Summary: Ancient and medieval writers repeatedly described parts of sub-Saharan Africa as inhabited by cannibals. Ptolemy explicitly placed "Aethiopian Anthropophagi" and "barbarian cannibals" on the coasts of East Africa and in the interior of Africa. Eldad ha-Dani's ninth-century travel tale describes black "Ethiopian" tribes eating castaways, although the text itself notes that many consider the tale to be fiction. Medieval Islamic non-fiction sources repeatedly claim that some black African tribes ate people, including al-Masudi, al-Maqdisi, Ibn Sa'id (via Ibn Fatima), al-Umari and Ibn Khaldun. In his description of West Africa, Ibn Battuta mentions a delegation of "Blacks who eat the sons of Adam" who killed and ate a slave girl given to them as hospitality, and then thanked the ruler of Mali with blood on their hands and faces. Ibn Battuta also mentions the belief of these cannibals that the best human meat came from the hands and breasts of women. Early modern European sources upheld claims of cannibalism, including Andrew Battel's report that the Imbangala "feed mostly on human flesh," despite owning cattle. A 17th-century European compilation (Ogilby/Dapper) lists many West and Central African groups as cannibals and describes eating slain enemies and selling captives as slaves. The text claims that evidence from the late 19th and early 20th centuries "fully confirmed" the prevalence of cannibalism in parts of Central and West Africa, especially in the Congo Basin and Nigeria. The Congolese-period colonial accounts cited here describe chiefs openly asking enemies for food and families describing how they divided up a captured person for consumption. Junker's account describes people quickly stripping and eating meat from severed heads after raids, treating it as routine. Meek's field research in Nigeria is cited, in which he found 34 tribes that admitted to cannibalism, and many more groups that retain traces of earlier cannibalistic customs in folklore. The text argues that cannibalism disappeared mainly due to Islamization, European colonization and modernization, rather than internal moral change. The text describes modern cannibalism during the war in Liberia, Congo and South Sudan as a terror tactic and/or a means of starvation, with Liberian warlords describing their preferred "finer meat." The text describes UN-investigated reports from Congo of Pygmies being hunted and eaten for alleged magical powers, and attributes cannibalism to the Mayi-Mayi militia.