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Small-Scale Political Dynamics
This article is based on earlier doctoral research undertaken at and supported by the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, and on current postdoctoral research at the University of Ghent funded by the BRAIN-program of the Belgian Federal Ministry of Science. The University of Uele, and more particularly Roger Gaise, helped to facilitate field research in the provinces of Haut-Uele and Tshopo in the DRCongo. I want to thank Judith Verweijen for her feedback on comparisons of leopard-men with present-day militias in the east of DRC. Author's email:
In 1911, the governor of Orientale Province of Belgian Congo, Charles Delhaise, sent a complete 'anioto' costume to the Congo Museum, now the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), in Tervuren, Belgium (Fig. 1). Delhaise reported that anioto dressed up as leopards and killed their victims at night, cutting the carotid artery with their iron claws and leaving leopard paw prints next to the bodies.1Delhaise's mise-en-scène photographs inspired the making of a sculpture, dressed with the objects. It has occupied a central place in the museum since 1915 (Fig. 2).2At that time, administrators in the colony dismissed the reported killings as leopard attacks and local superstitions.3Fig. 1.
Anioto ready to attack, mise-en-scène, Bali population, Congo. Photo by Charles Delhaise, 1909 © Royal Museum for Central Africa (RCMA), AP.0.1.6554.
Fig. 2.The leopard-man of Stanley Falls by Paul Wissaert, 1915. Plaster figure, decorated with ethnographic objects. RMCA A.371, photographer unknown; all rights reserved.
In the late 1920s, a more coordinated and sustained administrative and legal attention culminated in several high-profile trials. The discourse developing in the 1920s and 1930s in colonial journals and fiction upheld a stereotype of leopard-men as evil, animal-like creatures threatening the colonial order, in line with the sculpture's iconography.4In reality, leopard-men never wore such costumes for killing, and often committed murders with knives instead of claws.5Yet, the image helped to legitimize the way the colonial administration dealt with leopard-men as a criminal 'secret society' or 'sect'. Although the trials revealed the complex nature and purposes of the killings, these data did not affect published reports. In the 1990s, critiques of demeaning leopard-men representations targeted colonial literature...