Human Leopards: An Account of the Trials of Human Leopards Before the Special Commission Court

The early 20th century showed an increase number of occult murders by the Human Leopard Society of Sierra Leone. The main reason for the killings was to obtain human fat for anointing a terrible fetish called the Borfima whose black magic depended on the frequency with which it was fed. These killings got mixed with ritual cannibalism of which the first reports for this area date back to 1609. Unlike other Leopards Societies an unexplainable social dissonant sticks to the Sierra Leone version: The bush seemed to me pervaded with something supernatural a spirit which was striving to bridge the animal and the human. Some of the weird spirit of their surroundings has I think entered into the people and accounts for their weird customs. The people are by no means a low savage race. I found many of them highly intelligent shrewd with more than the average sense of humor and with the most marvelous faculty for keeping hidden what they did not wish to be known... (W. Brandford Griffith September 1915.)This revised and illustrated edition comes with a Post Scriptum about other Leopard fraternities like the Congolese Anyota the Nigerian Ekpe and its offspring the Cuban Abakuá.