The man-eater of Uroa and other collective fictions in Zanzibar by Martin Walsh, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge

This full article (which is very interesting) relates to events during the Colonial Administration of Zanzibar from 1948. You may download it here:

https://www.academia.edu/29187227/The_man-eater_of_Uroa_and_other_collective_fictions_in_Zanzibar


Introduction
 In the early hours of 30th June 1948 a small boy was seized and dragged from a field hut near Uroa on the east coast of Unguja island, Zanzibar, and was never seen again. Pugmarks were found nearby, and it was presumed that he had been taken and devoured by a leopard. Over the next seven weeks three more people were killed in similar circumstances in the same general area: a young girl, a middle-aged woman, and another boy. These events generated considerable alarm not only in the local communities involved, but also among officials in the British colonial administration, who ascribed the killings to a “man-eating leopard”, imagined in the mode of other “man-eaters” of African and Indian jungle lore. In an effort to prevent further deaths and contain the panic, the authorities went to some lengths to trap and kill the supposed man-eater, and its demise was announced in the second week of September 1948.

We know these and other details from the contemporary documents that have survived. The archival record includes official correspondence – some of which reached up to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London, district and other administrative reports, newspaper articles, and the personal notebook of Zanzibar‟s Senior Commissioner at the time, R.H.W. Pakenham. But though these written archives give us some insight into the knowledge and beliefs of officialdom, including Zanzibari Arab civil servants and local administrators, the voices of the villagers who experienced these events first hand are largely absent, though there are hints that they might have had something very different to say, not least their own interpretation of events. The few paragraphs that Pakenham wrote in his notebook make this very clear, though they were not intended for public consumption and did not enter the official record at the time.

Most of the people who witnessed or were close to the events of 1948 are now dead. In November 2011, having read the archives in Zanzibar some months before, I began to seek out and interview elderly people on the east coast who could recall something of what had happened more than 63 years earlier. Their accounts were very different from those preserved in the government archives, and not just richer and thick with local colour. Rather than a single man-eater, they described the depredations of multiple “kept leopards”, sent to do the bidding of the various witches who owned and controlled them. This reflected an understanding of leopard predation that persists to this day and that Helle Goldman and I have described in some detail in earlier publications (Goldman and Walsh 1997; Walsh and Goldman 2007; 2012). This paper is my first attempt to process material relating to the 1948 case, and to explore answers to some of the questions that it raises. Who and what should we believe? Can we reconcile the conflicting interpretations of Zanzibar‟s one-time rulers and the oral performances of their former subjects, discern unequivocal truth behind the competing fictions of colonial writing and postcolonial memory? What really happened?

Of Leopards, Zanzibar and Witches

The Zanzibar Leopard in the museum in Stonetown.

When I lived in Zanzibar in the 1960s, I was told that leopards were still found in the island’s heartland. Zanzibar is a small island, off the eastern coast of Africa, measuring approximately 85 kms by 38 wide. It is tucked into the waist of Africa, south of the equator and right in the path of the great Indian Ocean monsoons.

The remnant thick wetland reserve was called Jozani Forest and it was there that the endangered leopard made a last stand. I visited Jozani Forest with my parents and remember the huge trees hanging with lianas and orchids. My mother loved orchids and we drove through the forest in the back of an open jeep looking for them. But of the secretive leopards, there was only talk. Nowadays tourists flock there to see the delightful endemic Red Colobus monkeys.

In the Kiswahili language, a leopard is ‘Chui’. Maybe this word sounds like the animal’s cough. The Zanzibar leopard is known as ‘Chui Konge’ and ‘Chui Kisutu’. Kisutu means a cloth used during a wedding – which might have some connection to the fate of leopards in the past.

The Zanzibar leopard is regarded as a regional sub-specie of the mainland leopard, separated as the seas rose at the end of the last glacial age, about twenty thousand years ago. Due to its small population it has suffered from what scientist, Ernst Mayr, called the ‘founder effect’. Isolation let to a sharp decrease in genetic diversity and certain traits were lost while others were emphasised. The Island’s leopard was smaller in size and its spots had evolved to be smaller and more widespread.

In colonial times, until 1963, the Zanzibar leopard was protected and could only be shot with a permit. You could hunt pigs as they were vermin, but not leopards. Meanwhile, it appears that leopards had a very bad reputation as agents of bad witches. They purportedly strengthened the witch’s powers. The belief was that the animals were captured and then used by these ‘leopard-keeper’ witches against their victims. The locals believed that they would be sent out on malevolent errands under cover of darkness. Magic and spirits were involved. And fear too of course. Stories of ‘white’, that is ‘good’ witches, and ‘black’ witches abound in the history of Zanzibar and the neighbouring island of Pemba.

The policy of leopard protection changed after the violent 1964 revolution that ousted the new independent government. A campaign was started by the revolutionary government to eradicate them. The campaign seems to have been closely allied to witch hunting. Leopards were now seen as worthless and a threat and were actively hunted even after President Karume’s assassination in 1972.

In the 1990s there was an effort to start a conservation program to rescue the leopard and once more it was protected. Too late! It was decided that the population was so small, if it existed at all, that its long term survival chances was non-existent. I cannot help thinking that even if they could conserve a few, it would be worthwhile. Surveys and camera trapping in 1997 and 2003 have not revealed any animals. Although reports of sightings continue in the south of the island, researchers seem to be ambivalent as to whether any animals remain.

A solitary stuffed Zanzibar leopard remains in the Palace Museum on the Island. It crouches down in a defensive position; fangs bared in defiance, half hidden in undergrowth. It would be satisfying to think that as such it survives in remote pockets of its tropical island home. Instead, I fear that this is another story of loss; loss of wilderness and the rich pantheon of nature.

The Zanzibar leopard has slipped away into extinction.