In the Calabar Province of colonial Nigeria during the 1940s, a number of man-leopard killings took place: murders whereby the victim's body was elaborately mutilated to simulate a leopard attack. These murders triggered a large-scale police investigation that lasted from 1945 to 1948. The colonial administration had difficulty determining why these murders were taking place – were they ritual killings organised by a central master shrine? Were they linked to secret societies? Was the phenomenon related to witchcraft beliefs? Were the killings a response to demands for familiar forms of justice following the problematic reorganisation of the Native Court system in the 1930s? Were they the result of destabilised bride-price arrangements, particularly in divorce cases? In the end, the colonial administration decided that the killings were organised through ídíòŋ shrines, whose diviners were thought to be leading a movement of crime and anti-colonial resistance. Consequently, the ídíòŋ society was prohibited, and almost 1,000 ídíòŋ shrines were destroyed by the police. More than fifty years later, David Pratten challenges this conclusion as ‘difficult to accept’ but certainly convenient for the colonial administration because ‘[b]y highlighting superstition, tradition and custom as the cause of the man-leopard murders, the colonial authorities strengthened the case for their own civilising mission, and deflected attention away from the more immediate issues that dominated each of the murder cases’ (p. 273). Pratten does not offer one single alternative explanation, but has rather taken the killings as the starting point for a many-faceted exploration of the changes experienced in Annang society during the first half of the twentieth century. The resulting book touches on such topics as local history and memory, changing relations between youth and elders, gender, the changing role of secret societies, religion, education, the breakdown of trust, the reorganisation of colonial rule, and colonial knowledge production.
The study is organised chronologically, starting with an overview of Annang society up to 1909, which looks at elements of Annang personhood in relation to lineage, initiation and conceptions of the soul, shape-shifting beliefs, and changes and tensions relating to palm-oil production. The following chapter, ‘Resistance and revival, 1910–1929’, examines the ways in which Ibibio and Annang made sense of Christianity and colonialism. ‘Progressives and Power, 1930–1938’ explores the flawed reorganisation of local administration and the politics of gender and youth and elders. ‘War and the public, 1939–1945’ shows how existing tensions were intensified by the wartime economy. A detailed exploration of various explanations for the man-leopard murders, including the development of the (mis)understandings arrived at by the colonial police, is provided in the chapters ‘Inlaws and outlaws, 1946’ and ‘Divinations and delegations, 1947’. A final chapter, ‘The politics of improvement, 1947–1960’, explores the aftermath of the killings and the regular reappearance of the leopard murders in a range of local discourses on crime, secret societies, and civil litigation.
The book is based, in part, on a careful exploration of the colonial archive, but also on the reading of local newspapers from the period, as well as on interviews held in Annang between 1996 and 2004. This has resulted in a satisfyingly rich source base and beautifully detailed examples. Less satisfying, however, is how the book engages with the existing scholarly literature. Pratten has clearly read widely and has explored many case studies elsewhere in Africa that illuminate events described in his sources. However, this engagement is not easy to access on the level of the text. Nowhere in the chapters are the insights of other scholars discussed explicitly; we are entirely reliant on references in endnotes. For instance, readers interested in the source of an un-introduced quote on p. 159 have to turn to the note on p. 371 where they find the author of the quote (Channock, 1989), and then onwards to the bibliography on p. 402 to find out from which article the quote derives. Some references are genuinely problematic. On pp. 242–3, for instance, we read that
Of all the cases brought before courts in the Annang districts during this period it was matrimonial cases that were the most numerous. In this light, the leopard murder investigations illuminated the ways in which gender intersected with the economic concerns of the day.
An interesting point and one about which one might want to know a bit more. Following up the note results in ‘Byfield, 1997, p. 87’. Clearly, Byfield's observations regarding Abeokuta are relevant for the interpretation, but this does not illuminate what Pratten has seen in his sources to decide that this interpretation is also relevant for Annang.
This is a sprawling book that manages to include nearly all the themes that have been fashionable in African studies over the past ten years, applied to one particular case. There are nuggets of information here, as well as some fine explorations of specific events or situations that beautifully illustrate aspects of colonial African history with which we are familiar from the literature. Recommended reading for scholars working on south-eastern Nigeria.
