They Didn’t Just Own Their Bodies: The Grisly History of Europeans Consuming Enslaved Africans (Cannibalism)

 Disclaimer: There is credible historical scholarship documenting at least one unusually disturbing case of literal European cannibalism involving an enslaved African during the Atlantic slave trade, as well as substantial evidence of Europeans exploiting, dissecting, consuming, and commodifying Black bodies in other ways. However, it would be historically inaccurate to claim that Europeans routinely ate enslaved Africans. The strongest article is therefore one that distinguishes documented literal cannibalism from the broader history of bodily exploitation.

By Niggle - the podcast 

There are some chapters of history so disturbing that people would rather dismiss them than examine the evidence. The history of European slavery in Africa and the Atlantic is filled with such chapters. Among the most horrifying is the historical evidence concerning Europeans and the literal consumption of African bodies.

But this subject demands something more than sensationalism. It requires a careful distinction between what historians can document and what has become legend. The evidence does not support the claim that Europeans routinely ate enslaved Africans as a normal practice of the Atlantic slave trade. It does, however, document an extraordinary case of Portuguese sailors allegedly killing an enslaved African man, cooking his flesh, forcing other enslaved Africans to eat it, and consuming parts of the man's body themselves.

That case is documented in the scholarship of historian Manuel Barcia.

The Arrogante: When the Captive Became the Meal

In 1837, the Portuguese schooner Arrogante was intercepted near Cuba by the British Royal Navy. More than 330 Africans were aboard the vessel after being transported from the Upper Guinea coast. Following their arrival in Jamaica, accusations emerged concerning an extraordinarily brutal incident aboard the ship.

According to the historical evidence examined by Barcia (2022), sailors aboard the Arrogante were accused of killing an African man, cooking his flesh and forcing other enslaved Africans aboard the vessel to eat it. The accusations went even further: the sailors themselves were alleged to have cooked and consumed the man's heart and liver. Barcia's research does not simply repeat the accusation as unquestioned fact; instead, he examines the surviving records, the testimony surrounding the event and the way the story was contested and interpreted by European authorities.

That distinction matters.

The historian's work demonstrates that the episode entered an extensive transatlantic process of investigation and debate. In other words, we have historical documentation that Europeans were accused of literally consuming an enslaved African, but historians must remain careful about transforming one documented and contested episode into a claim about an ordinary practice of European slaveholders.

Nevertheless, the episode is horrifying precisely because it exposes the extreme vulnerability of enslaved Africans aboard slave ships. The people on those vessels had already been reduced by the slave trade from human beings into cargo. In the Arrogante episode, the line between treating a human being as property and literally treating the human body as food appears to have disappeared entirely (Barcia, 2022).

"Cannibalism" Was Also a Language of Slavery

There is another layer to this history that is equally important.

Scholars have examined how the language of cannibalism became intertwined with the Atlantic slave trade. Rachel Herrmann's research demonstrates that references to cannibalism appeared in narratives surrounding slavery, hunger and the Middle Passage. Formerly enslaved people described terrifying experiences in which European slavers were sometimes represented as literally or figuratively consuming enslaved people (Herrmann, 2018).

The metaphor was powerful because slavery itself was a system that consumed human beings.

European consumers could purchase sugar produced through enslaved labor. Ships carried human beings as commodities. Plantation owners calculated the economic value of individual enslaved people. Enslaved women could be exploited for reproduction. Enslaved workers were worked until their bodies deteriorated. Their labor generated wealth that flowed into European and American economies.

In that sense, abolitionists sometimes described consumers of slave-produced commodities as "cannibals" because they benefited from the destruction and exploitation of enslaved people's bodies. Carl Plasa's research shows how British abolitionist writers connected the consumption of sugar to the consumption of the bodies and labor of enslaved people (Plasa, 2009).

The metaphor was gruesome because the economic reality was gruesome.

A person could sit at a British table and consume sugar without ever seeing the plantation where enslaved people produced it. The physical distance between consumer and victim made the violence easier to ignore.

Black Bodies Became Objects of Science

The exploitation of Black bodies did not end when an enslaved person died.

In the United States, enslaved and free African Americans became disproportionately vulnerable to grave robbing and anatomical dissection. Medical schools needed cadavers for anatomical education, and Black bodies were frequently obtained through grave robbing or through the sale of deceased enslaved people by slaveholders.

Scholar Vanessa Northington Gamble and other historians have documented the racialized history of American medical education, while a study of anatomical education found that enslaved people and African Americans were among those disproportionately targeted for the acquisition of cadavers. Slave owners could even sell the bodies of deceased enslaved people to medical schools for dissection (Washington, 2007).

That is not cannibalism.

But it is another disturbing example of a society treating Black bodies as resources that could be extracted, purchased and used after death.

The body of a Black person could become labor while alive and an anatomical specimen after death.

That should force us to reconsider what "consumption" meant within systems of racial domination.

Europe Had Its Own History of Medical Cannibalism

There is another historical fact that complicates the story even further: Europeans themselves practiced forms of what historians call medical cannibalism.

For centuries, Europeans consumed human remains—including powdered mummies and other human-derived substances—because they believed them to possess medicinal properties. These practices were not limited to one country or one social class. European medical traditions included the use of human remains as supposed remedies for illness (Blakemore, 2025).

That history does not prove that Europeans routinely consumed enslaved Africans. It does, however, demonstrate that the idea of consuming human remains was not completely foreign to European medical or cultural traditions.

The disturbing question becomes what happened when European systems of medicine, colonialism, slavery and racial classification encountered African bodies.

A recent study by historian Vincent Roy-Di Piazza examined an eighteenth-century European anatomical case involving the dissection of an unidentified African man's body in Paris. His research demonstrates that African cadavers were relatively scarce in European anatomical theaters, even though African and Afro-descendant populations were present in European cities. The scarcity itself tells us something about the difference between Black people's presence in Europe and European access to their bodies for scientific purposes (Roy-Di Piazza, 2025).

The More Important Story Is Bigger Than Cannibalism

The danger of focusing exclusively on literal cannibalism is that it can allow people to dismiss the larger history as an isolated horror story.

The more significant historical reality is that European colonialism created systems in which African bodies could be captured, transported, sold, worked, sexually exploited, medically examined, dissected and economically consumed.

The body was central to the system.

Historian Rana Hogarth's recent research demonstrates how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical literature developed ideas about the supposed physiological characteristics of enslaved Black people. Medical knowledge about Black bodies was produced within the context of slavery and plantation management, meaning that racial assumptions became embedded in medical thought (Hogarth, 2026).

That history should make us uncomfortable—not because discomfort is the goal, but because historical discomfort can force us to ask better questions.

The question is not simply, "Did white Europeans eat Black people?"

The historically responsible answer is: There is evidence of at least one extraordinary, documented and contested case of literal cannibalism involving European sailors and an enslaved African. There is not evidence that such behavior was a routine feature of European slavery.

But there is overwhelming evidence of something broader and arguably just as important: European and American systems of slavery treated African people as commodities whose bodies could be converted into labor, wealth, scientific knowledge and social power.

The Arrogante case therefore deserves to be remembered, not exaggerated.

It represents an especially horrifying moment in a much larger history in which the humanity of African people was systematically denied. When a society can purchase a human being, work that person to exhaustion, separate families, sell children, exploit women's reproductive capacity and then claim ownership of the body after death, the historical question becomes larger than cannibalism.

It becomes a question of what happens when an entire civilization learns to see another group of human beings as consumable.

That is the real horror.

And that is the history we should be willing to confront.

References

Barcia, M. (2022). White cannibalism in the illegal slave trade: The peculiar case of the Portuguese schooner Arrogante in 1837. New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 96(1–2), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134360-bja10002(ScienceDirect) 

Blakemore, E. (2025, August 5). The gory history of Europeans eating mummies for health. National Geographic. (National Geographic) 

Herrmann, R. B. (2018). “The Black People Were Not Good to Eat”: Cannibalism, cooperation, and hunger at sea. In To feast on us as their prey: Cannibalism and the early modern Atlantic. Johns Hopkins University Press. (JSTOR) 

Hogarth, R. A. (2026). Enduring medical knowledge in the age of slavery. Past & Present, 271(Supplement 18), 240–268. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtag012 (OUP Academic) 

Plasa, C. (2009). “Stained with spots of human blood”: Sugar, abolition and cannibalism. In Slaves to sweetness: British and Caribbean literatures of sugar (pp. 33–51). Liverpool University Press. https://doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846315701.003 (OUP Academic) 

Roy-Di Piazza, V. (2025). Abraham Bäck, scarcity, and the racial anatomy of skin. The Historical Journal. Cambridge University Press. (Cambridge University Press) 

Washington, H. A. (2007). Medical apartheid: The dark history of medical experimentation on Black Americans from colonial times to the present. Doubleday. Evidence concerning the use of enslaved and African American bodies in anatomical education is also summarized in the medical-history literature. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) 