Let it be emphasized that leopards not only existed as imagined beings for the Poro authorities and initiates. Leopard teeth and skins were preferred materials for the production of ritual objects, costumes and masks. The Poro moreover entered the forest habitats of West African leopards, a place dangerous for humans. Fatal attacks of leopards on humans were often reported, even if reliable data about such animal attacks was not collected by colonial authorities in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and thus not available to the historian. Until about 1900 the British administration simply had no particular interest in recording such incidents, because deaths caused by predators were considered a problem for a hinterland population that was not effectively colonized (in terms of taxation, jurisdiction etc.) until the mid-1890s. This indifference of the colonial government of Sierra Leone changed drastically, however, when rumours about leopards, human leopards or humans in leopard skins predating human victims led to mass panic, detention and executions.33 In this situation colonial staff and journalists tried to collect as much information as they could about the species that might have been involved in these killings or murders, but all they accomplished was the collection of metaphorical explanations and inconsistent rumours.34 Most researchers agreed that leopards were killers, and thus plausible suspects: ‘Leopards notoriously eat boys and girls when they get their chance, and they spring on them from the jungle, and sever their spines’.35 At the same time, it was assumed that human murderers could take advantage of the leopard’s ferocity, copying such methods of killing in order to avoid criminal prosecution. The sources and discourses on human-leopard killing are plainly confusing.
By contrast, however, collections of the so-called native laws dealt with questions of compensation in cases of leopards killing domestic animals in a markedly more rational manner.36 There is some evidence that leopard attacks in villages and small towns were common enough to have led to local laws created specifically for such eventualities. Villagers were also from time to time attacked by the so-called man-eating leopards, and reacted by calling in a government hunter to solve the problem, or, more often than not, attempting to solve the problem themselves by building leopard traps around their villages. These traps were clearly created to mark the border between humans and animals, village and forest.37
Villagers usually abstained from sending hunters directly into the forests in search for leopards, however, because it was very unlikely that a particular leopard could be tracked by this method.38 ‘Leopards are so common in Sierra Leone as to amount to a pest’,39 a District Commissioner lamented in 1928, recalling the cases of several persons allegedly killed by the same leopard in 1925 and 1926; the government engaged hunters who went out and killed not the one ‘man-eater’ but seven leopards in all, capturing the cubs (Figure 10.2).40
Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush 169
‘As no further casualties occurred amongst the villagers, it seems certain that the man-eater was destroyed’, the Commissioner concluded, but no information was collected on leopard behaviour or the reasons for their transformation into ‘man-eaters’.
It is indeed impossible to draw generalized conclusions on leopard behaviour from historical documents alone. Fortunately, up-to-date ethological studies on leopard behaviour can be consulted. We know that, first of all, leopards are extremely sensitive to territoriality: ‘Leopards live in a complex land tenure system that is highly dependent on the stability of long-term relationships’.41 They live solitary lives in their own habitats, but the habitats of males and females overlap in a gendered spatial system:42 in rainforest areas of West Africa, for instance, a male leopard’s habitat usually has a size of about 90 kilometres, which he co-inhabits with approximately three females (and their cubs).43 Leopards may thus mate with each other without leaving their own habitats. On the other hand, this means that adolescent male leopards do have to leave the area where they were raised and find their own territory and partners of the opposite sex with whom they can cohabit: ‘Generally, subadult female leopards are philopatric, and subadult males disperse’.44 In this transition period between a cub and a grown-up male, leopards can then be observed wandering, exploring unknown areas, and are markedly more alarmed and aggressive since they have to compete with established males when crossing into their territories. Fights between established males and migrant newcomers result, and often end with the death of one or the other leopard.
The analogy with human youths is clear: as for human beings puberty should be regarded as a temporally liminal period, in certain animal species at least (Table 10.2).
With regard to leopards, this temporal liminality (youth, juvenility) also includes a distinctive spatial liminality, because the advent of a certain life period leads to migration and mobility between established habitats, until such time as leopards can find and establish their own territory. The social territorial space of leopards is thus reorganized whenever leopard offspring mature into adults. African forest leopards have no special mating seasons, so that the male leopard leaves the mother after about fourteen months in any given season. But the sex of the offspring in crucial here: females usually established their habitats close to their mother (around 3 kilometres) whereas males migrated further (around 11 kilometres). Male youths dispersed further afield the denser an area’s leopard population is, in order to avoid competition with their fathers. Once established, the gendered spatial order of leopards usually continued, Table 10.2 Spatial and temporal liminality in human and leopard hunting behaviour in colonial West Africa
Liminality Human Animal (Leopard)
Spatial Hunting, agriculture, village and
suburbanity, migration, initiation Hunting, mating, search for habitats (youth), change of landscape
Temporal Youth, marriage, rites of installation, colonialism (political/social/
economic crisis), death, initiation
Youth, hunting activity, seasonal behaviour
but agricultural or other forms of human presence may disturb this territorial order and its restructuring.45
One further, highly significant, aspect of animal liminality is defined by the fact that leopards’ hunting expeditions sometimes took them into villages and towns. Leopards may not have preyed upon domestic animals and humans ‘notoriously’, but they certainly started to hunt closer to human settlements in the dry season (November to April), when prey became scarce in the forests.46 The more extreme the dry season the more regularly leopards would enter towns, for all their aversion to interaction with humans. Activity and mobility typically increase in the dry season in any event.47 The common explanation offered in colonial Sierra Leone, that leopards would attack children in the dry season, was an empirically correct statement, though it had two distinctive implications with respect to the mobility of humans or leopards. On the one hand, in the dry season, male initiates had to stay in the forest under the aegis of Poro authorities (also referred to as leopard spirits) and could die there from diseases, infections or predator attacks. On the other hand, extreme dry seasons could cause leopards to undertake hunting expeditions into the settlements. During the Poro period in the dry season, the initiates would be taught to live on hunting in the forest,48 whereas leopards came closer to the town. This ambivalence generated the paradoxical situation that in the dry season leopards came into town (either the big cats themselves, or the masked and costumed initiates), whereas the local male youth left the town for their forest seclusion. Liminality existed on an interspecies level because the spatial and social order was temporarily turned upside down by both human and non-human actors. ‘Leopards’ were considered dangerous for children in two distinct spaces: their
‘spirits’ ate the male initiates in the forest, while leopards hunting in the towns were dangerous for the girls and young children there.
When comparing liminality in humans and leopards, we can see that phases of liminality often overlap temporally (the dry season, puberty, say) and spatially (here, the mobility between town and forest). Humans crossed the gates or portals between settlements and forests for different reasons. Hunting was of course one traditional human practice that could lead to a liminal status when ‘in the bush’. In West Africa, hunting was often placed in the care of certain castes of society,49 so that they remained liminal social beings even between hunting expeditions. They were ‘marginals’, in the terminology of Victor Turner. When plantation farming was expanding into natural forests after 1900, the settlement/forest edge was moved, too. Sometimes, farmers established satellite farmland far from the town, where they seasonally spent the nights, or they sent their children or workers to control them day and night. Leopard and baboon attacks were reported from such marginal farms quite often. Working in agriculture was always potentially dangerous, because wild animals and humans often were forced to meet. Leopard attacks typically happened in the twilight hours when humans slept in the sheds and when a man or woman went to a far-off farm with a baby or small child during the day; even attacks by chimpanzees were frequent, taking little children from the farms into the forest, injuring or even killing them there.50
Another ‘liminoid’ factor generating new animal behaviour certainly was the advent of the colonial age. There was an explicit colonial agenda of planned transformation, and yet the processes brought about were often diametrically opposed to the intentions
Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush 171 of the actors of modernization. In Sierra Leone, indigenous inhabitants were often scared and alarmed at colonial rationalization or interference in the fields of economics, politics and religion.51 After 1900, large areas were deforested and became rice farms or rubber tree plantations.52 Such dramatic modifications of the rural landscape may also have played their part in causing leopards to leave or renegotiate habitats. Research from India suggests that the more leopards were disturbed by human-made interventions in their habitats, the closer they would dare to come to human settlements.53 It is hardly implausible that the drastic changes of agricultural practices ushered in by colonial governments in the early twentieth century must have had their impact on leopard behaviour. The colonial era was a fundamental restructuring of the ecological order affecting both indigenous humans and animals alike.54