CANNIBALISM

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6942, 22 June 1929, Page 13

CANNIBALISM

STILL BEING PRACTISED Cabled 1 charges of cannibalism against Czecho-Slovakian gipsies prove that only a shred of sentiment prevents the human being from preying on his kind. In Chinese famine periods, cannibalism, the victims being unwanted female infants, is an authenticated fact. ’ The last previous European cannibalism dates only a few years back, to the Russian famine following the close of the war. The late Professor Meredjth Atkinson, who was in Russia with relief workers, vouched for the fact. The weird story of the employee of the Moscow public baths, who became crazed through hunger in November, 1923, was a case in point. He took an injection of morphine, seated himself in a bath-tub and turned on the boiling water. He left a note declaring that being crazy from hunger, he had decided to sacrifice himself for similar sufferers as a “human stew.” Australia is in a cannibal area, Papuans, and many uncivilised Australian abos eat their enemies and dead friends, both as a magical prescription for strength and as a neat form of burial. Some (as in Southeast Papua) eat their enemies as a humiliating form of revenge. Australian history holds the terrible record of a boatload of ship-wrecked Chinese who were made prisoners and one by one killed and eaten by Northern Territory aborigines,