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GORILLA EATERS. 
I lived iu what may be called the Tipperary of Manyema, 
and they are certainly a bloody people among themselves. 
But they are very far from being in appearance like the 
ugly negroes on the West Coast. Finely formed heads are 
common, and generally men and women are vastly superior 
to the slaves of Zanzibar and elsewhere. We must go 
deeper than phrenology to account for their low moral tone. 
If they are cannibals, they are not ostentatiously so. The 
neighboring tribes all assert that they are man-eaters, and 
they themselves laughingly admit the charge. But they 
like to impose on the credulous, and they showed the skull 
of a recent victim to horrify one of my people. I found it 
to be the skull of a gorilla, or soko — the first I knew of 
its existence here — and this they do eat. 
If I had believed a tenth of what I heard from traders, 
I might never have entered the country. Their people told 
tales with shocking circumstantiality, as if of eye-witnesses, 
that could not be committed to paper, or even spoken 
about beneath the breath. Indeed, one wishes them to 
vanish from memory. But fortunately, I was never fright- 
ened in infancy with “bogie,” and am not liable to attacks 
of what may almost be called “ bogiephobia ; ” for the 
patient, iu a paroxysm, believes everything horrible, if only 
it be ascribed to the possessor of a black skin. 
I have not yet been able to make up my mind whether 
the Manyema are cannibals or not. I have offered goods 
of sufficient value to tempt any of them to call me to see a 
cannibal feast in the dark forests where these orgies are 
said to be held, but hitherto in vain. All the real evidence 
yet obtained would elicit from a Scotch jury the verdict 
only of “ Not proven.” 
Although I have not done half I hoped to accomplish, I 
trust your Lordship’s kind consideration to award me your 
approbation, and am, etc., 
* David Livingstone, 
Iler Majesty’s Consul, inner Africa. 
