During the age of modern colonialism, urbanization of villages and migration into cities transformed both the environment of the pre-existing coastline and of the hinterland.
In British Sierra Leone, coastal settlements had mainly evolved from Atlantic harbours.
These places were characteristically and extremely multiethnic: in the nineteenth-century black Americans had ‘repatriated’ West Africa (Liberia especially); abolitionist vessels had conveyed freed slaves from all over Africa and resettled them in Sierra Leone and people from the hinterland of the colonies migrated to the coast in search of work. The latter brought their initiation rituals with them, something which caused anxiety and panic among the predominantly Christian majority of the towns. While the boys were usually brought out of the towns into their Poro bush, the Bundu bush for the girls was often installed close to the houses, leading to particular unease. There were, for instance, several cases in the capital Freetown when Christian girls – whether targeted deliberately or by accident – were kidnapped into the bush and circumcised against the will of their families. An anonymous author from Freetown complained about such crimes in a local newspaper:
and our Mothers, Sisters and Daughters find it unsafe to travel alone in some streets of Freetown for fear of being forcibly dragged into the Bondoh bush and put through the rites of this disgusting society; rites that are so disgraceful that common courtesy forbids its description in a public press.55
During the 1880s and 1890s, emotive discussions about the scandal of female initiation practised in urban areas reached its height. In this period, migration from rural areas into Freetown and other urban places increased. Male initiation, historical sources indicate, was much less a problem for an urban Christian lifestyle, since circumcision was common among African Christians too and in any event, as noted, the Poro bush for boys was necessarily installed far from the settlements. When the hinterland towns also expanded as a result of plantation economies in the 1890s, however, traders and other self-conscious modernizers began to attack the Poro rules prohibiting
any commercial exploitation of the forests around these camps. One newspaper correspondent complained that,
The purroh bush so near to the town of Bompeh is a great hindrance toward the enlargement of the capital, until the Chiefs and headmen will see to remove the
‘devil bush’ from the town. … Two years age the purroh law forbade any body to cut palm nuts, thereby impoverishing the country, and impeding commerce;
traders and people suffered … .56
In search of economic modernization, colonial actors tried to abolish the camps that so clearly represented liminal spaces between town and forest. When West African settlements (suburbs or towns) expanded, former Poro bush areas where destroyed, something that led directly to an urban myth about hunted areas of towns being built on bewitched Poro ground.57 For their part, traditional Poro authorities attempted to maintain the wilderness, and the gates that connected it to the settlements. At the coastal towns, meanwhile, newcomers from the hinterland also confronted the urban population with their ideas about human-animal transformation: whenever a wild animal attacked or killed a human being within these human settlements, it was considered an evil diviner who had turned himself, or another, into an animal to commit murder.58 Leopard attacks were less frequent in the coastal region than in the hinterland forests, note: there it was crocodiles, or in the local pidgin, alligators from the swamps and river deltas that regularly attacked fishermen. It was reported that in the town of Waterloo alone sixteen persons had been killed by alligators in the late 1880s. In one of these cases, the police investigated and examined the dead body and was confused by local rumours claiming that either a human being or a human-alligator had committed the killing.59 In coastal areas, it was alligators that became the liminal beings, oscillating between wilderness and town, between animal and human shape, but with the same evil intentions and effects for human society that leopards posed elsewhere. While migrants from the hinterland brought their ideas about man-killing predators being transformed human sorcerers, the Christianized (or Westernized) population of Freetown and its suburbs and satellite towns for the large part followed a more orthodox interpretation of these fatal attacks: while the migrants told the police to search the area for human murderers, the coastal people asked for intensification of alligator hunting.
Such hunting had some effect and several weeks after the killing of the last fisherman in the town Waterloo, local newspapers announced: ‘An alligator, 8 feet in length, was killed by some of our hunters on the 8th instant [that is, 8 November 1890]’.60 Bearing in mind that the average length of dwarf crocodiles living in the West African swamps and rivers was five to six feet, this crocodile was extraordinarily large. In their letters to the editors, (Christian) inhabitants of Waterloo complained about ‘monstrous alligators existing … in our little river’.61 The author of this quotation glorified the role of fishermen as liminal subjects who risked their lives by going afloat daily to deliver fish for the local population. The alleged pragmatism of hunting alligators was also complemented by spiritual rituals offered by Christian missionary churches in Waterloo, whose staff prayed for the fishermen and preached on the Biblical theme of the fisherman Peter. Local churches also picked up the ‘Mangators’ or ‘river monsters’
Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush 173 as chances to propagate Christianity: such monsters, they explained, were punishments for the sins of some fishermen who would not go to church, and practice traditional rituals instead.62 Despite all these efforts, however, the killings did not cease,63 and whenever hinterland migrants reported such alligator killings, they returned to human malevolence and the monstrosity of human cannibalism in particular:
A young woman was caught by cannibals (in the shape of alligator [sic]), … and carried up the river and there butchered and eaten, only a very small portion being discovered to attest this fact.64
These hinterland groups demanded that colonial authorities allow local people and their ‘chiefs’ to prosecute such crimes, through witch hunts.
The entire urban population seemed to agree that something had to be done against the alleged ‘monsters’, but there then existed contradictory ideas about the species of the killers and the appropriate measures to be taken against them. Moreover, the
‘rationalists’ were not invariably favoured by history and ‘progress’. Around 1905, for instance, public opinion in the Christian urban community began to change, as black intellectuals started to criticize colonial administrations and the presumed cultural superiority of Europeans in West Africa. In this context, initiation rites were rehabilitated ethnographically, by accounting for their social functions. The African medical doctor John Augustus Abayomi-Cole (1848–1943) highlighted, for example, the fact that the installation of taboos over forests was just a very smart socio-ecological method to let the forest recover.65 Cole also compared the Poro bush to Paradise and romanticized the exotic nature as sacred with a Christian perspective: ‘God is always in the bush’.66 All the same, local ideas about the wilderness were not as unbalanced as might be suggested by separating natural science’s supposed objectivity, Cole’s positive and exalting reinterpretation of the forests, or colonial demonization of nature and wild animals. Local evaluations of liminal spaces and liminal beings remained ambiguous:
such spaces and subjects were dangerous but powerful, the antithesis of order but also the source from which social order derived, associated with death but also rebirth.
Conclusions
When Northcote Whitridge Thomas arrived in Sierra Leone in 1914 in order to conduct field research on behalf of the colonial authorities, he entered a complex social environment with its confusing narratives and ellipses regarding human-animal transformation. Thomas was told repeatedly and in different places, for instance, that ‘a witch can live in a crocodile or leopard and seize people: four or five go into one animal and if the animal is shot, they die too’.67 Witches and their conspirators could turn into animals (leopards, crocodiles, bats) at night and then kill and eat people.68 What Thomas ended up describing in his reports was what we might define as the ‘liminal criminal’, a harmful creature, between human and animal. What ‘really’ happened in such cases (in the tidiness of Western judicial reason) is hard or impossible to define, but from the perspective of local communities liminality and animality went
together in the explanation of such malevolence and violence: people may have died from unknown diseases or been killed by wild animals such as a leopard or a large ape (in which case the animal was usually declared a witch).69 Sudden deaths of young children in particular were explained as deaths by the witchcraft of snake-men or other human-animals.70 And since it was their liminal status that formed a continuous threat for society, the danger could be countered only by magic rituals including animals.
Witches were fought by cursing a fowl: the eyes of the fowl were destroyed so that the witch would turn blind simultaneously, or the fowl was killed in order to kill the witch.71 If a supposed witch died soon after such a ritual, the person was ‘tied on a stick for burial and carried like an animal’.72 Such acts express the will of society to clearly draw a line between humans and animals by allocating the animal sphere to witches by practising special burial rites.
While human-animal ‘transformers’ were clearly marked as criminals, however, ritual experts also remained liminal beings between the animal/spirit world and human society throughout their lives, but were evaluated with ambiguity: they were necessary for a functioning society, but their powers were potentially dangerous at the same time. Therefore, their remains after death were treated like those of witches.
Dead experts falling sick had to go into the Poro bush and ‘must die in the Poro bush and be buried there’.73 Victor Turner focused on distinguishing such ‘liminars’ from other social types like outsiders and marginal: ‘Marginals like liminars are also betwixt and between, but unlike ritual liminars they have no cultural assurance of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity’.74 Turner also considers diviners, mediums, priests and other ritual experts as such permanent liminars, and we may add here, that initiation authorities from West Africa perfectly fit this definition. These experts were themselves transformers who were consulted in times of crisis: when animals became humans, when youths became predators.
In reconsidering Thomas’s hesitant steps in framing an anthropology that pays tribute to liminality and initiation in human–animal relations we note that Thomas had little time for animals themselves. He blithely explained that a given indigenous culture usually ‘attributes to the animal a vastly more complex set of thoughts and feelings, and a much greater range of knowledge and power, than it actually possesses’.75 Thomas acknowledged that human beings’ dependence on animals in subsistence economies, as well as the risk of dying ‘beneath the claws of a lion or a bear’76 were the major reasons for an intense human–animal relation: ‘It is therefore small wonder that this attitude towards the animal creation is one of reverence rather than superiority’.77 Some years before his journeys to West Africa, Thomas moreover explored the role of animals for human initiation rites based on ethnographic literature: ‘here, an individual provides himself with a tutelary genius. Sometimes conceived as a spirit, sometimes as a living animal, on whose aid he relies in the battle of life’.78 In both, the initiation into secret societies and into adulthood more generally, it was necessary to procure ‘a tutelary deity, which is commonly an animal’.79 Otherwise, however, Thomas deemed the role of animals ‘less important’ for initiation than, for instance, for rituals of hunting or death. His intense fieldwork in Nigeria and Sierra Leone may have changed this position, but serious distrust from both colonial administration and local chiefs prevented Thomas from gaining more elaborate insights into the actual ritual
Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush 175 practices, so that he subsequently studied liminality in initiation and with human-animal transformations separately.
This chapter, on the other hand, has sought to make the anthropological concepts of initiation fruitful for understanding the liminal roles of humans and animals in the history of West Africa. Although leopards are generally considered wild animals living in forests and savannahs far from human settlements, they are well known for preying on cattle and other domestic animals in suburban and village areas. Whenever leopards enter these places, fatal attacks on humans may occur. From this standpoint, leopards, too, can be considered liminal animals for the fact that they, too, trespass the spatial nature-culture boundary. Their liminal character must also be defined temporally: in colonial West Africa, for instance, they entered the suburban spaces, preferably at night, during dry seasons when other prey was scarce, and as juveniles looking for their own habitats. Human cultures, on the other hand, integrated this animal behaviour into their own rites of passage: in the dry season, juvenile boys lived in huts located between the settlements and the bushes where they were turned into men by leopard spirits. Their liminal youth was also defined spatially (between forest and town) and temporally (between child and adult). By drawing an analogy between these forms of human and animal liminality, in the specific historical context of colonial West Africa, this chapter considers not just the parallel but the overlapping and co-productive human-animal nature cultures that emerged during the process of colonial urbanization in West Africa.
Notes
1 Anon, ‘Human Leopards’, The Colony and Provincial Reporter, 1 November 1913, 4.
2 For a critical autobiographical analysis and discussion of his role in the formation of colonial anthropology see Paul Basu, ‘N.W. Thomas and Colonial Anthropology in British West Africa: Reappraising a Cautionary Tale’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, no. 1 (2015): 84–107.
3 The National Archives (Kew, London), CO 267/570, Anthropological Survey: Human Leopard Society (collection of letters).
4 Basu, ‘N.W. Thomas and Colonial Anthropology’, 91.
5 Cambridge University Archives, Cambridge, Haddon Papers, 11.012, draft book:
‘Religion, Totemism & Reincarnation in West Africa’, 181.
6 Ibid., 120.
7 Ibid., 162.
8 Arnold van Gennep, Les Rites de Passage (Paris: Picard, 1981). Reprint of 1909 edition.
9 N. W. Thomas, ‘Secret Societies (African)’, in Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, Volume 11, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1920), 296, 301.
10 He called the Poro, the Sierra Leonian initiation societies, ‘Purra’ in a list of West African secret societies. Ibid., 117.
11 Van Gennep himself admitted that this term is inadequate since those societies were only secret with regard to women and non-initiated children. Ibid., 115. This opinion has been repeated in nearly every work on these societies, but the term is still widely used and Victor Turner also mentioned the initiation into a secret society as a key
example in the broader understanding of rites of passage: See Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 95.
12 Turner, Forest of Symbols, 93–111.
13 Ibid., 94.
14 Ibid., 95.
15 Ibid., 96.
16 Victor Turner, ‘Liminality and Communitas’, in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures 1966 (London: Routledge & Paul, 1969), 95.
17 See Bjørn Thomassen, ‘The Uses and Meanings of Liminality’, International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2009): 5–27.
18 See Victor Turner, ‘Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology’, Rice University Studies 60, no. 3 (1974): 53–92.
19 Some theorists went as far as to call modernity itself an age of ‘permanent liminality’:
ibid., 19.
20 Ibid., 16.
21 Thomassen admits this under certain conditions in his catalogue of future research desiderata: ‘In other words, we have to consider the possibility that ritual passages can go wrong, and produce effects of a very undesirable kind’. Ibid., 21.
22 Turner, Forest of Symbols, 97.
23 ‘Les novices sont hors de la société, et la société ne peut rien sur eux et d’autant moins qu’ils sont proprement sacrés et saints, par suite intangibles, dangereux, tout comme seraient des dieux’: van Gennep, Rites de Passage, 161.
24 Ibid., 162.
25 Initiates were considered in-between the sexes; they were neither seen as females, nor males, but sexless – ‘that which is neither this nor that, and yet is both’: See Turner, Forest of Symbols, 99.
26 Ibid., 106.
27 Ibid.
28 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbol, Myth, and Ritual (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1974), 253.
29 Northcote Whitridge Thomas, Anthropological Report on Sierra Leone. Part I: Law and Custom (London: Harrison & Sons, 1916), 145.
30 H. G. Warren, ‘Secret Societies’, Sierra Leone Studies 3 (1919): 8–12.
31 George Schwab, Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1947), 272.
32 See for the special fear of bush spirits killing children, James Littlejohn, ‘The Temne House’, Sierra Leone Studies 14 (1960): 63–79.
33 Stephanie Zehnle, ‘Of Leopards and Lesser Animals: Trials and Tribulations of the
“Human-Leopard Murders” in Colonial Africa’, in The Historical Animal, ed. Susan Nance (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 221–39.
34 Stephanie Zehnle, ‘Wenn Tiere Morden. Koloniale Aushandlungen Zwischen Natur und Kultur in Westafrika’, in Andere Ökologien. Transformationen von Mensch und Tier, ed. Iris Därmann and Stephan Zandt (München: Wilhelm Fink, forthcoming 2017).
35 ‘The Nation’, ‘Human Leopards’, The Colony and Provincial Reporter (15 November 1913), 3.
36 N. C. Hollins, ‘Notes in Mendi Law’, Sierra Leone Studies 15 (1929): 57–8, 57.
37 Stephanie Zehnle, ‘Leoparden, Leopardenmänner: Grenzüberschreitungen in Raum und Spezies’, in Afrikanische Tierräume: Historische Verortungen, ed. Winfried Speit-kamp and Stephanie Zehnle (Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2014), 91–112.
Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush 177 38 C. M. G. Stanley, ‘Game Preservation in Sierra Leone’, Sierra Leone Studies 11 (1928):
2–15, 4.
39 Stanley, ‘Game Preservation in Sierra Leone’, 13.
40 Zehnle, ‘Leoparden, Leopardenmänner’.
41 G. A. Balme et al., ‘Edge Effects and the Impact of Non-Protected Areas in Carnivore Conservation: Leopards in the Phinda–Mkhuze Complex, South Africa’, Animal Con-servation 13, no. 3 (2010): 315–23.
42 However, the intensity of social interaction among kin (female adult, male adult and their offspring) differs severely: see T. J. Pirie et al., ‘Social Interactions Between a Male Leopard (Panthera pardus) and Two Generations of his Offspring’, African Jour-nal of Ecology 52 (2014): 574–6.
43 David Jenny, ‘Spatial Organization of Leopards Panthera pardus in Taï National Park, Ivory Coast: Is Rainforest Habitat a “Tropical Haven”?’ Journal of Zoology 240 (1996):
427–40, 429. In African savannas they establish habitats half that size: see ibid., 436.
44 Julien Fattebert et al., ‘Population Recovery Highlights Spatial Organization Dynam-ics in Adult Leopards’, Journal of Zoology 299 (2016): 153––162, 154.
45 Julien Fattebert et al., ‘Density-Dependent Natal Dispersal Patterns in a Leopard Population Recovering from Over-Harvest’, PLoS ONE 10, no. 4 (2015). Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0122355 (accessed 15 January 2017).
46 For the case of elephants, it was well-known among colonial hunting officials that they migrated between Sierra Leone and Liberia, spending the dry seasons in the latter state: see Stanley, ‘Game Preservation in Sierra Leone’, 9.
47 David Jenny and Klaus Zuberbühler, ‘Hunting Behaviour in West African Forest Leopards’, African Journal of Ecology 43, no. 3 (2005): 197–200. Male leopards also undertake longer marking tours in the dry season: see Jenny, ‘Spatial Organization of Leopards’, 438.
48 Schwab, Liberian Hinterland, 280.
49 Stanley compared them to traditional castes like blacksmiths across many African societies: see Stanley, ‘Game Preservation in Sierra Leone’, 2.
50 Howard Ross, ‘Man-Killing Apes’, Sierra Leone Studies 6 (1922): 45–8.
51 In 1898 this fear even caused a trans-regional anti-colonial war (The Hut Tax War) that was defeated by colonial military forces.
52 L.H. Palfreman, ‘Forestry Dept. Report 1918’, National Archives (Kew, London), CO 267/581, 29 May 1919.
53 For a discussion of these ethological studies, see Zehnle, ‘Of Leopards and Lesser
53 For a discussion of these ethological studies, see Zehnle, ‘Of Leopards and Lesser