Leopard murders

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The leopard murders are a long-running, enigmatic series of murders in colonial Africa . Between 1850 and 1950 around 1,000 people were murdered, mutilated and mostly eviscerated . Since these traces initially indicated leopard attacks , the European colonial rulers gave their name to the series of murders , which mainly stretched from West Africa to the Congo and East Africa .

Scientists at the University of Kassel in 2013 at least partially unraveled the leopard murders as a “battle [...] between two social systems. On the one hand the European colonial rulers with modern administrations and legal systems based on division of labor; on the other hand, the pre-colonial [African] secret societies , which made extensive claims on many areas of social life. "

Procedure of the perpetrator

The news magazine Der Spiegel reported on the perpetrators' approach in 1947:

“The time, place and type of murder are always the same. The murders happen between four and seven in the evening. The crime scene is almost always a bush path surrounded by thickets . […] [The] victim is knocked unconscious with a heavy stick and his back is cut open with a needle-sharp knife. The corpse is then mutilated to give the impression that a leopard was at work. The victims' heart and lungs are usually absent. "

Entrance into artistic works

In 1913 Paul Wissaert designed a double sculpture over two meters high. It is exhibited today in the Tervuren Africa Museum in Belgium . 1930 appeared in Belgium with Tintin in the Congo, the number 1 edition of the adventure series Tintin and Struppi . Inside, a devious medicine man puts on a leopard costume and announces that he is going to commit an act like the leopard murders. In 1943 Jacques Tourneur made the horror film The Leopard Man , based on the book Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich .

Differentiation from leopard men

Since the leopard murders were not primarily for occult purposes, according to the current state of science, only a few murders go back to the leopard men, a group of mostly young male Africans who believed that they were leopards and had to kill people in order to subsequently kill their blood, fat and meat to use for magical purposes. The leopard men were just one of many occult societies in which animal transformations into lions, elephants, buffalo, monkeys, owls or even leopards played a role.

literature

  • David Pratten: The man-leopard murders. History and society in colonial Nigeria. Edinburgh Univ. Press, Edinburgh 2007.
  • David Pratten: The 'Leopard Murders' in Colonial Nigeria . In: Philipp Batelka, Michael Weise, Stephanie Zehnle (eds.): Between perpetrators and victims. Violent relationships and violent communities . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2017, p. 233-258 .

Web links

Leopard murders in the archive NfA - News Service for Historians, last accessed on 16 July 2013

Individual evidence

  1. a b Secret societies could be behind puzzling "leopard murders" , Der Standard from May 19, 2013, last accessed on July 16, 2013
  2. a b Kassel researcher decrypts the secret of the leopard murders , University of Kassel on May 14, 2013, last accessed on July 16, 2013
  3. Killer hunt in the jungle - leopard men strike . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1947, pp. 11 ( online ).