Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent - The last headhunters

On a journey to Nagaland on the Indo-Myanmar border, the British travel writer encounters a local tribe and learns all about the centuries-old tradition of headhunting

“I was about 20 when I went for my first headhunt,” says the old man, his beetly eyes bright with the memory. “I remember running back to the village with my enemy’s head in a bamboo basket, and showing it to all the girls. I felt so proud and happy.”

Langtoyimlok and I are sitting in a smoky morung in the Phom Naga village of Yaongyimchen, high in the cloud-wreathed mountains of Nagaland. A leathery, puckish man of almost 100, he’s formally dressed in a jaunty brown fur beret and a scarlet waistcoat sewn with cowrie shells. Around his neck hang strings of orange beads, a wild boar’s tusk and three small bronze human heads. “These show I’ve taken three heads,” he tells me, fingering the smooth metal faces.

Headhunting – and no, we’re not talking ‘searching for business executives’ – used to be rife among the Naga tribes, a Tibeto-Burman people who inhabit the mountainous tract straddling the Indo-Myanmar border. Until a few decades ago, there was nothing a lusty Naga warrior adored more than returning from a raid on a nearby village with a bloody basket of freshly taken heads. Heads, they believed, were the dwelling place of the soul and hence receptacles of great power: the more of these grisly prizes a village had, the greater fertility and good fortune it’d enjoy.