‘The Strangest Problem’: Daniel Wilberforce, the Human Leopards Panic and the Special Court in Sierra Leone

Abstract

This chapter examines the emergence of a colonial archive on ‘native savagery’ following the panic over ‘human leopards’ in Sierra Leone in 1912. It shows how the fright of the colonial elites was charged by the regurgitation of past prejudices and experiences of violence. The colonial archive—colonial officials used to refer to ‘Thuggee’ in India as the ultimate example of native ‘savagery’—was consulted to reinforce existing racial stereotypes. The panic ultimately resulted in an explosion of anthropological literature about the ‘leopards’ being disseminated all over Britain and its Empire. As the detailed analysis of this peculiar genre of texts clearly suggests, the narratives of the ‘leopard murders’ drew on earlier prejudices about African religion and ritual, and the resulting ‘scientific’ literature in turn became an important reference point for later investigators.

I would like to thank Kim Wagner and Harald Fischer-Tiné for their input into this chapter. I wrote about this topic at greater length in a chapter of my PhD thesis: ‘“The People May Be Slaves, Entirely Innocent”: Slaves, Masters and Legitimate Trade in the Special Court of 1912’. In ‘Whose Slavery? The Politics and Language of Slavery in Sierra Leone, 1898–1956’. ETH Zurich, 2013.