The BBC is reporting that there is a remote Fiji mountain village that killed and ate an English missionary 136 years ago that's going to offer an official traditional apology to the man's descendants this week.
Reverend Thomas Baker of the London Missionary Society was killed and eaten by the people of Navatusila on July 21, 1867, after he took a comb out of a chief's hair.
Touching the head of a chief was strictly forbidden.
I wasn't there, being that this happened half way across the world 101 years before I was born, but I am wiling to put a 10 spot down that he snatched that comb out of the chief’s head to punk him.
Yeah, I swear that is what I think happened.
He wanted to show the little savages that Jesus had bigger balls than their chief had.
The first rule of missionary work is to discredit and undermine what the people already have in place so you can replace their belief system with your own.
There is no way in hell you are going to tell me that this was all an honest misunderstanding.
I am not saying that he deserved to be eaten, but that might have been standard punishment for trying to punk the tribal chief.
One of the cannibals that took part in killing and eating Baker at the time was quoted as saying "we ate everything but his boots".
In fact, one of those boots they didn't eat is sitting in the Fijian Museum.
I wonder why they kept the boot. Seems like they could have saved it and used it to flavor soup like a piece of salt pork. Maybe they did.
At the time when Baker arrived at those islands to "beat some Jesus into them" those islands were known as "the Cannibal Isles".
I consider that forewarning.
Evidently the missionaries eventually won out because today they say that the inhabitants of those islands consider Jesus Christ the whole friggin show.
However, before you get all misty eyed about how this is yet another success story for Christianity, turning savages into respectable westernized Jimmy Snuka, this apology they are offering isn't coming totally out of the guilt of eating this man.
Like most apologies made publicly for something that happened almost 150 years ago, there is another reason just under the surface.
Apparently the Fijians believe that they are being cursed for what their forefathers did to Baker, and they are trying to apologize to remove the curse.
Apparently the lord Jesus Christ, as powerful as he is, is as worthless against curses in 2003 as he was to Reverend Thomas Baker in 1867.