Tarzan Kills Cannibals

Tarzan Kills Cannibals

“It seems that uncorrupted nature is good, since these folk, instead of eating me, showed me a thousand kindnesses.” – Voltaire 403

            Few practices in any culture fascinate and repulse westerners like cannibalism. The image of benign missionaries roasting in a pot, while savage persons of dark complexion prepare to feast is indelible.  It is a foundational part of the western image of Africa.  The picture has been painted by agenda driven European explorers, and novelists like Edgar Rice Burroughs.  In his novel Tarzan of the Apes, Burroughs uses cannibalism to place white, aristocratic, men of noble birth at the apex of civilization.  That view not only perpetuates false history, it comes with a heavy death toll.

 When Christopher Columbus received word of the Caribales in the West Indies, no aspect of their culture so impressed him as the accounts he received of their “man-eating” (Brittanica, 2010).  That first impression, had by one man, contained incredible portent.  When Columbus justified his military actions against the Caribs to the Spanish throne he first cited their savagery, then established their savagery by citing their “man-eating” (Columbus, 1906, p. 148).  Whether or not the Caribales actually did eat humans may never be known.  Columbus himself never bothered to find out.  What followed was a Spanish act of military aggression, the scope of which was enough to make Alexander the Great blush.  Eric Foner (2009) estimates that 80 million people, one-fifth of the world’s population, were killed in the Spanish conquest (p. 23).

                The word “cannibalism” originates from this historical context.  In fifteenth century Caribbean dialects “R” and “N” were interchangeable.  Caribales could be referred to as Canibales. When “cannibalism” is mentioned we are literally referring to these people.  Columbus reduced what was a complex society to one practice that served his ends; whether or not it was actually being practiced.  That pattern persists.  It is no coincidence that those European explorers who wanted to colonize Africa summarized many of its people as cannibals.  They were just following the Colombian pattern. 

            Perhaps as persistent in the English language as the word “cannibalism” is the name “Tarzan.”  Tarzan of the Apes has sold more than twenty-five million copies.  Several blockbuster movies have been made based upon Burroughs’ inexorable protagonist.  Few, if any American authors have produced so ubiquitous an icon.  Until recently, Tarzan has enjoyed a fairly unexamined life.  Just as soon might one question the origin of the word “cannibalism” as delve into the implications and cultural nuances of Tarzan of the Apes.  However, as Chinua Achebe (1977), in his seminal essay “Images of Africa,” demonstrates; it is time indeed for all of us to revisit our assumptions about other cultures, especially as they exist in literature (para. 21).  It is time to take a serious and unromantic look at “Tarzan, the killer of beasts and many black men” (Burroughs, 1914, p.126).

            Tarzan of the Apes contains 11 passages in which cannibalism is discussed.  Together, they epitomize the “Colombian pattern,” as identified earlier.  Each passage serves to create a stratification of classes.  This demarcation is based upon the degree to which characters are appalled by, accepting of, or practicing cannibalism.

            The principal cannibals in the novel are the people of Mbonga.  We first meet them as they enter the vicinity of Tarzan’s cabin.  It is an important passage.  It introduces in 7 paragraphs two seemingly dichotomous themes that persist throughout the narrative.  The first is Burroughs’ moral indignity at King Leopold’s exploitation of the African natives.  The second is his overall portrayal of those natives as inferior to white men.  The Mbongans are forced to leave a Belgian labor camp wherein they had been “harassed . . . for rubber and ivory.”  The picture is painted of an oppressed people, fleeing for “freedom and the pursuit of happiness.”  However, lest we associate this “strange cavalcade” with American patriots, we are informed that, “their yellow teeth were filed to sharp points, and their great protruding lips added still further to the low and bestial brutishness of their appearance.”  Moreover, they did not overthrow their oppressor they, “massacred a white officer and a small detachment of his black troops.”  What did they do then?  Why, what any savage would do, of course: they “gorged themselves” on the meat of these men (81-82).

            Later “a stronger body” of the black troops under Belgian command fell upon the Mbongans and killed many of them.  Let it be noted, as explicitly as possible, that two separate tribes of Africans are discussed in this passage: the Mbongans and another unnamed African tribe, which the Belgians enlisted as soldiers.  What does this other tribe of Africans do with their conquered enemies? Why, what any savage would do, of course: “that night, the black soldiers of the white man had had meat a-plenty” (82).  In Burroughs’ world all Africans are savage cannibals.

            Here we encounter the real evil of Burroughs’ stratified classification of humans.  As Achebe points out, men like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Albert Schweitzer are not disgusted by cruelty to Africans because it violates a civility among equals, but because it is cruelty to a lower order.  Yes, the Africans are to be treated decently, after all “the African is indeed my brother but my junior brother” (para. 18).

            Tarzan epitomizes the difference between black men and white men.  In direct contrast to the description given of the Mbongans is Burroughs’ elegiac treatment of Tarzan: “With the noble poise of his handsome head upon those broad shoulders, and the fire of life and intelligence in those fine clear eyes, he might readily have typified some demigod . . .” (119).  Where Tarzan’s musculature is worthy of worship the Mbongan Kulonga’s “sinewy arm,” makes him “a sleek and hideous thing of ebony, pulsing with life” (86).  A stark distinction is made between the two based on appearance alone, but cannibalism will fully establish Tarzan’s superiority.  Tarzan kills Kulonga because Kulonga killed his adopted ape mother Kala.  He then wonders whether or not he should eat him.  At first he thinks so, “he prepared to get down to business, for Tarzan of the Apes was hungry.”  But then Tarzan does what Burroughs believes no African could possibly do: he reasons.  His superior, white, intellect – but more importantly his “hereditary instinct” – caused him to land upon the “worldwide law” that only savages eat people (90-91).

            This “hereditary instinct” is an important theme in the novel.  By it Burroughs refers to Tarzan’s noble birth into the Clayton family.  In Burroughs’ novel there exists within all white men of high birth a native intellectual, physical, moral, and deportmental superiority.  The line of demarcation is not only between races, therefore, but also between social classes.  Tarzan’s uncanny ability to teach himself to read English is attributed to “a healthy mind endowed by inheritance with more than ordinary reasoning powers” (65).  Tarzan’s handsome features are those of “the aristocratic scion of an old English house” (46).  In a long, but important passage Tarzan performs a gentlemanly gesture in kissing the locket he has just gifted to Jane.  He did this without any training in etiquette:

It was a stately and gallant little compliment performed with the grace and dignity of utter unconsciousness of self.  It was the hall-mark of his aristocratic birth, the natural outcropping of many generations of fine breeding, a hereditary instinct of graciousness which a lifetime of uncouth and savage training and environment could not eradicate. (203)

At this point in our discussion it should not be surprising that cannibalism marks the most definite line of demarcation between classes.  Burroughs presents us with two classes of white men: the noble and the wretched.  In the noble class are the Porters, Samuel T. Philander, and the Claytons (Tarzan, his parents, and his cousin William Clayton).  In the wretched class are the sailors, including their captains.  Burroughs’ noble class is universally intolerant of cannibalism.  Nothing so offends Jane about the Mbongans as the thought that they are cannibals, and William Clayton certainly disapproves of the practice since he uses the hint that Tarzan might be a cannibal to demonstrate that Tarzan is an unfit match for Jane (225).  The wretched class, however, when it is not joking about participating in cannibalism is actually participating in it.  When Snipes, one of the wretched mutineers from the Arrow, finds a notice Tarzan has left on his door, he exclaims: “this sign was not posted an hour ago or I’ll eat the cook” (125).  Though this is not actually an acceptance of cannibalism on Snipes’ part, it would be difficult to imagine that William would have made such a joke.  Just in case we missed this subtlety, though, Burroughs has his wretched class actually participate in cannibalism.  When the mutineers from the Arrow set out to sea they soon become starved and commence eating each other (192-193).  The only people that participate in cannibalism are the Africans and this wretched sailor class.  These black men and white men of low birth have no “hereditary instinct” to prevent them from violating the “worldwide law”.

Does Burroughs really have a sinister motivation as he discusses cannibalism?  It is difficult to tell.  What is absolutely certain is that, even in the fictional world of Tarzan of the Apes, the fate of those labeled “cannibals” is the same as the Caribs of the West Indies.  As soon as Burroughs has demonstrated that the Mbongans are cannibals, he begins to kill them off.  In every scene in which the Mbongans are present they are being killed.  Many passages could be cited, but let us take up the scene in which the French sailors, who had come to rescue Mr. Porter and his party, are avenging D’arnot.  The first Mbongans they encounter are working in their fields.  They “dropped their implements and broke madly for the palisade.  The French bullets mowed them down” (222).  Inside the village, “the battle turned to a wild rout and then to a grim massacre . . . They spared the children and those of the women whom they were not forced to kill in self-defense” (223).  In the end, “there lived to oppose them no single warrior of all the savage village of Mbonga” (223).  Burroughs might maintain his detestation of “that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium” (212), but it is also hypocrisy to justify in fiction what one opposes in reality.

The argument might be raised that Burroughs is just a product of his times; it was assumed everywhere that Africans were cannibals.  Racism was the rule, Burroughs is not to be blamed.  That is evasive reasoning.  People do not write a 22 volume series about something that they take for granted.  At some point we have to stop excusing Burroughs because of what influenced him and begin analyzing the influence his assumptions had on the popular psyche.  Burroughs’ Africans are all cannibals.  That meant something to him, and he made it mean something to his readers.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. (1977). An Image of Africa. The Massachusetts Review, 18(4), 782-794.

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Voltaire, Francois-Marie Arouet De. Candide. In Sarah Lawall (Gen. Ed.), The Norton     Anthology of Western Literature (pp. 375-438). New York: W. W. Norton and    Company.