Converging on Cannibals: Terrors of Slaving in Atlantic Africa, 1509-1670

by Jared Staller

Overview

In Converging on Cannibals, Jared Staller demonstrates that one of the most terrifying discourses used during the era of transatlantic slaving—cannibalism—was coproduced by Europeans and Africans. When these people from vastly different cultures first came into contact, they shared a fear of potential cannibals. Some Africans and European slavers allowed these rumors of themselves as man-eaters to stand unchallenged. Using the visual and verbal idioms of cannibalism, people like the Imbangala of Angola rose to power in a brutal world by embodying terror itself.

Beginning in the Kongo in the 1500s, Staller weaves a nuanced narrative of people who chose to live and behave as “jaga,” alleged cannibals and terrorists who lived by raiding and enslaving others, culminating in the violent political machinations of Queen Njinga as she took on the mantle of “Jaga” to establish her power. Ultimately, Staller tells the story of Africans who confronted worlds unknown as cannibals, how they used the concept to order the world around them, and how they were themselves brought to order by a world of commercial slaving that was equally cannibalistic in the human lives it consumed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780821423530
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Series:	Africa in World History
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jared Staller teaches world history at St. Francis Episcopal School of Houston, Texas. He earned his PhD from the University of Virginia and taught African and world history at Rice University. His research has appeared in History in Africa, Research in African Literatures, and elsewhere.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

1 An Introduction to Cannibal Talk 1

2 Angels of Deliverance, 1483-ca. 1543 16

3 Phantoms of the Kongo, 1568-1591 45

4 Destroyers of Angola, 1600-1625 72

5 Queen of Cruelty, 1629-1655 103

6 Preachers and Publicists, 1500-ca. 1670 135

7 The Afterlife of the Jaga 168

Appendix A Research Methods 175

Appendix B Suggested Further Readings by Chapter and Topic 184

Appendix C Primary Source Excerpts 194

Notes 211

Bibliography 239

Index 251

Plates follow page 102.