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1 - Introduction: The Man-Leopard Murder Mysteries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2013

David Pratten
David Pratten
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

‘MURDER AT IROT OKORO – LEOPARD ALLEGED’

Leopards, or human leopards as some suspect, have been waging a relentless war on the people of this division, particularly those living in Ikot Okoro Area. Again and again the people have appealed to Government for help. They have wailed for a long time, but no help has been forthcoming. Day after day reports are made of loss of several lives due to the ravages of these ferocious animals. Nobody knows what Government thinks of this state of affairs. Recently the house boy to Court Messenger Okon Bassey was attacked and killed while on his way to tap palm wine near a riverside. The people are like sheep without a shepherd.

Nigerian Eastern Mail, 10 March 1945

This newspaper article launched the official investigation into the ‘man-leopard’ murders. From this moment, and for the next three years, the Imperial gaze of police, press and politicians was focused on Calabar Province in south-eastern Nigeria. At the time the police investigation was reported as the ‘biggest, strangest murder hunt in the world’, and it would become the last major investigation in Africa into killings linked to a shape-shifting cult. Three years later, when the police wound up their enquiries in early 1948, they calculated that 196 men, women and children had been victims of the man-leopard murders, though they also conceded that there were almost certainly more murders that were never brought to light.

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The Man-Leopard Murders
History and Society in Colonial Nigeria
 , pp. 1 - 25
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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