Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/207

 APPENDIX Note 1. Page 42. ONE of the best accounts of African cannibalism known to me is given in The Ethiopian, " The Human Leopard Society," by J. Cameron Grant. (Charles Carrington, publisher, Paris, 1900.) As further illustrating this point, I here insert a clipping from The Evening Star, of Washing- ton, D. C. (Thursday, December 5, 1895, p. 10), which reads as follows : — MEN WORSE THAN APES The Revolting Cruelties Practiced by Many of the Ferocious African Tribes. (From the London Saturday Review.) The cannibalism of the black secret society known as the Human Leopards, in the country near Sierra Leone, disclosed by the recent trial, brings forcibly before us the difference between the East African and the West African habits of eating human flesh. The Sherbro cannibals waylaid and killed their victims, and afterward feasted on their flesh. The cannibal- ism of the east coast is of a very different kind. The flesh of the old people — the grandfather and grand- mother of a family — is dried and mixed with condi- ments ; and a portion of this is offered, with a dim sort of sacramental meaning, to travelers who become guests of the family. To refuse it would be a deadly insult. To accept it is a passport to the privileged position of a friend of the house. Many of our trav- elers in East Africa have eaten thus sacramentally of the ancestors of some dark-skinned potentate. The cannibalism of the west coast is, as has just ( 183 )