The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (review)

Pratten’s masterful book uses an apparent epidemic of “man-leopard murders” in Ibibio and Annang-speaking southeastern Nigeria immediately following World War II as a window onto the changing and complex dynamics of social life in colonial Nigeria. These murders bore similarities to panics tied to supposed man-leopard murders in other African settings. Although Pratten effectively examines the Nigerian case comparatively, it is his fine-grained historical narrative that is most impressive. He provides a uniquely intimate analysis of the consequences of colonial intervention on the micro-politics of everyday life in the affected communities, wherein gender and generational conflicts figure profoundly in the political, social, and religious experiences of and responses to British rule.

Utilizing a remarkable array of sources, from European and African archives to contemporary oral-history interviews, Pratten weaves a rich tapestry that brings alive the complexity of the colonial period, incorporating police and court records, British administrators’ reports, newspaper accounts, colonial anthropological research, Christian mission documents, and much more. The book is written in the manner of a detective story, drawing readers into the mystery of what really underlay these murders and the multiple and lively debates that they engendered in both local Nigerian and British colonial accounts. But unlike a typical detective mystery in which the culprit is ultimately revealed, Pratten’s features intertwining culpabilities, manifold truths, and enduring uncertainties.

Pratten traces the economic and political strategies of the British—including the manipulation of chieftancy, efforts at taxation, trade and development policies, and the concurrent role of mission Christianity—as they unfold in ordinary Nigerians’ everyday experience of kinship, marriage, and divorce. Although the book does not purport to be about gender, it is in fact one of the most nuanced gendered analyses of Nigerian colonial history ever published. Pratten’s examination of people’s anxieties about brideprice, marriage, and divorce admirably connects macrosociological transformation to the most intimate aspects of power.

The book is equally about colonial and local political imaginations. But Pratten does not allow the seemingly fantastic nature of the man-leopard murders to become an exercise in exoticism—either as a simplistic rendering of Nigerian beliefs in the supernatural or as a polemical critique of British colonial fantasies about the African “other.” He deftly reveals how the multiple and often contradictory interpretations that the murders generated in both colonial and local discourse connect to equally contradictory social problems produced by the political and economic projects of British colonialism in Nigeria. Rather than resolving the murder mysteries, Pratten demonstrates that the truth is ultimately an intricate and complex matter.

Pratten’s history is suggestive with regard to a wide range of trends and phenomena in contemporary Nigeria, from current anxieties about brideprice, sexuality, marriage, and changing gender dynamics to recent booms in urban vigilantism and common modem narratives about the relationship between money and ritual murder. Pratten himself argues that explanations of the present through analogies to history are often undertaken without doing the hard work of documenting and understanding the actual events and processes that occur between the past and the present. The Man-Leopard Murders certainly succeeds in providing this rich history.

Pratten’s original interest in the man-leopard murders was clearly spurred by his anthropological fieldwork. Yet curiously, at the end of the book, he notes that most of his contemporary interlocutors were reluctant to speak extensively and candidly about this history. The book, which ends with Nigeria’s independence in 1960, would have been even more satisfying had it gone further to use the past as a vehicle to understand the present. But perhaps that will be the purpose of Pratten’s next study.