The Cannibal Ogre

Dokonikan is the great adversary of Trobriand heroic myth: a cannibal giant who ate the inhabitants of village after village in northern Kiriwina, so that the whole population fled by canoe, leaving behind only the woman Bolutukwa, hidden in her grotto at Laba'i. Her son Tudava grew up, learned powerful magic, cultivated the first gardens, and finally killed and beheaded Dokonikan, concealing the head in a baked taro pudding which he served to his maternal uncle as a reproach for abandoning his mother. Malinowski analysed the episode as a matrilineal transformation of the ogre-slaying tale; later mission collections from the Trobriands record the same figure as Dokinikani in a whole cycle of cannibal tales.

Domains

• cannibalism

Powers

• to hunt down and devour human beings

Sources

• Dokonikan is the man-eating ogre of the Tudava cycle who depopulated the Trobriand coast and was finally slain by the culture-hero Tudava, who served the ogre's head to his maternal uncle in a dish of taro pudding.: Malinowski, Bronislaw. Myth in Primitive Psychology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926. (secondary); Strenski, Ivan (ed.). Malinowski and the Work of Myth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. (secondary)