Former Liberian president Charles Taylor is on trial for war crimes at the Hague. Wednesday’s testimony from former soldiers included gruesome details of cannibalism ordered by Taylor.
Marzah, who led the Death Squad group of killers, said many of the victims of cannibalism were members of the Krahn people of the then Liberian president, Samuel Doe, who Taylor was attempting to overthrow. But those eaten also included soldiers from UN and West African “Ecomog” peacekeeping forces.
“He said we should eat them … Even the UN white people - he said we could use them as pork to eat,” Marzah told the court. “We ate a few [Ecomog soldiers], but not many. But many were executed, about 68.”
Marzah then provided step by step instructions for turning a human corpse into a meal. Defense lawyer Courtenay Griffith got a little cheeky and asked,
“Which ones taste best?”
I’ll refrain from cracking a joke about those commercials proclaiming pork as the new white meat.


14 Comments
This is a little grisy, but oh well. Once I burned my foot on the Fourth of July when sparks landed on it. The burns smelled like oo-jing-oh. I told this to a Vietnam vet once and he said the same thing. Burnt flesh smelled like fried squid that he use to get from Thai street vendors…
That would be tasteless…. And anyhow, it’s “Pork: the other white meat”
I’m not old enough to have been there myself, but I have it on good authority (several informants who grew up there) that in Manchuria under the Japanese (’Manchukuo’ or ‘Manshuukoku’) there were restaurants in some cities such as Harbin and Shenyang (’Houten’) in back alleys that served ‘long pig’ meat which everyone understood was from humans who been shot or had frozen to death… no shortage of healthy corpses in Manchuria in those days.
I’ve heard that when you get laser eye correction there’s a puff of smoke that comes out as the back of your eye is burned into a new shape. That puff of smoke smells like bacon.
Oh, man, that sense-image is really clear, WangKon936 - maybe too clear!
Well, I can’t comment on taste… thank goodness…
That’s a great thing to have pop into my head next time the guy behind me in the movie theater starts munching on dried squid.
It’d be appropriate if I’m watching a zombie movie, though.
Thanks, Wang.
This reminds me of an argument for vegetarianism I remember reading; South Pacific cannibals preferred the taste of Asians with their low-meat diet to Europeans with their high-meat diet.
#8,
One more reason not to be a vegetarian: you’ll get eaten first if you’re captured by cannibals.
#8 I prefer to eat women with low-meat diets too. They taste a little like chicken.
Back in college my fraternity used to brand (optional though). We would just heat up a 6-inch piece of steel on the stove in the kitchen, you would drop your pants, lean against a wall, a couple guys would hold you, and you would get branded on your right hip. Since several guys would get this done in one night, the whole kitchen smelled like bacon, really strong.
And in case your wondering, yes I have one and no, it doesn’t hurt as bad as you think it would.
Apparently, humans and pigs appear to have a lot in common. Isn’t all insulin on the market produced by genetically engineered pigs and some organs used on humans harvested from pigs?
Also… cannibalism is risky business. Repeated ingestion of same species protein causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (vCJD), more popularly known as Mad Cow Disease. It happens in cows because we put bovine protein in cattle feed. Gross but true.
You know what’s really trippy? Humans have some resistance to vCJD, meaning that all our ancestors at some point in time participated in cannibalism.
It’s amusing how the text-sensitive ad that shows up is for afrointroductions.com, an international dating site to meet Africans. That’s the connection they made with “eating white meat.”
#13 it is ironic too as many black men think it’s un-cool to have a box lunch at the Y.