Originally published: Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, c2007.
Summary:
"Focuses on the deaths of about 200 people in southern Nigeria in the mid-1940s. At the time, the deaths were explained as predation by shape-shifting leopard-men and native witchcraft. ... leads readers on a tortuous road to discoveries about local resistance to colonial and missionary encroachment. Pratten reveals how secret societies worked behind the scenes to impose authority at a time when traditional values were losing ground. Could the leopard murders have been a convenient way to take care of the spread of information that placed too much knowledge about native society in the hands of European authorities?"--Dust jacket.