Then there was Jean-Bedel Bokassa, who had a taste for young girls, literally, when he ruled the basket-case Central African Republic from 1966 to 1979. Bokassa gave the world a few easy laughs in 1977 when he emulated his hero Napoleon by crowning himself emperor at a stadium in the ramshackle capital, Bangui. The lavish ceremony cost more than fifteen million dollars, which must have rivaled the country’s GDP at the time. Foreign correspondents in Bangui for the coronation picked up rumors that Bokassa was a cannibal whose favorite meal, when he couldn’t get young girls, was fricassee of political opponent. He was also rumored to feed enemies to the crocodiles in the palace pond.
Two years ago, when I was in Bangui for a few days, I paid homage to Bokassa’s enormous coronation throne, fashioned in the image of a rampant eagle and once swathed with twenty-four-karat gold. The gold had long been hacked away, and the rusting throne was shoved into the corner of an open basement in the now abandoned stadium, as decrepit and discredited as Bokassa’s memory.
I tracked down one of Emperor Bokassa’s cooks, a grizzled old man whose mind was still sharp, and asked about the macabre rumors. “Yes, Bokassa liked eating human flesh,” he admitted. “It was no secret in the palace, we all knew, and he’d boast to us that there was no better way of triumphing over an opponent than by eating him. Though he never had me cook any human flesh, I sometimes saw the body parts. He had the remains cut up at his farm near Bangui.”
Bokassa was a cannibal with a demonic sense of humor. William Dale, the US Ambassador in Bangui from 1973 to 1975, wrote that during his time there, “young girls began to disappear, one by one.” One Sunday morning in 1975, the Swiss pastor at Bangui’s Lutheran church asked to speak in private with Dale. While visiting Bokassa’s farm, he told the ambassador, he saw two schoolgirls roped to a tree.
Aware of the persistent rumours of Bokassa’s taste for human flesh, Dale remembered that when he first met the Emperor to present his credentials, the ruler remarked that “his grandfather had been a cannibal and sometimes he believed he had tendencies in that direction.” Dale says Bokassa also told ambassadors at a palace dinner that “he sometimes wondered whether his ambassadorial guests realized exactly what they were eating.”
Dale made a gruesome conclusion. “The ghastly thought occurred to me that perhaps Bokassa was actually dining on parts of the school girls, and was possibly serving them as a routine matter to his dinner guests.” French investigators called in by the military leader who overthrew Bokassa found identifiable human parts, revealed as chunks of butchered missing schoolgirls, hanging in Bokassa’s huge meat locker at his farm.
Not long after, a thousand miles to the east of Bangui, Idi Amin, Uganda’s insane and mercurial dictator, claimed that he too had eaten human flesh but found it too salty, and this revelation was reported with relish by media around the world. Bokassa was an avid cannibal, and the best you could say for him was that he was faithfully carrying on the family tradition.
[Paul Raffaele] Among the Cannibals (Man′s darkness ritual)
In Mundo sed non de Mundo 