You may remember people heaping scorn on US President Joe Biden back in April 2024 for claiming that his Uncle Ambrose was eaten by cannibals in PNG (Papua New Guinea) during the Second World War.

“He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea.”

This anecdote aroused plenty of outrage from PNG politicians who proclaimed that there was never, not much, or hardly any cannibalism in the good old days.

But now the story has once again raised its well-chewed head. 2025 is the 50th anniversary of independence for PNG, a year which was expected to be a celebration. Instead, the news is full of stories about nine people being killed in shootouts in Enga Province over that New Year period, as violence escalates in the highlands, a region that was hit by a catastrophic landslide last May.

That news was overshadowed by a video that soon went viral of armed gang members holding mutilated body parts in Central Province, 60 miles (100 km) from the capital.

Voices in the Tok Pisin language on the video said they planned to eat the victim, with one man making licking motions as they displayed a severed foot, saying,

“this is our meat, we will cook it and eat it”

There was an immediate furore over the claims of cannibalism. Police said the deceased was killed in a dispute in the remote Goilala mountains in the province, but there are conflicting accounts of when the video was made. 

Prime Minister James Marape called for calm, and stated,

“Such acts of inhumanity are intolerable and represent a significant challenge to our shared humanity”

Marape had objected to Biden’s claims about cannibalism during the war, saying that PNG did not deserve to be labelled as a nation of cannibals.

Community leader Matilda Koma from Auga Dilava added,

“We do not eat people. Goilala people are not cannibals”

Fane’s Catholic priest Francis Pirit said that the video of the killing and youths pretending to eat human remains was a show of bravado, boasting because they had won a battle.

“There are no cannibals in the Goilala area. I sleep, eat and live amongst them. They do not eat human beings”

Despite the boast by the men, there is no footage of flesh being eaten in the gruesome video.

Cannibalism in PNG was largely a ritual practice by a small number of tribes and largely ceased by the 1960s after being banned by the colonial power, Australia. The suspicion that colonised peoples are inevitably cannibals has never completely disappeared; when the Australian soldiers of the 7^th Division AIF began to find mutilated and cannibalised bodies in New Guinea in late 1942, they were not sure whether to blame the Japanese or local tribesmen. After a lengthy commission of enquiry, the Australian government in 1945 finally added cannibalism to the War Crimes Act 1945, the only nation to do so.

As recently as 2012, 29 members of a “cannibal cult” were arrested in Madang province on PNG’s northeast coast. Forensic reports and statements made by the accused led police to believe parts of the victims had been eaten.

One of the more persuasive substantiations of PNG cannibalism was Kuru, a rare, incurable neurodegenerative prion disorder that was found in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in the middle of the last century. Kuru is a form of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, related to the “mad cow” disease that cured people from eating beef for many years, and appears to have been spread by funerary cannibalism. It is often touted as a reason not to be a cannibal, appearing unexpectedly in films like Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are and many films about wendigos.

So, cannibalism remains a sensitive topic in PNG. President of the PNG Law Society Hubert Namani sparked outrage when his comments condemning the “barbaric killing, mutilation and cannibalism” over the festive season were reported by the Post Courier newspaper.

Meanwhile, Goilala’s local member of parliament, Casmiro Aio, pointed out this week that there had been no regular police presence in his electorate for 10 years.

The questions remain – did any of the dead people get eaten? And more interestingly, why would that be so much more appalling than the fact that nine people were killed?