In 1913, a Special Commission Court led by Chief Justice W.B. Griffith convened at Gbangbama to try a cluster of murders attributed to a so-called “Human Leopard Society.” Of the thirty-four men tried, nine were hanged, two imprisoned for life, eight given hard-labor sentences of varying lengths, eleven were expelled from the colony, and four acquitted. In Cannibalism Myths, Empire, and Identity in Colonial Sierra Leone, the author takes these trials as her central object and pursues three major aims. First, she reconstructs the cases from the surviving court transcripts and commentaries, arguing that they reveal far less about ritual murder than about how colonial fears, indigenous political tensions, and competing ideologies converged in a courtroom. Second, she reframes the Special Commission Court as an instrument both of colonial power and of local claimants seeking to address grievances and punish their oppressors, thereby facilitating their removal by the British authorities. Third, and most ambitiously, she traces the trials’ governing terms cannibalism and eat back to the Atlantic slave trade, arguing that the vocabulary of consumption forged in slavery was reactivated in the early twentieth century to represent colonial legal violence. She further argues that the Victorian biases and dogma were built on local established translations of ate and consume associated with witchcraft and cannibalism.
Across an introduction and eight chapters, Keefer’s construction shows the trials were more complicated, as each chapter examines the questions of Atlantic and domestic slavery, religious tensions, the expansion of British hegemony, oath-taking, and colonial encounters with Poro society. Keefer situates the study carefully within the existing literature, but in some sections this overshadows the book’s own argument. The readers only reach the full analysis of the trials in the final three chapters, after an extensive foundational treatment of Sierra Leone’s slaving past and political transformations.
Even though Keefer’s reconstruction of Poro is one of the book’s strongest passages, she is candid about its limits. She has no direct access to the inner workings of Poro and depends instead on the existing ethnographic literature, commentaries of the trials, archival documents and other publicly available texts. The precolonial governing institution Poro emerges not as the criminal conspiracy colonial officials imagined but as an institution of legitimacy, ancestral continuity and judicial authority; an institution that trained leaders, mediated between elites, and bound communities to ancestry across generations. Body markings are read along the same lines, not as proof of secret-society membership but as a language of belonging, power, and inheritance that colonial authorities lacked the literacy to read. On her account, colonial officials’ understanding of body marking was extracted under torture and intimidation of crown witnesses and staged as judicial spectacle. The leopardism-cannibalism distinction that the book draws from Arthur Abraham is doing important work here, as it allows Keefer to take seriously the regional realities of ritual murder and witchcraft accusation while refusing the colonial misapprehensions that treated these as evidence of anthropophagy. Keefer argues that the human leopard cases represented a cultural inflection point, embodying the coercive imposition of British law over a previously autonomous interconnected region.
Furthermore, Keefer’s analysis takes leopardism not as a Sierra Leonean peculiarity but as a well-established practice associated with the ritual complex of Ekpé, a merchant association of the Cross River region in southern Nigeria, one that moved along the circuits of the Atlantic and internal slave trade towards Sierra Leone, drawing on David Pratten’s The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). This is among the book’s most important contributions, as it shows the socioeconomic dimension of the consumption idiom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a subsection devoted to the “Colonial Paranoia: The Other Leopard-Men” (43), Keefer offers a comparative reading, setting the 1940s Calabar killings beside the Sierra Leone cases of 1913. A further paragraph scrutinizes similar accusations during the civil war of 1991–2002 and the 2019 killings attributed to Poro that prompted a temporary ban on initiations, while reports of coerced Poro initiation continue to surface in the national press, giving her readers an understanding of inherited colonial fear. Yet her analysis of the inherited colonial fear and intimidation is compressed into a single paragraph, and the reader who reaches it glimpses the longer history Keefer might have written from 1913 to the present.
Throughout the book, several scholarly questions emerge, including: Is Human Leopard a fact or colonial construct? Was the judicial violence at Gbangbama produced by colonial misunderstanding of African culture, by racial ideology, by the structural needs of a land-hungry administration, or by some combination of the three? Keefer poses these questions more than once but is reluctant to land on an answer, leaving them productively open. Some readers may find this restraint admirable, others may wish for a sharper verdict. Importantly, Keefer’s argument arrives as a convergence rather than a thesis. The book will be valuable to historians of colonial law, of West Africa, and of slavery’s afterlives.
