It’s July 1996 and Dr. Martin Walsh has just arrived on Unguja, a small island nestled within an archipelago thirty-seven kilometres off the coast of Tanzania. He’s been tasked with finding an elusive predator many conservationists fear already to be extinct. Known locally as “King”, it’s not officially been sighted for over a decade, though rumours of its existence continue across the island.
His search starts by talking with the local hunters who know the lay of the land and its fauna best. But the responses from these discussions are puzzling. For when Walsh asks after the status and potential whereabouts of the protagonist in his quest—the Zanzibar leopard—the hunters ask: which kind?
Apparently, there are not one, but two types of leopard inhabiting Zanzibar. The “wild leopards” that live deep in the bush and flee human contact. And the “kept leopards”, that are sent to harm and harass villagers by evil witches who belong to magical underground leopard-sharing networks.
Fast-forward to the present day, and I’m within arm’s-reach of a Zanzibar leopard. It’s slightly smaller than its African counterpart—it’s thought to have evolved separately in isolation since at least the end of the Ice Age, when the Archipelego was cut-off from the mainland by rising sea levels. It’s also changed its spots, which are denser, clumping together in places.
Whether these differences are enough to classify the Zanzibar leopard as a genetically distinct subspecies of its continental counterpart remains unclear. In any case, this particular leopard has bigger things to worry about. It’s over 7000 kilometres from home and is wedged in a narrow drawer deep in the vaults of London’s Natural History Museum.
Save for a few other skins in Cambridge Masachetuses, and a faded specimen in Zanzibar museum, the skull and pelt before me could very well be the only relic of a once thriving island endemic. With early conservation efforts in Africa largely directed towards protecting megafauna on the continent, the plight of Zanzibar’s leopards slipped under the radar of conservationists until the mid-90s. By then it was already too late.
Today, the Zanzibar leopard is considered either extinct, or to be surviving at such low numbers that it might as well be. Like with all large carnivore declines, agriculture and human-predator clashes didn’t help. But there’s one other unusual factor which sealed the plights of Zanzibar’s leopards. Witchcraft.
The story of the Zanzibar leopard is one of genocide and moral panic, of witch-finders and leopard trappers, who used their own sons as bait and seared leopard’s eyes out with redhot crowbars in popular public ceremonies. But most of all it is the story of how superstition gone wild lead to the demonization and eventual government-sponsored slaughter of an island’s apex predator.
An aura of myth and evil-doing surrounds many large carnivores (especially lions and hyenas) across Africa. But the particular set of beliefs shrouding the Zanzibar leopard appear to be unique, and date back to at least the first world war.
As Harold Ingrams, then district officer of north Unguja, Zanzibar’s largest island, wrote:
“Early in 1921, a leopard made its appearance in my district, and in a few nights accounted for eighteen goats. I went out to try and get it, and sat up all night for it in a tree over a kill, but it was of no use, and the natives and even the Arabs said I might have saved myself the trouble, as a witch had tamed the leopard and it would go where he told it.”
During his interviews in Unguja, Walsh found that the belief that leopards could be domesticated and controlled by magical means was still widely and strongly held, though the precise details differed across the island. There were variations on how “kept leopards” were captured, fed, trained, manipulated, and moved around among leopard-sharing associations.
Usually, such leopards were said to be hidden within the limestone caves that still pepper the island. To this day, tourists can pay to visit such caves, whereupon they are shown “evidence” of kept leopards: a bowl of half-drunk water, a patch of fur—though never the leopards themselves.
The origin of local beliefs in witches and kept leopards seems to have erupted from an originally benign aspect of indigenous culture. Before being merged into wider forms of governance, many Zanzibari towns and villages were self-ruling, run by small councils of elders, who were helped by other villagers in various supporting roles.
One of these roles was that of the Mvyale, who had a Shaman-type role in healing sickness, blessing crops, organising religious ceremonies and placating spirits—often from cave shrines. Antelope hunting parties would also visit Mvyale before expeditions to receive incense and prayers believed to protect them from leopards.
Walsh thinks that the old belief that Mvyale had some level of control over the activities of leopards foreshadowed the emergence of “a new class of witches…in the collective imagination”. He imagines a situation where an unpopular Mvyale “was accused of abusing their powers and acting like a witch…corrupting the popular image of Mvyale, transforming them from protectors of the community into evil persons using leopards for their own nefarious purposes”.
We can only guess whether this is actually how beliefs in leopard keeping arose. But if true, agriculture could have been behind the transformation of Mvyale from revered spiritual practitioner to vilified leopard keeper.
As rural development carved away leopard territory in the early 20th century, conflict between people and the wildcats likely increased. It’s a pattern observed often in Africa and beyond: as farmland impinges on the habitat of large carnivores, human-predator conflicts grow.
“Villagers explained the growing number of attacks on their children and livestock by supposing that the leopards responsible for them were owned by witches and sent to do them harm,” says Walsh.
Take Suleiman bin Abdallah, who was staying with relatives at a farm when he was dragged out of his sleeping hut in the early hours of the morning. When he started yelling, the leopard momentarily released its grip, and when people ran to help, the leopard fled.
Suleiman still has the scars on his knee and neck, putting him in the strange—perhaps unique—position of bearing the scars of an animals that likely no longer exists. His mother believed that the leopard was sent at the behest of Suleiman’s biological father, whom she left to marry another man when she was pregnant with him.
Other victims of the Zanzibar leopard weren’t so fortunate. Most of the fatal reports pre-Second World War are of infants or farmers guarding their crops from bush pigs. But in 1948, the killings reached their apogee. Over the space of seven weeks, a small boy, a young girl and an elderly woman in the same general area were dragged away and devoured by leopards, causing considerable alarm not only among villagers but also the colonial British officialdom.
Reports of the “man-eater of Uroa” even reached the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London.
“[Such attacks] undoubtedly generated a fear which was disproportionate the probability of their occurrence,” says Walsh. And although the attack on Suleiman and the case of the alleged man-eater of Uroa both happened after beliefs of kept leopards were widespread, they aggravated the fear that leopards could be commanded to attack people or livestock at the whim of an angry leopard keeper. Perhaps they also suggest how these very beliefs could have originated.
Following a similar attack around the turn of the 20th century, villagers might have been fearful and confused. Maybe they wanted a way of rationalising such an attack. Or someone to blame. A wyvale would be the perfect fall guy. Infused with preloaded beliefs about their abilities to summon spirits and control leopard movements from sacred caves, who else could be more to responsible?
Inject in the possibility that a particular wyvale could have a well-known grievance. It’s not unfathomable: an attack on an infant in Uzi was alleged to have been prompted by his mother shunning the sexual advances of the leopard owner.
And then just add one more ingredient. The side-lining of local fears of leopards under colonial rule. Colonial authorities considered the leopard as an object of scientific curiosity and even argued that it helped economic development by preying on crop-raiding species. (They would later introduce an unsuccessful decree that made it an offence to kill or wound leopards).
Suddenly, we have all the elements—superstition, fear, anger, a perceived sense of disregard—needed to turn the island’s largest predator into the witch’s familiar.
Of course, much of this is conjecture. But one thing’s for sure, by the start of the First World War, the belief in leopard keeping witches was entrenched in Zanzibari culture. And it was this belief that was the kindle which would start a firestorm—one that ultimately consumed the Zanzibar leopard.
It was the belief that would spark the brutal persecution of accused witches. It was the belief that would see one notorious leopard-trapper rise to the very upper echelons of society, to the extent that he could call the president of the Archipelego a close friend.
And ultimately, it was the belief would see that island-wide eradications of the “King”, using bullets paid for by the Zanzibari government. But now I’m just getting ahead of myself.
This is part 1 of a two-part series on the extinction of Zanzibar’s leopard. Read part 2 soon.
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