page_title: Msiri
section_title: Cruel punishments
hierarchical_section_title: Msiri / Evaluation / Cruel punishments
caption_attribution_description: English: Msiri's compound at Bunkeya. The objects on top of the four poles, around which some of Msiri's warriors are gathered, are heads of his enemies. More skulls are on the stakes forming the stockade.
context_page_description: Msiri founded and ruled the Yeke Kingdom in south-east Katanga from about 1856 to 1891. His name is sometimes spelled 'M'Siri' in articles in French. Other variants are "Mziri", "Msidi", and "Mushidi"; and his full name was Mwenda Msiri Ngelengwa Shitambi.
context_section_description: Msiri was said to punish his enemies and other miscreants by mutilation (cutting off ears), burial up to the neck and being left to starve, or being shut up in a hut to be eaten by a pack of starving dogs. Execution by beheading was certainly carried out, as witnessed by the heads placed on poles. Ironically the Stairs expedition meted out the same treatment to Msiri himself (and Leopold's regime in the Congo Free State hung heads and bodies of villagers on fences as a warning to others of what happened to those who did not fulfil their rubber quota).
  Msiri's capital Bunkeya and surrounding villages had a population estimated at 60,000–80,000 in 1891. A year after Msiri's death, it was 10,000–20,000. In that part of Africa people disperse into the bush when threatened. For instance, David Livingstone reported twenty years earlier that Mwata Kazembe VIII Chinkonkole Kafuti so tyrannised his people that many had moved away, and he could muster scarcely 1000 men. Continuing the contrast with Msiri, when the assassins sent by Msiri and Tippu Tib advanced on his boma, Chinkonkole Kafuti's people did not warn him, but let him be taken by surprise.
caption: Msiri's boma at Bunkeya. The objects on top of the four poles, below which some of Msiri's warriors are gathered, are heads of his enemies. More skulls are on the stakes forming the stockade.[16]
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