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Leopard Society, leopard men, and Anyoto were names used for one or more secret societies that operated in West and Central Africa approximately between 1890 and 1935.[1][2] It was believed that members of the society could transform into leopards through the use of witchcraft.[3] The presumably earliest reference to the society in Western literature can be found in George Banbury's Sierra Leone, Or the White Man's Grave (1888).[3] In Western culture, depictions of the society have been widely used to portray Africans as barbaric and uncivilized.[1]
 | The examples and perspective in this article may not include all significant viewpoints. (July 2023) |
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Members of the society would allegedly dress in leopard skins, waylaying travelers with sharp claw-like weapons in the form of leopards' claws and teeth and engaging in cannibalism, but such claims have been disputed. Scholar Vicky van Bockhaven writes:
Reports that the Anyoto sometimes imitated leopard attacks, and the existence of their costumes, played on the European imagination. Reports often mention the Anyoto killing innocent victims without any apparent reason. The cannibalistic aspect also receives a great deal of attention in the reports, even if it does not generally seem correct.[1]
During field research in the 1960s among the Mano people in north-central Liberia, the American anthropologist James Riddell collected detailed statements about the Leopard and Crocodile Societies that had been active in that area, including from former members of these societies. They had comprised men from different towns and their primary purpose had been to organize trade between these towns, which were otherwise independent political units.[4] Only men who could command the labour of many dependents were allowed to join, as the trade organization and the transport and protection of trade goods were labour-intensive. Those who wanted to join had to sacrifice a member of their "own domestic group in a cannibalistic feast" to prove that they had sufficiently many dependents whose services they could contribute. The supposed waylaying of travellers was only a trick to hide the connection between the victim and the man who had chosen to sacrifice them.[5] The cannibal feasts, on the other hand, were real, according to several old members of the society interviewed by Riddell.[6]
In the 1920s, Lady Dorothy Mills spoke with several district commissioners who tried to juridically prosecute members of the Leopard Society engaged in cannibal murders. She noted: "The members will offer and help to procure some one of their own family for the sacrifice. A man will offer up his wife or his child or his young brother".[7] To avoid suspicions, the chosen victim was usually kidnapped outside their home, but Mills also spoke with a man who had witnessed how a group of "Leopards" raided a house, carrying away a man and a boy who had been sleeping there, supposedly as victims for their next feast.[8]
In a criminal trial in the 1900s, a member of the Leopard Society confessed that he had been present when a girl donated by another member of the society had been murdered and that he had eaten of her flesh. In this case, the victim was a purchased slave, not a relative of the donor. The child was killed and beheaded by her owner, who then divided the corpse into four parts by cutting it "down the centre and across the middle". The flesh was cooked and eaten by the members of the society; some who had not been able to be present during the ceremony also received their parts and ate them later.[9]
In another trial a few years later, a man stated that another member of the society had volunteered his niece for sacrifice. After the girl had been stabbed to death with a large knife and cut into pieces, all her flesh was roasted over an open fire and eaten by members of the society, including the witness. The most important members could choose their preferred parts, while the others had to be satisfied with the remainders. Everything was eaten, including the edible organs; only the girl's bones and skull, picked clean of all flesh, were left behind when the feast was finished.[10] Due to this testimony and other evidence, the girl's uncle was found guilty of murder and later executed.[11] Other trials showed similar patterns of men volunteering dependents, often relatives, for sacrifice and consumption.[12] While all members of the society seem to have been adult men, the eaten victims were usually "young boys and girls".[13]
Encounters with suspected remnants of the Leopard Society in the post-colonial era have been described by Donald MacIntosh[14] and Beryl Bellman.[15]
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Fictionalized versions of the Leopard Society feature in the Tarzan novel Tarzan and the Leopard Men, in Willard Price's African Adventure, in Hergé's Tintin au Congo and in Hugo Pratt's Le Etiopiche.
An alternate, more egalitarian version of the Leopard Society appears in the Nsibidi Script[16] series by Nnedi Okorafor.[17] Robert E. Howard mentions them in his horror/detective short story "Black_Talons".
A different take of the Leopard Men appears in The Legend of Tarzan. This version of the group are actually leopards that were magically uplifted by La. A fictional incarnation of the society also appears in the 2016 film The Legend of Tarzan.
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In 1913 the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, acquired a sculpture by Paul Wissaert commissioned by the Belgium Ministry of Colonies depicting a leopard man preparing to attack a victim.[1] The scene in the sculpture was appropriated by Hergé in Tintin au Congo.[19] The sculpture is depicted by Congolese artist Chéri Samba in Réorganisation (2002), commissioned by the Royal Museum, at the center of a tug-of-war between Africans trying to remove the sculpture from the museum, and whites trying to keep it there.[19][18]
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