Leopard Society

[3] The presumably earliest reference to the society in Western literature can be found in George Banbury's Sierra Leone, Or the White Man's Grave (1888).

Scholar Vicky van Bockhaven writes: Reports that the Anyoto sometimes imitated leopard attacks, and the existence of their costumes, played on the European imagination.

Those who wanted to join had to sacrifice a member of their "own domestic group in a cannibalistic feast" to prove that they had sufficiently many dependents whose services they could contribute.

[6] In the 1920s, Lady Dorothy Mills spoke with several district commissioners who tried to juridically prosecute members of the Leopard Society engaged in cannibal murders.

After the girl had been stabbed to death with a large knife and cut into pieces, all her flesh was roasted over an open fire and eaten by members of the society, including the witness.

Everything was eaten, including the edible organs; only the girl's bones and skull, picked clean of all flesh, were left behind when the feast was finished.

[13] Encounters with suspected remnants of the Leopard Society in the post-colonial era have been described by Donald MacIntosh[14] and Beryl Bellman.

An alternate, more egalitarian version of the Leopard Society appears in the Nsibidi Script[16] series by Nnedi Okorafor.