Jabari: The impossible story of the giant African hunter boy who shocked the U.S. South in 1869
Today, we’re going back to 1869 to the story of Jabari, a giant African hunter boy whose presence and skills shocked the US South and sparked fear, rumors, and an impossible mystery no one could explain. This is a difficult and intense story. So, take a moment, breathe, and listen carefully.
Before we begin, subscribe to the channel and tell me in the comments which city and country you’re listening from. Your support helps keep these stories remembered instead of buried. Let’s begin. In the summer of 1869, on a cotton plantation 40 mi west of New Orleans, a group of wealthy white men gathered for what they called a sporting event.
They brought rifles and whiskey and dogs trained to hunt escaped slaves. They came to watch a spectacle that their host, Colonel Marcus Whitmore, had promised would be unlike anything they had ever seen. The prey, Whitmore announced with a showman’s flourish, would be an African giant, a savage captured from the darkest jungles of the Congo.
A creature more animal than man, who would provide excellent sport before being brought down like the beast he was. What happened over the next 48 hours would become legend in Louisiana, but not the kind of legend Whitmore intended. By the time the sun rose on the third day, three of the hunters were dead.
Seven more were injured so severely they would never fully recover. Colonel Marcus Witmore himself was found tied to a cypress tree in his own swamp, weeping and begging for mercy,
surrounded by every enslaved person he had brutalized for years. And the African giant was gone. Vanished into the wilderness with 43 men, women, and children who should have been free 4 years earlier, but had been kept in chains through fraud and violence and the willful blindness of a nation that had grown tired of fighting for justice.
This is the true story of Jabari, the hunter who became the hunted, who became the hunter once again. It is a story of survival and revenge, of courage and cunning, of a man who was underestimated by everyone who met him and who made them pay for that mistake in ways they could never have imagined.
It begins not in Louisiana, but 6,000 mi away in a village on the banks of the Congo River in the autumn of 1868. The village was called and it had existed in that location for more than 300 years.
The people who lived there were part of the Congo Kingdom, one of the most sophisticated civilizations in central Africa with a written language, a complex system of government and trade networks that stretched across the continent.
They were farmers and fishermen, craftsmen and scholars, warriors and priests. They had survived Portuguese colonization, the slave trade that had depleted their population for centuries, and the constant pressure of neighboring kingdoms seeking to expand their territory. Jabari was born in 1852, the third son of a man named Ken, who held the title of war chief.
In the hierarchy of the village, this made Jabari royalty, though not in line for leadership. His older brothers would inherit their father’s responsibilities. Jabari’s path was different. From the age of seven, he was trained as a hunter. This was not a casual education. Among the Congo people, hunters occupied a special position in society.
They provided meat for the community. They protected the village from predators. They ranged far into the wilderness, learning its secrets, mapping its dangers, becoming intimate with the forest
in ways that ordinary people never could. A skilled hunter was worth more than a dozen warriors because he could operate alone, survive in conditions that would kill others, and accomplish tasks that required patience and intelligence rather than brute force. Jabari excelled at the training.
By the time he was 12, he had killed his first leopard, tracking the animal for 3 days through dense jungle before cornering it in a ravine and dispatching it with a single spear thrust. By 14, he had faced a forest elephant that was terrorizing outlying farms, driving the massive creature away from human settlement through a combination of fire, noise, and strategic positioning that demonstrated a tactical mind far beyond his years.
By 16, he was considered one of the finest hunters in the region, sought after by neighboring villages to deal with problem animals and consulted by his father on matters of strategy and defense. He was also by the standards of his people and any other physically extraordinary. Jabari stood 6′ 7 in tall, a height that would have been remarkable anywhere in the world, but was almost unheard of in the mid-9th century when average male height was closer to 5’6 in.
His body was layered with muscle developed over years of running through forests, climbing trees, carrying heavy loads across difficult terrain. His shoulders were broad enough that he had to turn sideways to enter most doorways. His hands could span a grown man’s skull. But what made Jabari truly formidable was not his size…..
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