The Headhunter’s Daughter
William Morrow
229 pg pb
By Diane Weddington
North Carolina author Tamar Myers presents the second in a series about the Belgian Congo in “The Headhunter’s Daughter.”
Myers is author of more than 30 mysteries and hundreds of garden articles. Many of her works are set in Pennsylvania Dutch country.
Her parents became missionaries in the Belgian Congo in 1932. She was born in 1948. Two years later her parents were assigned to establish a mission station for the Bashilele, a fierce tribe of headhunters who often killed outsiders.
Myers grew up amidst this tribe, unharmed because her parents were respectful of the tribal customs. Others did not fare as well. To be accepted as a man each male tribal member was required to kill an enemy and bring home the skull to use as a drinking cup.
What seems an exotic life to outsiders became the norm for Myers. She lived with her parents and three sisters in a palm leaf hut until it was too termite-infested to be habitable. Food supplies were scarce and shipped in from South Africa, so she learned to eat antelope, wild boar and even elephant meat.
When she reached third grade she was sent to a boarding school two days’ drive from the mission. The ferry she had to take to school passed through Bapende territory, home of cannibals. The Loange River itself was filled with crocodiles and hippos.
Myers hated boarding school. Just before Independence Day in the Congo, her family was furloughed home to the Midwest, where the curried fields and fences discomfited Myers, used to tall grasses and plains.
Returning to a country freed of colonial rule, her family rented a villa above the Kasai and Tshikapa Rivers which the fleeing Belgians had abandoned. There they confronted an intensified tribal warfare, this one between the Baluba and Lulua.
Her father sent many letters from Africa to his mother, and it is from these that Myers takes many of the details in her Congo series. (Her first, “The Witchdoctor’s Wife,” has been a best seller.) Her father’s many interests included anthropology and it was from him that she learned about the polyandry and cannibal use of the dead common in the Bashilele.
“The Headhunter’s Daughter” is not a true story, Myers cautions, despite its veracity of detail. The incident which is the focus of the book never happened. Yet her vivid description of life in the Belgian Congo makes it seem as though it did occur.
The storyline is gripping. A native governess kidnaps a white infant with intent to give the infant to a Belgian who has promised her money for the deed. While waiting for his arrival she is bitten by the poisonous mamba snake and dies.
Out hunting for the man he will kill to pass his rite of manhood, a young Bashilele finds the infant. He takes it home to his mother who is mourning a still-born child. The tribe accepts this white child, named Ugly Eyes, and raises her absent any white contact.
When she turns 13 a missionary school teacher hears of her existence and urges the police chief to investigate. With a translator and a curious young American woman, the police chief goes to the remote village. They force the frightened girl to come with them.
Can Ugly Eyes accept life in a white settlement? Should she? Who is this young woman, anyway? The answers which unfold are surprising and they also raise quite clearly issues about family values, “civilization,” and self-determination.
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