Human Leopard Society

Captain Beatty, just before leaving for the Dardanelles, asked me to write a preface. I think that the best preface will be to answer, as far as I am able, several questions which were frequently put to me on my return to civilization after the conclusion of the Special Commission Court. These questions were, "What was the object of the Human Leopard Society? Were its members cannibals for the purpose of satisfying an appetite for human flesh, or was it some religious rite? Would the sentences inflicted by the Special Commission Court have the effect of stamping out the horrible practice?" The first question can be answered with some confidence. The trend of the whole evidence showed that the prime object of the Human Leopard Society was to secure human fat wherewith to anoint the Borfima. The witnesses told us how the occasion of a murder is used to "blood" the Borfima, but the potency of this terrible fetish depends upon its being frequently supplied with human fat. Hence these murders. The question as to cannibalism it is not possible to answer with any degree of certainty. The Commission sat for over five months, had before it vihundreds of witnesses, and the notes of evidence ran into thousands of pages; but the Court was a judicial tribunal, and it was anxious to bring its labours to an end as speedily as possible, so that no question was asked or allowed by the Court which was not relevant to the issue. Again and again answers given by witnesses opened up avenues which it would have been most interesting to investigate, but, unless the investigation was relevant to the case in hand or would have served to elucidate some other part of the evidence which was doubtful, the Court could not allow it to be pursued. Nor would it have been seemly for the members of the Court to make private investigation into a matter before them judicially.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Human Leopards" (An Account of the Trials of Human Leopards before the Special Commission Court; With a Note on Sierra Leone, Past and Present) by Kenneth James Sir Beatty. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The early 20th century showed an increase number of occult murders by the Human Leopard Society of Sierra Leone. The main reason for the killings was to obtain human fat for anointing a terrible fetish called the Borfima, whose black magic depended on the frequency with which it was "fed". These killings got mixed with ritual cannibalism, of which the first reports for this area date back to 1609. Unlike other Leopards Societies an unexplainable social dissonant sticks to the Sierra Leone version: "The bush seemed to me pervaded with something supernatural, a spirit which was striving to bridge the animal and the human. Some of the weird spirit of their surroundings has, I think, entered into the people, and accounts for their weird customs. The people are by no means a low, savage race. I found many of them highly intelligent, shrewd, with more than the average sense of humor, and with the most marvelous faculty for keeping hidden what they did not wish to be known..." (W. Brandford Griffith, September 1915.) This revised and illustrated edition comes with a Post Scriptum about other Leopard fraternities like the Congolese Anyota, the Nigerian Ekpe and it's offspring the Cuban Abakuá.

"The bush seemed to me pervaded with something supernatural, a spirit which was striving to bridge the animal and the human ..." From the preface Were the Human Leopard Society members cannibals for the purpose of satisfying an appetite for human flesh, or was it some far out religious rite? These and numerous other questions will be answered in this historic account. The Human Leopard Society, the Human Alligator Society and the Human Baboon Society were West-African underground organizations, responsible for weird rituals and murders, rumors of cannibalism and human sacrifice. During the harvesting of human fat to replenish the energy of some primitive entity, the members of these groups came to believe in the reinvigorating effect of the human meat gourmet. Their morbid activities spanned decades and came to an end with the labors of the Special Commission Court, and the ensuing punishment of the perpetrators. Notoir Books is a publisher of new old books on topics of esoteric interests, eccentric memoirs, overlooked history, otherworldly stories and distinctive voices. You can visit notoirbooks.com for more.These sordid records of the Special Commission Court once again prove the reality that truth is often stranger than fiction.

A recounting of the "Human Leopard Society", a group of cannibals in the Hinterland of Sierra Leone who were captured and tried for their crimes against humanity.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.