MICHAEL CRICHTON

natives often come aboard with tusks of ivory with the intention of buying a slave,complaining that meat is now scarce in their neighborhood.”In the Congo, cannibalism was not associated with ritual or religion or war; itwas a simple dietary preference. The Reverend Holman Bentley, who spenttwenty years in the region, quoted a native as saying, “You white men considerpork to be the tastiest of meat, but pork is not to be compared with human flesh.”Bentley felt that the natives “could not understand the objections raised to thepractice. ‘You eat fowls and goats, and we eat men; why not? What is thedifference?’This frank altitude astonished observers, and led to bizarre customs. In 1910,Herbert Ward wrote of markets where slaves were sold “piecemeal whilst stillalive, incredible as it may appear, captives are led from place to place in orderthat individuals may have the opportunity of indicating, by external marks on thebody, the portion they desire to acquire. The distinguishing marks are generallymade by means of coloured clay or strips of grass tied in a peculiar fashion. Theastounding stoicism of the victims, who thus witness the bargaining for their limbspiecemeal, is only equaled by the callousness with which they walk forward tomeet their fate.”Such reports cannot be dismissed as late-Victorian hysteria, for all observersfound the cannibals likable and sympathetic. Ward wrote that “the cannibals arenot schemers and they are not mean. In direct opposition to all naturalconjectures, they are among the best types of men.” Bentley described them as“merry, manly fellows, very friendly in conversation and quite demonstrative intheir affection.”Under Belgian colonial administration, cannibalism became much rarer—bythe 1950s, there were even a few graveyards to be found—but no one seriouslythought it had been eradicated. In 1956, H. C. Engert wrote, “Cannibalism is farfrom being dead in Africa. . . . I myself once lived in a cannibal village for a time,and found some The natives. . . were pleasant enough people. It was just an oldcustom which dies hard.”Munro considered the 1979 Kigani uprising a political insurrection. Thetribesmen were rebelling against the demand by the Zaire government that theKigani change from hunting to farming, as if that were a simple matter. TheKigani were a poor and backward people; their knowledge of hygiene was125