Forget donkey meat, they’re eating people in Uganda

I know you have heard stories of people eating donkey meat in the guise of beef; or game meat being passed off as goat meat.

I suspect you have also bought roasted chicken on the roadside, and unknowingly partaken of wild birds.

If you have ever ventured out of the East African borders into DRC in the hunt for gold, you may have seen monkey meat being openly sold in the market place. What you may not know is that somewhere in Uganda human flesh is the only meat that tickles some taste buds.

Rakai District is one place I will be avoiding now that the rumours of cannibalism have been proved true.

If you have watched “Hostel”, the horror movie where people pay to torture their victims to death, then you will also avoid seedy motels.  In the movie, college students who are hiking or backpacking their way across Europe are told of a town called Bratislava in Slovakia, where they are promised the party time of a lifetime of drugs, drinks and sex.

Unfortunately, what happens is that they get drugged and killed in horrific ways. 21-year-old Peace Arinaitwe and her husband Deus Bandihihi probably do not watch horror movies, and do not believe most of the idle talk in town.

Got stranded

They had attended a burial ceremony in Rakai District with their nine-month-old child. Unfortunately, they got stranded in the evening without transport. John Ssegirinya, the village chairman offered to accommodate them for a night.

Little did they know that they were innocent lambs who had wandered into a lions’ den, just in time for dinner.

They were probably warmly welcomed and engaged in a bit of chit chat with questions about their home and family. This enabled them relax and gave the chairman and his wife time to sharpen their knives, ready to attack.

They had hardly settled when the couple pounced into action and hacked Peace and the baby to pieces, as Deus watched in horror. Deus saw his chance and jumped through the open window, racing off into the night.

The flesh was shared out and eaten, and some distributed among their secret network of cannibals.

In the morning, Deus with a couple of injuries reported the matter to the police, but even though they combed every corner of the homestead, and no spec of blood or piece of bone was found.

I suspect this is because the closest Ugandan police have come to Luminol is in the TV series CSI where the detectives spray it around to help find traces of blood left at a crime scene.

A number of suspects were rounded up, and blood and saliva samples brought to Kampala for DNA tests.

But I wonder why they did not take stomach and stool samples and test these for the presence of human flesh?

One of the suspects has since hanged himself; and another spilled beans about the whole story and the secret network that peddles and eats human flesh In Uganda.

However, with no hard evidence or a godfather, I doubt Deus will get his day in court. It is a man-eat-man society, quite literally.