Quoted from Stanley Burnham's 3rd edition of America's Bimodal Crisis:Black Intelligence in White Society, Foundation for Human Understanding,Athens, Georgia, 1993, p 50.
White slave traders seldom captured their prey, but bought them at slave-tradingtowns from tribes which had dominated the slave market well before whiteswere included among their customers. We can only deplore the high fatalityrate among slaves brought to the New World, but it turns out that the fatalityrate was even higher among some of the African river tribes that kept slavesfor purposes of cannibalism.
At least one of these tribes, the so-called Fang, depended on cannibalismto such an extent that it supplemented its captured slaves by purchasingslaves from other tribes for the same culinary purpose. Cannibalism wasnot as universally practiced in Africa as slavery, but a large minorityof tribes did resort to it, especially along the Congo river basin.
In his fascinating history, The River Congo (1977)*, Peter Forbath summarizesexplorers' accounts of their encounters with cannibal tribes, which commonlysubmerged their victims chin-deep in streams before cooking them, "sincesuffering was believed to tenderize the meat for the cooking." (Forbath*,page 368).
*Forbath, The River Congo, New York: Harper & Row, 1977, p. 368, etal.