An excerpt from "Conversations with the Cannibals: the End of the Old South Pacific"
By MICHAEL KRIEGER
I ask the four old Big Nambas if they themselves have seen people eating human flesh. Yes, yes, they say, they all have seen their fellow villagers eating humans. Alam says that he has eaten people and indicates that Teven has, too. I ask Alam to tell me about his own personal experience as a warrior, and he tells me the following story, which took place a few years before World War II:
His village, Amok, was continually warring against other villages. The villagers were always living in fear of an attack. They guarded not only their village but also their vegetable garden, which even then was the source of most of their food, particularly yams, their dietary staple. On this particular day Alam, armed with a musket, was one of the warriors on guard outside the vegetable garden, which was fenced to keep the village pigs out. There had been recent attacks by the Small Nambas, and one man had already been killed. (He didn't specify whether the deceased was one of his people or the enemy.) Alam heard someone approaching and threw a stick inside the garden to alert those inside. A Small Namba appeared and Alam shot him in the chest.
The women smeared a batter of crushed yams, called laplap, over the victim's entire body, after they had cut him to let out the blood.
"What happened then?" I ask.
"We tied the man's wrists and ankles and put a stick between them so two people could carry him to the village. We carried him to the nakamal." The Small Namba killed by Alam was lashed to (really hung from) a tall, hollowed-out drum, usually carved in the shape of a man, called a slit drum.
Then, Alam says, the women smeared a batter of crushed yams, called laplap, over the victim's entire body, after they had cut him to let out the blood. "They just throw the head away," Alam says, "and then let the body lie down and just cut him up like an animal."
"Where do they cut him?" I ask.
"They throw away the intestines," Alam replies. Then with his finger he draws imaginary lines around his shoulders, elbows, wrists, knees, ankles, and hips -- the joints where the pieces are cut. In response to another question, he says they don't eat the heart or liver. The entire insides are discarded. They eat just the body."
"Do they eat the buttocks?" I ask.
"Oh yes" is the enthusiastic reply. "Because that is the big meat. That is the best part!"
Excerpted with permission from
Conversations with the Cannibals: the End of the Old South Pacific (Ecco Press, 1994).
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