In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (15 page)

Smoked Green Makaku

It’s been ten years since I took a rusty barge down the Congo River, but the memories remain vivid. Like the moment I realized my dorm cabin was doubling as the boat’s brothel. Or the time our captain lost his temper and deliberately drove the boat aground for three days. Or the sweltering hot rooms below deck where stowaways were hung from their wrists and whipped. But it’s the expressions of the smoked monkeys that I remember best. Faces contorted in an agonizing howl, lips blackened from smoke, eye sockets charred and empty. Smoked primate is the nouvelle cuisine of Central Africa and every day dugout canoes pulled up out of the endless jungle to unload stacks of them for delivery to the marketplace in Kisangani. By the end of the trip the decks were covered with what looked like piles of withered children curled up in fetal position. Occasionally someone would tear off an arm to make a bit of soup.

I didn’t realize then that I was witnessing the birth of a culinary trend that many believe will finally lead to the extermination of mankind’s closest relatives. Primates like chimps and apes have been on endangered species lists for many decades, but their numbers had stabilized until a recent breakdown in traditional food taboos put them back on the fast track for oblivion. “If the taste for bushmeat continues to spread at its current pace,” says Anthony Rose of the Institute for Conservation Education, “all African apes and most other nonhuman primates may soon be threatened with extinction.” Hundreds of wildlife organizations have recently made the issue a top priority, including famed ape specialist Jane Goodall, who has predicted the extinction of wild apes within fifty years if the culinary fad continues.

The problem began with logging companies sending foreign workers into the deepest parts of the African jungle. Keeping their workers fed in these areas is extraordinarily complicated. So to economize and maximize profits, many of these companies simply gave their workers guns to hunt “bushmeat” like gorillas, chimps, gazelles, anteaters, and whatever else they could find. Many of these animals have always been on the local menu, but most tribes considered primates taboo because of their obvious kinship to humans. Seeing foreigners munching on monkey chops for the last few decades, however, has normalized this as food. “You must come to my house,” one of my fellow passengers used to urge. “My mother, she makes the best monkey!”
(“Ma mere, elle fait le mieux singe!”)
This local consumption has recently been exacerbated by a growing export market. The chimp jerky on my boat, for instance, was destined for the second-largest city in the Congo, Kisangani, so it could be shipped to places like Brussels, where African expatriates willingly pay up to $20 for a plate of Ma’s smoked green
makaku
stew. The lure of this easy cash, combined with the local consumption and better guns, is causing slaughters in numbers unimaginable in the recent past. Some estimate the market is now worth a billion dollars a year and that 10 percent of the meat in some African towns comes from primates and that the international market—worth an estimated one billion dollars— consumes a quarter of a million metric tons of primate meat a year. With an estimated two hundred thousand chimps left in Africa, the math isn’t hard to do. The recent extinction of Ghana’s red colobus monkey has already been blamed on this phenomenon.

It’s not just the monkeys that are threatened. Primates, whose genome code is 98 percent identical to that of humans, carry a version of the HIV/AIDS virus, and specialists have long suspected that this was the source of the human virus. Only nobody could figure out how it had been transmitted. Then in 1999 a team of researchers stumbled across a chimp that the U.S. Army had frozen twenty years earlier and, after an exhaustive genetic investigation, deduced that the first human victim of AIDS had been infected by a dish of chimp cooked about fifty years ago. An historic meal. The disease has already killed some 20 million people worldwide. In the area through which I was traveling, half the population is expected to die from AIDS before they reach the age of twenty.

The Laughing Man

The Congo is a hundred thousand square miles of jungle, mud roads, and diamond mines. Aside from the boat where I saw the smoked monkeys—which usually runs about three weeks late—the only way to get around is hitching rides. There’s really nothing to see, but it requires so much effort to get anywhere, you’ve no energy left over to wonder what you’re doing there once you arrive. One of the more popular tourist attractions is probably the cannibals. My first encounter came near the Uganda border. Our truck was passing through a typical Congo village of a dozen tipsy-looking huts scattered along a red mud road. Thatched grass roofs, bamboo doors. But there were no people. The line of waving children who had greeted us in every village was missing.

I asked the man sitting next to me on the truck’s roof what had happened.

“Cannibals,” Jacques explained calmly. Jacques was a Congolese man, perhaps eighteen, whom I’d met soon after getting off the Congo barge. “They have attacked this place. So the people, they have just left.”

I laughed. Surely, I said, you don’t believe cannibals still exist?

Jacques looked offended. “But it is only true! Sometimes you can even see the Laughing Man in my town of Kisangani.”

The Laughing Man? I asked. Jacques explained: The Laughing Man is a sickness that comes to a cannibal when the spirits of the people he has eaten possess him. First he starts hearing their voices in his head. Then he begins to see things. He talks to invisible spirits. He can’t stop smiling, and eventually he laughs himself to death.

At the time I wrote off Jacques’s story as yet another African fairy tale, like the church whose followers scream themselves to sleep every night to scare away evil spirits, or the insect that lives exclusively on human corneas. I was wrong. The technical name for Laughing Man disease is
kuru
, although it has been documented only among the cannibals of Papua New Guinea.
Kuru
is closely related to today’s infamous Mad Cow disease (the human version of which is Creutzfeldt-Jakob). Both are caused by institutionalized cannibalism:
Kuru
comes from humans eating the raw brains of their relatives, while Mad Cow first appeared when ranchers began feeding their steers the flesh/blood/brains/organs of other cattle. As in the case of the Laughing Man disease, the cattle’s cannibalistic diet—created to maximize profit—appears to have allowed the spread of bizarre renegade proteins, called prions, that eat holes in the brain tissue and turn it into a spongelike glob. At present, some 3 million animals have died from these diseases, as well as an unknown number of people.

It’s a gruesome tale of greed and how ignoring traditional taboos sometimes carries a price. What makes it particularly bizarre is what the symptoms shared by the cannibalistic diseases of Laughing Man and Mad Cow potentially indicate. The first signs of both include spasms of the limbs, and around the mouth. For human sufferers, this evolves into an uncontrollable urge to smile, followed by compulsive laughter. Then comes dementia, paralysis, and death. These symptoms are quite similar to a rare condition called St. Vitus’s dance. Named after a saint who was made to dance on a bed of red-hot coals, St. Vitus causes sufferers to shiver in a mock spastic “dance” and is believed to have been the cause of the weird religious-dancing hysterias that swept Europe during the 1300s. The Papua New Guineans believed that spirits possessed victims of Laughing Man, just as Christians believed that demons possessed sufferers of St. Vitus’s dance. Whereas eating a human brain transmits Laughing Man, St. Vitus results from eating rye bread infected by the fungus ergot, the active ingredient in the drug LSD. Not surprisingly, the first symptoms of an LSD trip are very similar to symptoms of both diseases: uncontrollable laughter and smiling, followed by hallucinations and temporary dementia.

People from Sigmund Freud to Montaigne have commented on our irrational horror of eating one another. “It baffles all sense of logic,” wrote Freud, “that we should kill one another, often to applause, but be horrified beyond words at even the thought of eating one another.” The similarity in symptoms between diseases tied to cannibalism and hallucinogens opens an intriguing line of speculation, i.e., that our aversion might have roots in historic illnesses associated with eating human flesh, or a knowledge that it once had been some kind of sacred food, a category consistently dominated by mind-altering agents. This second possibility sheds a different kind of light on a number of historic oddities. The ancient Greeks, for instance, called their sacrificial victims
pharmakos
, which means atonement, but is related to the word
pharmakon
, which means drug (hence the word
pharmacy
). The Vatican’s psychedelic description of how eating the flesh of Christ via the communion wafer creates a sensation of “immersion within a universal being” starts making a sort of sense. If eating raw brains causes psychic disturbances of some kind, the tradition of Druid priests chewing a “mystic meat” to see visions might be connected to their custom of preserving their leaders’ heads in oil. Was the altered state the Druids achieved similar to the “spacy” feeling reported by humans infected by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? “It would be hazardous to dismiss this custom (of preserving heads) among the Celts as being merely a desire to collect trophies for the accumulation of marital prestige,” wrote Celtic historian T. G. Powell. “It’s more likely derived from an older cult relating to human fertility. . . .”

If eating one’s fellow human was merely gross or unhealthy, like eating human feces, would cannibalism have developed so many mystical overtones? Probably not. “Cannibals care intensely
how
they ate people and also whom they ate, when and where,” wrote Margaret Visser in her delightful book
The Rituals
of Dinner
. She ascribes this fastidiousness to proper table manners. Another possible explanation lies in cannibalism’s antecedents as a religious cult. In his book
Muelos: A Stone Age
Superstition About Sexuality
, scholar Weston La Barre marshals an impressive array of evidence that there was once a religion centered on ingesting an intoxicating elixir produced in the human brain, a cult which grew into the world’s head-hunting cultures. “There was a very ancient belief in human life power apparently resident in the skull,” he writes, “to be obtained by eating brains of other men.” While La Barre speculates that this substance, called
muelos
, was thought to provide a kind of sexual/psychic power related to semen, he points out that the rites are closely associated with the taking of psychotropic substances. The Bikim-Kuskusmin people of New Guinea say the two are one and the same because a spirit called Afek put his blood/semen/bone marrow into magical plants to give them their hallucinogenic powers.

European Druids and the tribes of Papua New Guinea are among the more famous cannibal sects. Both were unusually isolated societies and were more likely to retain traditions that disappeared elsewhere. The early Tibetan Buddhists
(Bonpo)
were equally isolated, and they, too, are thought to have ritually eaten their loved ones as a way of passing on their wisdom. I have a Tibetan skull bowl sitting on the desk in front of me. The interior is covered in mystic carvings in a manner identical to those seen in hundreds of Tibetan religious paintings. In the paintings it’s usually held by a wild-eyed deity, who carries the skull bowl, called a
kapala
, in one hand and a knife, called
chugri
, in one of his other nine. The skulls in these paintings are heaped with a gelatinous gray substance called
amrita
, supposedly semen. The shape and whorl-like designs of the substance,

however, make it look remarkably like a human brain. Today these images of brain eating are described as being purely metaphoric. The same metaphoric rationale is applied to the shapely demoness typically copulating with the gods in the same painting, primly ignoring the fact that Tibetan Buddhism is closely related to Tantric Yoga, a discipline well known for its religious sexual practices. If the sexual imagery is clearly more than a mere metaphor, why not the ones involving brains? Anthropologists have reported Tibetan rites that use skull bowls to serve a substance that looks like brains but is actually made of wheat, and Tibet’s Mongolian cousins, the Kanjur, identify
amrita
specifically as a human brain.

These people were endo-cannibals and ate their friends to gain their wisdom. Endo-cannibals tend not to eat the actual meat, preferring to burn it to a powder or eat the brain exclusively. Exo-cannibals, a group who eats their enemy to gain their strength, generally prefer a good man chop. Common sense tells us that endo-cannibals eat their friends’ brains because— obviously—that’s the center of thought and knowledge.

Obviously.
That was a trick sentence. We’re all so sure that the brain is the organ of thought that eating it to gain wisdom seems almost rational. Yet, it is reasonable to question whether early Tibetans, or a Stone Age people from New Guinea, considered the brain in this light. The father of modern science, Aristotle, believed the brain’s sole function was to cool the blood. Among the Fore tribes of highland Papua New Guinea— where the Laughing Man disease was discovered in the 1960s— the brain was reserved for the corpse’s closest female relatives. Some scientists attribute this to the men demanding the tastiest bits and leaving the rest for the ladies. The brain, however, has long been among the most prized of dishes. Until the 1700s Europeans brought the head of whatever animal was being eaten to the guest of honor so he could smash the skull open and spoon out the contents to the table’s applause (knives and forks were considered bad taste under the circumstance). Later, servants sawed an opening in the skull to make a removable “lid” that the guest could just pop open. Until quite recently, the eating of a cow’s brain was a rite of manliness at many Texan barbecues.

While I would never imply that Texas is a den of neanderthal affectations, scholars believe ritual brain eating like this was particularly popular among Neanderthals for about two hundred fifty thousand years, and that the practice disappeared only during the Celtic Bronze Age. Others date it back to 400,000 B.C. Neanderthals no more thought the brain was the center of thought than chimpanzees do. Not that chimps don’t think highly of the tidbit: According to Jane Goodall, the only food chimps refuse to share with one another is the head of their near relative, the baboon, which is
always
given to the group’s alpha male. In cases where two baboons are simultaneously killed, the heads of both are still given to alpha chimp, who sucks them out with gusto. No one is suggesting that chimps value the snack because they think it is the repository of the soul. They just like the way it tastes. It excites them. It’s delicious, so much so that it raises a number of questions about the amorphous line separating intoxicating from tasty. The most praised drink in the world is wine. Yet most think it’s vile when they take their first sip. And with good reason—alcohol is a poison, and our body’s immediate instinct is to reject it. It’s only when we experience alcohol’s ability to intoxicate that we realize how “delicious” it really is. We have rationalized the pleasures of intoxication in terms of taste.

So when the chimps exhibit such rabid enthusiasm for the raw brain of a sister species, it’s reasonable to wonder precisely what has them so worked up. Is it a taste sensation, or something closer to the feline love of the intoxicating herb catnip? Likewise, when the cannibals of Papua New Guinea say they reserve the dead man’s brain for the closest female relative because it is “special . . . precious,” their meaning, before being interpreted by Western anthropologists, is unclear. A word like
precious
, in its original sense, was a reference to some kind of magical power and is the kind of language that shamans use in explaining how they receive their wisdom from peyote and other hallucinogens.

This is all in the never-never land of speculation, but it’s reasonable to suggest that, given the connection so many cultures make between madness and inspiration and holiness, the dementia-like symptoms associated with brain-eating diseases could have led to cannibalism being associated with priest castes. A number of anthropologists have suggested that eating human brains or heads was the prerogative of the religious elite in a variety of cultures. The Aztecs, for instance, doled out their sacrificial victims according to social rank. The heart went to the Sun god, while the meat went to the nobles. But the heads went to the priests, according to documents from the time. No one knows for sure what the priests did with them, but archaeologists have recovered hundreds of skulls they believe came from sacrificial victims, and every single one of them had their brains removed. There were no organic remains found to indicate they had been discarded.