developments of which are peculiar to that country; but there is a hideously genuine appetite for fresh human flesh still existing among the negroes of West Africa. The cannibalism manifests itself in a refinement of gluttony...
