Chapter 2: Murder, He Wrote
Usen Udo Usen and the Interpreter's Verdict
It is not often that one has occasion to report a pleasant encounter with a Nigerian institution, but report it I must. The writing of this chapter required archival records held at the National Archives in Enugu - documents of considerable value nearly a century old. I am indebted to Daniel Agbo, who kindly volunteered to travel there on my behalf, and to Mrs Josephine Anagor, who assisted him in retrieving and scanning several hundred pages of records with admirable diligence. The official fee levied for this service was so modest that to disclose it here would cause me embarrassment.
This was a very difficult chapter to write. I can only hope you find it worth the trouble.
Introduction: The Parrot’s Work
On 11 February 1948, in the Written Answers section of Hansard, a question about murder was asked and answered. Mr. T. Reid put forward his question. Thomas Reid was sixty-six years old, a Labour backbencher representing the railway workers of Swindon - but he was not a typical constituency man. Before entering Parliament in 1945, he had run a colonial capital as Mayor and Chairman of the Municipal Council of Colombo, and chaired a League of Nations commission supervising elections in the Sanjak of Alexandretta. He had a taste for the awkward files and the disputes that sat between local violence and international embarrassment. He called Malaya “the Clapham Junction of East and West,” and asked questions about places most of his colleagues could not find on a map.
“To ask the Secretary of State for the Colonies,” Reid’s question read, “how many leopard murders occurred in Nigeria in 1947; and to what extent public opinion there has condemned the cult.” The question was brief, the phrasing almost bureaucratic.
Mr. David Rees-Williams, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, replied. He was forty-four, energetic, and had one of those careers that only the Empire could produce: a Welsh solicitor who had qualified with the Straits Settlement Bar, lectured on commercial law in Penang, and defended cases in Kedah before returning to serve as a wartime Lieutenant Colonel training officers for military government. He had already visited Burma and Sarawak to midwife the managed retreat from Asia, and was sensitive to the optics of imperial authority in ways both large and small: on his Burma mission he had complained that his committee secretary’s outfit of blue shirt, khaki shorts, and pink ankle socks was infuriating to the Governor and “none too pleasing to me,” adding that he did not “fancy being launched into those wild parts… in his pink socks.” In 1948 he would visit Africa twice, compressing entire territories into answerable briefs between trips. But he had not been to Calabar Province, where the terror had a name - Ekpe Owo, leopard people - but no certain face.
“The number of proved leopard murders in 1947 was 35,” Rees-Williams replied. “Prominent men throughout Nigeria have expressed horror at the murders and the more educated element has been enlisting public opinion against the cult and has been co-operating with the administration in their efforts to counter it.”
The minister did not mention that proved was doing a great deal of work in that sentence - that the actual death toll was almost certainly higher, that bodies had been discovered since 1943, that the Nigerian police had calculated at least 196 victims by the time they wound down their investigation. He did not mention the executions: the men who had been hanged, the dozens more imprisoned, the communities torn apart by accusation and confession. He did not mention the arguments raging within the colonial administration itself about whether these were ritual killings by a secret society, opportunistic murders disguised as animal attacks, or - as one stubborn district officer insisted - actual leopards, the real kind, doing what leopards do when human prey becomes easier.
None of that reached the floor of the House of Commons. What reached London was paper: telegrams translated into savingrams, reports condensed into briefs, terror rendered into categories - proved, uncertain, cult - and then compressed further into a thirty-second exchange.
And yet the curious thing was that the question had been asked at all. How had a series of killings in a corner of Nigeria that most Britons had never heard of - Abak Division, Opobo Division, places whose names meant nothing to the average reader of The Times - travelled far enough to prompt a parliamentary question? The answer lay in the same paper trail that simplified the murders: telegrams, yes, but also newspaper articles, petitions, lobbying. The Ibibio Union - an organisation of educated Nigerians from the affected region - had sent delegations, written letters, and demanded inquiries. The Union was not a government department, but it behaved like one. Founded in the late 1920s as one of the region’s “improvement unions,” it was an organisation of the educated and semi-educated - teachers, clerks, catechists, traders, court officials - who had learned to speak in the language of petitions and progress. It raised money, built schools, argued for roads and dispensaries, policed reputations, and acted as a kind of unofficial parliament for Ibibio-speaking districts and their neighbours.
By 1948, the “leopard murders” had become a minor sensation. Newspapers in Sydney and Auckland ran brief, horrified items about the “leopard cult” of Nigeria. The imagery was irresistible: shapeshifting killers, ritual sacrifice, bodies in the bush. It confirmed every dark fantasy about Africa.
What were these murders? Who decided what counted as truth, and whose words carried that truth from village to empire? These questions could not be answered from the green leather benches of Westminster. To answer them required going back to the bush paths of Annang country as a story began its long journey toward becoming fact.
On 3 November 1945, the Nigerian Eastern Mail ran a triumphant headline from Abak: “’Man-Leopard’ Caught At Last.” The energetic District Officer, Mr. F.R. Kay, had arranged for special detectives who arrived in September and set to work “diligently... enquiring vigilantly at every village they entered.” Their careful survey of the murders had produced a breakthrough. A woman named Etok Ebere had been waylaid and killed on the path to visit her daughter at Nung Ikot. Her death, the paper declared, “proved that the atrocious deeds were not perpetrated by the alleged leopards but by savage people commonly known as ‘Men-Leopards.’” The alleged killer, one Akpan Udo Adiaha of Ikot Idoro, had reportedly buried her body in the bush and been “rounded up and apprehended.”
The newspaper offered its readers a portrait of the murderer’s method. A “man-leopard,” as the story went, “would cover himself with a mask and arm himself to the teeth with sharp cutting and tearing implements. On finding a suitable victim he would pounce on him and tear him to pieces.” The language sits uneasily between description and nightmare - a killer who does not merely attack but pounces, who does not simply murder but tears. The District Officer and his detectives, the paper concluded, “deserve public congratulations.”
The congratulations proved premature. The worst of the leopard murders - the mass killings, the panic, the executions - still lay ahead.
But this confidence was not shared by everyone who encountered the bodies. The wounds themselves were ambiguous. They clustered at the neck and throat, where a leopard’s killing bite would land. They left the kind of punctures and tears that claws might make. Medical officers examining corpses found themselves unable to say, with the certainty the courts required, whether the injuries had been inflicted by steel or by fang. And the earliest witnesses, the ones who stumbled upon the bodies before anyone told them what they were supposed to have seen, often said simply: ekpe. The word meant leopard. But it also meant something else.
In the languages of the Annang and Ibibio, ekpe carried a weight that no English translation could hold. It named the animal - the spotted cat that had always lived in the forests of the Cross River basin and had always taken goats and sometimes children. But ekpe also named a masquerade tradition, a society, a category of spiritual power that had nothing to do with zoology. When a man said ekpe killed his sister, he might mean a leopard. He might mean something that wore a leopard’s authority. He might mean both, or neither, or something that the question itself could not capture.
This ambiguity mattered because it sat at the foundation of every investigation and trial. When the first police constables arrived at the scenes, they had to decide what had happened. Early files treated them as leopard deaths. The medical evidence pointed that way. The early witness statements supported it. The African constables, who knew the bush and knew the animals, believed it. Cases were filed as “death by wild animal” and life went on. At least until someone decided to look again.
The reinvestigations began around 1945, and they changed everything. Police officers returned to villages where deaths had been attributed to leopards. They called back the witnesses who had given their original statements. And this time - under circumstances that would later be disputed - the witnesses changed their stories. A woman who had said she saw nothing now remembered seeing a man in leopard skin. A farmer who had reported finding his wife’s body in the bush now recalled that he had heard human voices before the screaming stopped. Statements that had been filed as evidence of animal attack were reopened and reclassified. The result was a cascade of prosecutions. Men who had been nowhere near the deaths - or who had been near them only in the revised memories of coerced witnesses - found themselves charged with murder. Trials were then held and convictions were secured. By the end of the affair, seventy-seven people had been hanged.
