NATIVES OF BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 447 
ashamed of eating human flesh, and they grew to regard such a practice as 
most abhorrent. 1 
But while cannibalism in the main disappeared as an avowed custom it has 
lingered as a horrible practice amongst depraved people, who now do not care 
for healthy human flesh—namely the' bodies of people killed in battle—but 
crave for dead bodies which have been in the grave a few days or weeks, and 
which they exhume and devour. No doubt this custom prevailed among many 
other races of man in the savage stage and was the grain of truth at the bottom 
of the Eastern myth of the Ghul. 
I had not been long in Nyasaland before I heard that cannibalism of a more 
or less secret kind still lingered amongst the timid mountaineers of Nyanja race 
on Cholo Mountain midway between Chiromo and Blantyre; and in 1891 
a French priest who had been stationed for a year as a missionary at Mponda’s 
town at the south end of Lake Nyasa, described to me how frequently people 
of Nyanja race dug up corpses and devoured them. He described the horror 
with which the Muhammadanised Yao regarded this practice, and went on 
to relate how a certain woman was accused of being a witch and of eating 
human flesh from the graves; that she stoutly denied the accusation and they 
then forced her to drink mwavi; she found she could not vomit and that death 
was certain. She therefore shrieked out “ It is true: go to my house and you 
will find the remains of a man’s leg hidden in such and such a place.'’ People 
rushed to the house and the priest followed them, and to his horror he saw 
them bringing out from the interior what seemed to be the bones of a leg 
with fragments of putrefying flesh still remaining attached to the bones. The 
woman was killed and burnt by the populace. 
The idea amongst the natives is that these Mfiti will the death of a certain 
person which they compass by occult means—namely, by secret spells and 
charms, by the burying of medicine “ against ” a person (that is, they take some 
stuff which is supposed to possess mysterious properties and bury it, dedicating 
it as they do so to the individual whose death they wish to bring about). Their 
main object in causing a person’s death is to be able afterwards to eat his body. 
Of course with this substratum of fact that these acts of nauseous cannibalism 
do occur, there is an enormous amount of superstition mingled. Supernatural 
powers are ascribed to these Mfiti , with whom the eagle-owl, the jackal, 
the leopard or the hyena are specially associated, those creatures being supposed 
to be the servants of the witches or to be the forms which the sorcerers assume 
when they visit the graves or dig up the bodies. The wizard is believed to be 
able to make himself invisible, to transport himself as a spirit rapidly from 
place to place, and to fly through the air with fantastic gyrations. He may 
still be invisible to ordinary eyes while he is taking up and mutilating the 
corpse. “ When the jackal barks, 2 ‘ there,’ says the listener in the night, ‘ is 
the messenger calling these midnight w T retches to their awful orgies ’; when 
1 Yet one constantly meets with cases of it occurring, especially if the act of cannibalism be associated 
with rage and the desire to utterly consume the enemy or for the wish to secure his qualities of bravery by 
eating his heart. The old Makanjira met his death through cannibalism. He was jealous of a headman 
who had acquired power and influence after Makanjira's first defeat at the hands of the British. He 
had this man secretly killed, and his body cooked and served up with an enormous mess of native 
porridge. A number of chiefs and persons of importance were invited to the feast. After it was over they 
were told that the meat they had consumed was the body of So-and-so. One young fellow, a nephew 
of Makanjira, was so enraged at having been made to commit this act unconsciously, that he killed 
Makanjira then and there, and thus avenged the deaths of Captain Maguire, Dr. Boyce, and Mr. Me Ewan. 
He was however slain himself by the chief’s adherents. 
2 I quote from the Rev. D. C. R. Scott, in his Mafianga Dictionary. 
