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Zehnle, Stephanie. Zehnle, Stephanie. "Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush: Humans, Leopards and Initiation in West African History." Animal History in the Modern City: Exploring Liminality. By Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher and Philip Howell. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 161–180. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 24 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350054066.0015>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 24 September 2021, 10:58 UTC. Copyright © Clemens Wischermann, Aline Steinbrecher, Philip Howell and Contributors, 2019 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Animal History in the Modern City Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush 10 Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush: Humans, Leopards and Initiation in West African History Stephanie Zehnle Introduction From the 1890s to the 1920s, rumours about leopards, about humans dressed as leopards, or about leopard spirits killing human beings paralysed the inhabitants of the British colony of Sierra Leone. The authorities at first played down such stories as ‘primitive superstition’ but when dead bodies were found, the police and courts were forced to deal with these so-called human-leopard murders within the colonial judicial system. From the confusing and often mixed metaphorical statements of the witnesses and the accused, the British legal bureaucracy settled on the following account of the violence, an explanation that is now canonical: The ‘human leopards’ form a secret society, how recent or how ancient no one appears to know. … To obtain admission to the society, an aspirant must dress himself in a leopard’s skin, prowl about in the jungle on all fours, and when he finds a suitable victim, preferably a boy or a girl, and, for choice, defenceless and alone, spring upon it from behind, and kill it, as a leopard would, by swiftly severing the spinal cord. … It may be that the human leopard devours his victim, but whatever else he does with him, he must preserve some of the fat, for human fat is an essential ingredient in the ‘medicine’ or charm, known by the name of ‘borfimor’. To this sovereign drug, the Society of Human Leopards owes its power.1 Dozens of the accused would eventually be sentenced to death by the colonial and district courts for these terrible crimes – particularly in the series of trials held between 1912 and 1913 – but the scandalous stories of mysterious deaths caused by humans/leopards would not be silenced. The colonial government concluded that since the problem could not be entirely solved by legal measures, it needed a trained anthropologist to clarify the nature and crimes of such ‘secret societies’. They called in the British anthropologist Northcote Whitridge Thomas (1868–1936),2 a scholar who had already completed research for the Nigerian colonial government on Animal History in the Modern City.indb 161 17-05-2018 17:20:31 162 Animal History in the Modern City indigenous law, which, despite his reputation for academic and personal eccentricity, was praised for its thoroughness. In Sierra Leone, Thomas travelled extensively from February 1914 to April 1915 collecting information on the alleged secret societies; but there was an immediate conflict between the academic and the legal requirements. Thomas asked the colonial government for his local informants to be protected from criminal prosecution – the Attorney General replied, however, that all criminals had to be reported to the colonial administration. Worse was to come: for the purpose of his research Thomas even attempted to be initiated into local societies, though the chiefs he consulted were apprehensive of diplomatic tensions with the colonial staff and immediately reported his request to the District Commissioner.3 The colonial government shortly prohibited any such initiation, evidence again of the mounting distrust between the anthropologist and those who had called for his expertise. All the same, Thomas was able to proceed with his study of secret societies in Sierra Leone. In his interpretation of their initiation rituals, Thomas focused on two major concepts: liminality and (animal) totemism. For his research on the latter, Thomas benefitted from a life-long interest in European and non-European ‘folk superstitions concerning animals’.4 In his unpublished monograph Religion, Totemism & Reincarnation in West Africa, for instance, Thomas analysed the widespread belief in the possibility of ‘transmigration into an animal’5 (especially from human to leopard), and he also emphasized the concept of the leopard as the ‘the bush soul of the [human] king’6, along with the totemic taboos regarding leopards in Sierra Leone and beyond.7 Thomas’s other guiding concept, that of liminality in initiation rites, was adopted from the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep’s Rites de Passage (1909).8 Thomas used van Gennep’s recently published ideas to highlight a secret society’s ability to generate the ritual ‘rebirth’ of initiates, specifically by leading them out of the towns and practising rites during a period of ‘seclusion in the bush’.9 Liminality and animal totems thus formed the basis of Thomas’s understanding of Sierra Leone’s secret societies. What is astonishing is that Thomas did not link these insights in the process of youth initiation. To appreciate the full complexity of Sierra Leone’s human–animal relations in the context of the so-called secret societies and the human-leopard killings, going beyond the account of a passing colonial scandal and the anthropological explanations offered at the time, this chapter revisits the theory of liminality, but applies these ideas to both humans and (real, not merely metaphorical) leopards. This chapter seeks specifically to consider the analogous liminality of male youths moving into the bush for purposes of initiation, and juvenile leopards wandering in the towns looking for prey. Historicizing ethnological concepts concerning the spatial and temporal liminality of human initiation and exploring the use of these theories for a multi-species history, these reflections lead to a re-evaluation of liminal spaces (urbanity in this case) and liminal periods (here, juvenility). Expanding the ethnographic concept of liminality To make the concept of liminality fruitful for historical human–animal studies, it is necessary to integrate this essentially ethnographic term into both historical methodology and the sub-discipline of animal history. When the French ethnographer Animal History in the Modern City.indb 162 17-05-2018 17:20:31 Liminal Youth Between Town and Bush 163 Arnold van Gennep first presented his Rites de Passage, he established a three-stage model of such initiation rites. During the rite of separation (1) the initiate has to break with the past or his whole personality. In the transition period (2) – the liminal stage – the actual change of a person or group takes place. Finally, the rites of incorporation (3) mark the resocialization of the initiates into society, as ‘new’ persons. Because Sierra Leonian initiation rites were not well-researched when van Gennep wrote his monograph,10 he referred to examples of the so-called secret societies11 from other West African regions and the Congo, which were responsible for organizing the initiation of children before or during puberty. At first, van Gennep explained, the initiates were secluded – often in the forest. In the période de marge, initiates’ bodies were then altered – by, for example, circumcision, ritual injuries and body painting. Lastly, the initiated were reintegrated by rites of being reborn, by being bathed in a river, by relearning how to walk and eat, by destroying the forest camps or by way of other ritual performances. Despite not being able to draw on knowledge about these particular societies, the so-called Poro initiation rites of colonial Sierra Leone and Liberia followed van Gennep’s classic model of rites of passage impressively accurately. One major shortcoming has to be highlighted with reference to the Poro liminal phase, however. Although van Gennep considered seclusion ‘in the bush’ or ‘in the wilderness’ a general feature of West African initiation, he did not consider either animals or animal spirits as relevant actors or factors in this process. In the orthodox account, the ‘liminal’ cohort does not follow the normal social structures, but becomes temporarily part of the order of nature; more precisely, they become members of the inhabitants of the forest, a place that included wild animals. But this means that only someone looking at this rite from the perspective of the society left behind in the settlement could accurately describe that stage as ‘liminal’; from an internal view there was still a hierarchy and a society in connection with animals and forest spirits. In order to grasp the liminal nature of human-animal society, we clearly must include animals and animal spirits as subjects. It is equally necessary to focus on the middle stage explored in Victor Turner’s subsequent work on liminality, which we need briefly to explain. Turner relied on his colleague van Gennep with regard to the three-stage structure of rites of passage, but he made his entire focus the middle or liminal phase. In 1967, he presented his thoughts about this aspect of ritual initiation in his famous text ‘Betwixt and Between: the Liminal Period in Rites de Passage’. 12 Turner argued that ‘during the intervening
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