‘Eating monkeys is good for the soul’

A FEDERAL judge in Brooklyn has rejected a Liberian woman’s religious reasons for smuggling endangered monkey meat into the country.

Mamie Manneh

According to this report, US District Judge Raymond J Dearie ruled that Mamie Manneh’s faith didn’t preclude her from applying for permits to import exotic food or explain why she misled officials.

Manneh, 39 and a mother of 11, was charged with smuggling the meat three years ago after customs agents seized a shipment of primate parts as it passed through Kennedy Airport on the way to her home in Staten Island.

Manneh’s lawyers claimed a First Amendment right, arguing that some Liberian Christians eat monkey meat for spiritual reasons.

When she first appeared in court in August, 2007, Manneh testified that she was baptised as a Christian, and that she eats the monkey meat on religious occasions like Easter:

Because monkey from the wildlife is a very smart animal.

Her testimony suggested that she practices a hybridized religion that borrows both from Christian concepts and indigenous African religious beliefs.

Seventeen congregants of Manneh’s church in Staten Island, the First Christian Church at 54 Thompson St., filed an affidavit testifying to the importance of “bushmeat “for their religious beliefs.

This is something our forefathers did, it is something we learned as children, and it is a part of our treasured relationship with God as African Christians. We eat ‘bushmeat’ for our souls.

One of the few worshippers left at the church, Leona Artis, said the congregation’s appetite for monkey meat is deeply misunderstood.

Where some people have turkey, we’ll have monkey meat. Nobody who ever ate it got sick and died from it. I’ve been eating it all my life. It’s delicious.

Manneh was arrested after federal inspectors at JFK Airport examined a shipment of 12 cardboard boxes from Guinea. They were addressed to Manneh and, according to a flight manifest, contained African dresses and smoked fish with a value of $780.

Manneh, who is also known as Mamie Jefferson, was then charged with smuggling 65 pieces of “bushmeat” into America from Guinea in violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.

Government agents seized “skulls, limbs and torsos” of primates, including green monkeys and hamadryas baboons, according to court papers. The meat had been smoked.

However, The US Supreme Court, in 2006, may have bolstered Manneh’s prospect of winning her case, when it ruled 8 to 0 in favour of exempting a small group in New Mexico from prosecution for using a hallucinogenic plant to make tea.

The court in that case, Gonzales v O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao De Vegetal, found that the practice by followers of a Brazilian religion was protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 law passed by Congress that protects groups who use illegal substances for religious purposes.

But “bushmeat” brings new issues into play. A statement signed by a special agent of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Philip Alegranti, said issues in the case included the conservation of protected species, and public health threats that experts say can stem from eating primates. Diseases linked to primates include HIV, SARS, Ebola, Monkeypox, and Lassa Fever, the federal government says in its complaint in the case.

Manneh is currently serving a two-year sentence in state prison for trying to run over a woman she suspected of sleeping with her husband, Zanger Jefferson. If convicted of the federal charges she faces up to five more years in prison and deportation.

See background report here.