A Careful Paw
Shape-shifting men, ritual murders, and the largest Nigerian police investigation you've never heard of.
This article is non-fiction.
22 February, 1945.
As Allied forces battled imperial Japan for the island of Ramree, Dan Udoffia was walking home with a friend, Akpan Etuk, 9500 kilometres away in Ikot Okoro, a small town in present-day Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. They were going to tap palm wine near a river when, according to Akpan’s testimony, a leopard sprang from the bush and attacked Udoffia.
When Udoffia broke free, the men ran to the local court compound where Udoffia collapsed from his injuries. Okon Bassey, a court messenger and Udoffia’s employer, arrived on the scene and moved the wounded man into his home. Udoffia died there the next day. Frederick Kay, District Officer (DO) for the Ikot Ekpene division1, read of the incident in the Nigerian Eastern Mail2.
MURDER AT IKOT 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 (Pratten, The Man Leopard Murders)
Human leopards? Maybe Frederick Kay knew of the infamous Sherbro leopard murders in Sierra Leone when he launched an inquiry into Udoffia’s death3. Akpan, the sole witness, swore in his initial statement that he saw a leopard attack his friend. An autopsy, however, concluded it was a human using a sharp instrument that had inflicted the fatal injuries.
Speculation flourished. Kay heard rumours that Okon Bassey, Udoffia’s employer, was a member of a feared cult, ekpe owo, which used Idiong charms to transform into leopards and kill. The Idiong is a traditional diviner in Annang society, roughly analogous to the Igbo dibia or Yoruba babalawo. Despite similarities in name, ekpe owo (leopard men) was distinct from the ekpe society (leopard society). The ekpe society was a fraternal society that had thrived for centuries in South-Eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. The society enforced laws, maintained internal peace and even supervised trade4. Ekpe owo, however, was a cult allegedly motivated by ritual bloodlust5 as much as the manillas6 they charged those who hired them as assassins.
As Kay investigated Udoffia’s death, an informant claimed to have heard Okon arguing loudly with Udoffia over a land debt before the attack. Another informant reported that Okon had taken Udoffia’s wife and tried to sleep with her after the burial. When questioned by police, Okon’s senior wife gave a contradictory statement that finally broke Okon’s alibi and implicated him in Udoffia’s death. Okon Bassey appeared in court on 27 November 1945 on a murder charge and received the death sentence two days later. The Crown prosecutor was a certain young lawyer named Barrister Louis Mbanefo7.
Udoffia’s murder put the authorities on alert. By the end of 1945, 36 active investigations were in progress, and many more murders were reported as the work of ekpe owo. Sometimes the victims were mutilated—severed limbs, missing hearts, flesh taken from faces or necks. Many victims were women.
Etuk Ebere was killed on her way to visit her daughter in September 1945 (This newspaper mentions her death). Adiaha Akpan Udo was returning from the farm along with seven other women when she was ambushed and killed. A man was killed for felling a sacred ndêm tree and selling it to Christians. A young girl was beheaded by her father, who confessed he did so to make potent charms. On 20 November 1945, villagers in Ikot Akam found the dead bodies of four women. Three more women died two days later, this time at Ikot Essiet.
By January 1946, there was a “total collapse of law and order” in the leopard area, the collection of towns and villages in which the murders occurred. There was no laughter from little children hard at play to quicken the humid afternoon air, and trips to farms had to be made in the company of several others. In hushed tones, villagers discussed rumours of powerful chiefs collaborating with the leopard men, rumours of severed tongues, arms and breasts in raffia bags smuggled to buyers in Ogoni land.
Frederick Kay felt the murders undermined colonial authority, which makes sense because a government draws legitimacy partly from its monopoly on violence. In January 1946, Kay asked the government to impose the Peace Preservation Ordinance8 on Abak and Opobo Districts. The ordinance allowed authorities to arrest suspects arbitrarily and hold them for up to a year, besides other egregious violations of personal liberty. The imposition of the ordinance in the region amounted to an admission of failure by a government that was still looking for a central motive for the murders.
As I read Pratten’s book, two questions gnawed at me.
Puzzle #1: Why were the victims usually women? The motives in many of the investigated cases were usually marriage-related (divorce, jealousy) or debt-related. Economic uncertainty from falling oil palm profits, the growing influence of Christianity and tensions from indirect rule in the Eastern province widened fissures in domestic life and gendered relations in colonial Annang society. Human labour was crucial to their agrarian culture, and labour needs were often met by marrying multiple wives. Child betrothal was commonplace, but the government saw it as a form of “covert slave trade”.
Divorce-related suits dominated the native courts’ caseload. Although native court reforms granted women more freedom to divorce their husbands, crafty husbands also brought spurious divorce suits against wives they were tired of. Divorce customs at the time required a woman’s parents to refund the full bride-price, which was often an onerous thing to ask simple villagers years after they had probably spent all the money.
Yet, the native courts were controversial even in their time. Warrant chiefs, indirectly supervised by district officers such as Frederick Kay, heard cases at these courts. Besides being wildly corrupt, these warrant chiefs often had no traditional basis for authority. The recognised leaders in the community did not draw their authority from a collective mandate of their people, an unfortunate fact that plagues Nigerian politics even today.
People also mocked the native courts for their lenient punishment. A native court might give a thief six months in Abak prison, whereas the more “effective” traditional punishment was a vigorous beating and public shaming in the market square. In summary, native courts lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
So, a possible explanation for Puzzle #1 starts with situating ourselves in this atmosphere of judicial frustration, where economic and marital pressures led to divorces, and husbands or bride-giving families took matters into their hands rather than rely on the slow and often confusing court process.
Puzzle #2: What purpose did the idiom of the leopard serve in these murders? It might have been easier to poison one’s victim using a well-known toxicant like partially processed cassava roots. Why did the killers have to invoke leopard imagery at all in such gory murders?
Let’s situate ourselves once more in the rural society of the 1940s and consider a 60-year-old adult in an Annang village. Such an adult would have grown up in a pre-colonial community organised around traditional institutions and customs that provided a stable lens through which they could view their world. Children joined their age grades and aspired to progress to the next; parents enquired about the bush souls9 of prospective husbands to ensure compatibility with their daughters; old men poured drink with their left hand to ward off evil spirits and sought the favour of benevolent ones using libation from the right hand.
By the 1940s, the entrenched colonial government and growing Christian influence would have subverted all these traditional institutions. Our fictional person would wake one day and find one leg on either side of a widening schism. It is hard to describe the damage this revelation does to one’s spirit and the broader collective psyche of a community. We know of the material cost of colonialism. I think there is also a violence the colonised mind does to itself to rationalise its condition, a sort of mental autophagy that is just as ruinous.
As such, I think leopard imagery in these murders channelled traditional myth and lore in a violent protest against the advancing world order. Viewed in such a light, the murders are almost a conservative movement, one that sought to invoke in the people’s imagination a time when power/justice was swift, merciless and of the gods.
On 5 January 1946, a large police force moved into the leopard area, established police camps and imposed curfews on the villages. Five days later, Chief Mbodi’s daughter-in-law was killed near one of the new police camps. As in many other cases, the police suspected a personal motive and arrested Chief Mbodi for the murder. He was later released because of insufficient evidence for a murder charge.
A major challenge for investigators was the lack of solid evidence and witnesses. They moaned that ekpe owo had so terrified the rural population, and the fear of retaliation was so great, that it was hard to find people brave enough to testify against suspects. By the end of 1946, the number of murders investigated rose to 157.
On 12 January 1947, villagers found PC Evan Chima’s body by a bush path near Ikot Obon Akam. Chima was an officer involved with the leopard murder investigations so his death was seen as a direct challenge to the colonial government. One suspect arrested for the murder confessed that he sold mutilated body parts from previous murders to Idiong diviners, who used them to prepare powerful charms and other medicines.
The police rejoiced. They had long theorised that the murders and mutilations were done to meet ritual demands of the Idiong divination cult. The suspect’s confession finally gave them the “proof” they needed.
The government had long seen the Idiong sect as hazardous to colonial authority. In general, British administrators were paranoid about influential secret societies, as they could covertly mobilise the native population against colonial rule. For example, government consensus in the aftermath of the 1929 Women’s War was that only a shadowy Igbo secret society could have coordinated and mobilised women to protest across the region so quickly10.
The suspect’s confession gave the colonial government the perfect pretext to move against the Idiong divination cult, and move they did.
For weeks, officers compiled the names and locations of every Idiong diviner. On 24 February 1947, the government outlawed the Idiong cult. Three days later, the police mounted surprise raids on over 300 shrines. Officers detained hundreds of diviners in the camps and destroyed over 1000 shrines by the end of the week. It mattered not that the police eventually found no solid evidence in any of the raided shrines that linked to a murder.
Meanwhile, police took four suspects to court for Chima’s murder. The trial began on 27 November 1947, but the sitting judge concluded that police fabricated part of the suspects’ written confessions; he acquitted all the suspects. The judge’s name? Justice Adetokunbo Ademola11.
In summer 1947, the Ibibio Union delegated 36 chiefs on a peace-keeping tour of the leopard area. Its stated purpose was to appeal directly to the native population and curb the murders. The delegation held over 80 meetings attended by 213 villages and 65,000 people in May, June and July 1947. Besides hearing public grievances in each place they visited, the 36 chiefs also made each village swear mbiam, a ritual oath, that they would neither join nor aid ekpe owo.
…the ceremony started with the burying of a palm frond (àyèì) across the road leading to the village, after which an elephant tusk (nnûk éníìn) was blown three times. Salt, sand and water from the village were mixed and poured over the buried palm leaf. Villagers then walked across the buried palm leaf in order to undertake the ‘solemn agreement’ that they would not join or hide ékpê-ówó.
- David Pratten, The Man-Leopard Murders
Usen Udo Usen, secretary of the Ibibio Union, was part of the delegation. He released a report at the tour’s end that agreed with the government’s view that the ritual demands of the Idiong diviners had contributed to the murders. Usen’s report caused an uproar. The union’s official stance was that the government’s ban on Idiong was unjustified, and the union was actively lobbying for its reversal. After Usen refused to retract the report, the union expelled him from their ranks and banned him for life.
During the union’s tour, John McCall, District Officer for Opobo division, looked into the murders with his assistant, Dennis Gibbs, and concluded that real leopards were killing people. They posited that “too many leopards were hunting too little game in the area”. To test this theory, they organised a leopard hunt and trapped several leopards, including a “7-foot man-eater” caught in the same area where a double murder of a man and woman had occurred just 2 weeks earlier.
McCall wrote to the government, insisting that they had “hanged the wrong men” for various murders and that it was real leopards that were attacking people. The government responded by relieving him of duty and posting him back to Lagos.
But our friend, Usen, was not quite done. In 1948, and without union support, he launched another “leopard area” tour. He found a stronger mbiam and made the villagers swear stricter oaths to neither aid nor abet the ekpe owo. It is ironic that although he strongly supported the prohibition of Idiong, he used the same “fetish” tools in his oath-swearing.
Akpan Eto, son of Chief Ukpong Eto, was one of those who swore Usen’s new mbiam. Both men were widely suspected of being members of ekpe owo, especially as Chief Eto was a prominent Idiong diviner before the government’s ban. Akpan died two weeks after taking the oath. Usen’s reputation soared, and tales of his powerful charms spread throughout the region. Remarkably, apart from a single death in 1948, the killings stopped.
Usen shows how people at the time navigated cultural schisms and straddled both colonial and traditional modes of understanding. An educated clerk, Usen surely aspired to British values and ideas of propriety. But he also knew that the colonial investigation was a futile attempt to establish truth and justice through the alien machinations of Crown prosecutors and written confessions. Usen knew, perhaps subconsciously, that truth in his land could only be established by “testing” (ndómó, to test and see), that mbiam was mightier than the gavel.
According to Pratten, many who remember the events of 1945-1948 claim it was Usen’s mbiam that finally stopped the killings. Usen himself, mere months after his infamous solo tour, died in Enugu. The police suspected poison.
The final tally at the end of investigations in 1948: 196 murder investigations, hundreds more murders that were never investigated, 96 convictions (all men) and 77 people hanged in what is possibly still the largest police investigation in Nigerian history.
Was it shape-shifting leopards, or maybe actual leopards? Colonial records insist there were no leopards and that the murderers were opportunistic men who cloaked their bloodlust in the garment of ancient folklore.
So was the entire ordeal just an extreme case of mass hysteria as the people of South-Eastern Nigeria grappled with economic and cultural anxieties during and after World War 2? Mass hysteria that became a self-fulfilling cycle of death, suspicion and fear; restless men waiting for their wives to return from the farm at dusk; nervous mothers searching for their children who had strayed too far from the family compound in play.
And, come night, doors and windows shut tight as the restless bush creeps closer, glowing eyes piercing its swirling darkness; silent figures crouched low in the ferns, placing a careful paw in front of the other.
David Pratten’s extensive research on the murders, “The Man-Leopard Murders,” was an invaluable resource. I recommend it to anyone who wants to go beyond my sweeping outline.
District officers were junior British administrators who oversaw local native authorities in one or more districts. This paper contains more details on the structure of the colonial government.
A popular newspaper in the old Eastern region. You can access some digitised archives here. I got goosebumps reading news from a society that no longer exists in that same form. Some names I recognised, like those of prominent families in Owerri, but the many unknown names fascinated me more. Is anybody bearing witness on their behalf today? I’m ashamed to say how many hours I spent in this newspaper archive.
See this article from 1916 for a sense of Sierra Leone’s infamous history of leopard societies. Leopard men were so entrenched in European fantasies of “wild Africa” that they appeared, often as antagonists, in stories like Tarzan, Tintin and even Sherlock Holmes. I also think the idea of shape-shifting Africans who can transform or channel “big cat energy” influenced Marvel’s Black Panther.
For example, the Ekpe society acted as credit guarantors and debt collectors for European merchants and Aro traders during the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra).
I learned of several Nigerian murder cults while researching this article. Have you heard of the Odozi Obodo society, which essentially formed a parallel local government and terrorised entire towns in modern-day Abakaliki from 1954 to 1958?
The manilla was a West African currency that became a common means of exchange from the 16th century and during the transatlantic slave trade. They are basically bronze or copper bracelets in the shape of a horseshoe. I thought to myself: How crazy is it that this 16th-century currency used to trade slaves was STILL in circulation in the 1940s, at the same time Wole Soyinka was entering his teenage years and Nnamdi Azikiwe agitating for independence? The past is never too far from us.
He’s widely reputed as the first Nigerian lawyer from the Eastern region, and there’s much more to say about him than this footnote. So many stories, man.
The Peace Preservation Ordinance (PPO) entered Nigerian law in 1912. That same year, the government also passed the Unsettled District Ordinance (UDO) which, among other things, could “prohibit from all unsettled districts such ‘aliens’ as the ‘black lawyer’ and the ‘Lagos agitator’”. Source
I tried to find other situations in which the colonial government used PPO or UDO in Nigeria. It seems PPO was used to suppress the Adubi War (Egba Uprising) of 1918, and then a decade later, for the Women’s War of 1929. I could not find colonial correspondence confirming this, so take that information with some skepticism.
In Annang tradition, a person has two souls. The bodily soul occupies one’s physical body, while the bush soul was often a living thing from the bush (a snake, chimpanzee, or leopard). This conception of the soul had bearing in the physical realm. For example, households always kept a pot filled with water for their bush souls to drink. (Pratten, The Man Leopard Murders)
Reflecting on the aftermath of the Women’s War in 1929, the British thought that “a big native society of Ibos is working the show,” and that “the secret propaganda must have been skilfully carried on in the districts where this trouble arose.” (Pratten, The Man Leopard Murders)
I chuckled. It seems Igbo people have always been the national scapegoats : )
He became Chief Justice for Western Nigeria in 1955, the first black Chief Justice anywhere in the nation’s history. In 1958, he became the Chief Justice of Nigeria ahead of independence. He presided over several man-leopard murder trials in the 1940s.