History is messy. It's often terrifying. When we talk about the history of the Atlantic world, we usually stick to the numbers: millions of people stolen, thousands of ships, and centuries of forced labor. But there is a darker, more visceral layer to this trauma that rarely makes it into high school textbooks. For hundreds of years, a terrifying belief gripped many enslaved Africans: the idea that white people ate black people.
It sounds like a horror movie plot. It wasn't. For those trapped in the hold of a slave ship, it was a logical conclusion based on what they were seeing with their own eyes.
Imagine the scene. You’ve been kidnapped. You're chained in a dark, suffocating space. Every few days, a few of your friends or family members are dragged up to the deck and they never come back. You see the white sailors—pale, strange-looking men—boiling giant pots of meat. You see them drinking red liquid that looks suspiciously like blood. In a world where you have no context for who these people are or where they are taking you, the most rational explanation is that you are being "fattened up" for a feast.
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The Fear of "The Cannibal" in the Middle Passage
This wasn't just a random rumor. It was a widespread, systemic fear. Scholars like Dr. Vincent Brown at Harvard and Dr. Stephanie Smallwood have documented how this specific terror shaped the psychology of the Middle Passage. In her book Saltwater Slavery, Smallwood explains that the "totalizing violence" of the slave trade created a vacuum of information. When people don't have information, they fill the gaps with their worst nightmares.
The red wine the sailors drank? To an African observer who had never seen viticulture, that was blood. The "salt beef" boiling in the copper kettles? That was clearly the flesh of the person who was dragged away yesterday. Even the cheese—something unfamiliar to many West Africans at the time—was sometimes mistaken for human fat or brains.
It’s heavy stuff. Honestly, it’s hard to wrap your head around the level of psychological torture involved here. We often think of slavery as a purely economic system, but for the victims, it was an existential apocalypse. They believed they had been captured by literal monsters.
Equiano’s Account
The most famous primary source we have for this is Olaudah Equiano. In his 1789 autobiography, he describes his first moments on a slave ship. He was terrified. He looked at the white men and their "horrible" looks and "red faces." He wrote quite clearly that he thought he had "gotten into a world of bad spirits" and that they were going to eat him. He even asked his fellow captives if these men were going to devour them.
He wasn't alone.
British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson recorded similar accounts. He noted that many Africans were so convinced they were being taken to a slaughterhouse that they would commit suicide by jumping overboard rather than be eaten. They preferred the sharks to the dinner table. This wasn't "superstition" in the way we use the word today; it was a survival response to an incomprehensible level of cruelty.
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The Reality of Medical Cannibalism in Europe
Here is where the story gets even weirder. And more uncomfortable. While enslaved Africans were terrified of being eaten, white people actually were consuming human remains back in Europe during the same era.
It was called "corpse medicine."
From the 16th through the 18th centuries, it was common for European doctors to prescribe ground-up mummies, human fat, blood, and bone meal to treat everything from epilepsy to bruising. Dr. Richard Sugg of Durham University has written extensively on this in his book Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires. He points out that while Europeans were calling Africans "savages" and "cannibals," they were simultaneously sipping "spirit of human skull" to cure a headache.
- King Charles II of England drank "The King's Drops," which contained powdered human skull.
- Human fat was used as a topical ointment for gout and skin issues.
- Fresh blood was sought after at executions; the poor would pay for a cup of the "warm" stuff to cure seizures.
When you look at it through this lens, the African fear that white people ate black people wasn't just a misunderstanding of wine and beef. It was a reflection of a culture—European colonial culture—that quite literally consumed the bodies of others for its own health, wealth, and longevity. The "cannibalism" was systemic.
Why the Myth of the "Black Cannibal" Was Created Instead
If Europeans were the ones practicing corpse medicine, why is the popular image of a cannibal almost always a Black person with a bone through their nose?
That was a marketing campaign.
The "Black Cannibal" trope was a deliberate invention used to justify slavery. If you convince the public that the people you are enslaving are "monsters" who eat each other, then you can frame slavery as a "civilizing mission." It's a classic case of projection. The colonizer accuses the colonized of the very brutality they are currently inflicting.
During the 19th century, "scientific" racism took this a step further. Writers and explorers would return from Africa with tall tales of cannibalistic tribes to sell books. These stories were rarely based on observed fact. Instead, they were based on hearsay or misinterpreted rituals. For example, some funerary rites involved handling ancestral bones, which European observers immediately labeled as "preparing a meal."
The Cultural Legacy of This Fear
This fear didn't just vanish when the ships stopped sailing. It morphed. In the American South, rumors of "night doctors" or "black snatches" persisted well into the 20th century. These were stories of white doctors who would kidnap Black people off the streets at night to use them for medical experiments or to harvest their organs.
While the "eating" part became more metaphorical, the core fear remained: that the white power structure viewed Black bodies as a resource to be consumed. And let's be real—given the history of things like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or the theft of Henrietta Lacks' cells, these fears weren't exactly based on nothing.
The Nuance of the Narrative
We have to be careful with how we frame this. It’s easy to get lost in the sensationalism. The historical reality is that while actual cannibalism (the eating of flesh for food) was not the goal of the transatlantic slave trade, metaphorical and medical cannibalism were very much part of the European landscape.
Enslaved Africans saw a system that drained their blood, broke their bones, and traded their lives for sugar and tobacco. Sugar, ironically, was sometimes called "the blood of the slaves" by abolitionists. When you drink tea sweetened by the labor of someone who died in a field, are you not, in a sense, consuming them?
That is the profound truth behind the rumor.
It wasn't just about a pot of meat on a ship. It was about an entire global economy built on the literal consumption of human life. The fear that white people ate black people was a visceral, poetic, and terrifyingly accurate description of how the slave trade functioned.
What We Can Learn From This Today
Understanding this history helps us decode racial tensions and "conspiracy theories" that still exist. When we see distrust toward the medical establishment or the government in Black communities, it’s not coming from nowhere. It’s rooted in a centuries-old history where the "human" status of Black people was legally and physically denied.
- Acknowledge the source. Distrust is often a survival mechanism passed down through generations.
- Examine the "medical" history. Recognizing that European "corpse medicine" existed helps debunk the idea that "cannibalism" was a one-sided or "primitive" trait.
- Look at the metaphors. Ask how modern systems might still be "consuming" people today—whether through exploitative labor or the prison-industrial complex.
History isn't just a list of dates. It's a collection of stories we tell to make sense of the world. For the people trapped on those ships, the story of the cannibal was the only one that made sense of the nightmare they were living. We owe it to them to understand why they believed it.
To dive deeper into this, check out the archives at the National Museum of African American History and Culture or read Dr. Saidiya Hartman’s work on the "afterlives of slavery." These resources provide the academic backbone to these visceral historical accounts, proving that sometimes, the things people are most afraid of are the things that are actually happening, just in a way we haven't yet learned to name.
Next Steps for Further Research
To gain a more complete understanding of this historical intersection, you should focus on the primary accounts of the Middle Passage. Start by reading The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in its entirety to see how he describes the sensory experience of the slave ship. Then, cross-reference this with the work of Dr. Richard Sugg to understand the specific timeline of "corpse medicine" in Europe. This provides the necessary context to see how the "cannibal" myth was a two-way street of fear and projection. Finally, look into the "Night Doctor" folklore of the 20th-century Jim Crow South to see how these Middle Passage fears evolved into modern medical distrust.