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| Credit: Peter Maas |
"Chasing imaginary leopards: science, witchcraft and the politics of conservation in Zanzibar" is a short paper by Martin Walsh and Helle Goldman originally published in the "Journal of Eastern African Studies" (November 2012). It was reprinted in 2017 in an academic volume titled "Contemporary Issues in Swahili Ethnography", edited by Iain Walker. The two authors of the paper have a blog called "The Zanzibar Leopard".
Zanzibar is an archipelago off the coast of East Africa. The main island is called Unguja. Zanzibar, a former British colony, is presently part of Tanzania. The Zanzibar leopard (Panthera pardus adersi) was a local subspecies of the leopard. Although the leopards were protected by the British colonial authorities, the Zanzibari natives hunted them anyway, since these big cats killed livestock and occasionally humans. After the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, eradication of the leopard became quasi-official policy, and when Western conservationists became interested in protecting the animal during the 1990´s, they were either extremely rare or already hunted to extinction. (It´s intriguing to note that scientists have only seen the Zanzibar leopard in the wild on two occasions, both during the early 1980´s.) Walsh and Goldman, who carried out research at Unguja, believe that the Zanzibar leopard is most probably extirpated.
There is just one problem. The natives keep seeing them...
The fact that Ungujans claim to know the whereabouts of leopards, including specimens in captivity, have led Western outsiders to assume that perhaps there still is a viable population of big cats on the island. It´s also a widespread belief among trained researchers hailing from Unguja. A number of researchers have experienced what the authors call "kept leopard chases", ultimately futile attempts to locate supposedly tamed leopards owned by villagers. The presumed owners often demand large sums of money to show their specimens, but in the end, nothing ever comes out of it. Attempts to persuade the leopard-owners to build miniature zoos where they can display the cats have also come to naught.
Walsh and Goldman believe they have identified the explanation: the persistent belief in the survival of the Zanzibar leopard is a superstition, closely connected to ideas about witches and witchcraft. According to local lore, there are two kinds of leopards: wild and kept. The kept leopards belong to witches, who breed them in secret and can use them to attack and otherwise terrorize the village population. If I understand the paper correctly, the islanders were also scared of wild leopards, since nobody could know for sure whether they really were wild, or belonged to a witch. Hunters who shot and killed the (real) leopards had to have "magical protection" before embarking on an expedition into the forest. So strong was the superstition that the local government of Abeid Karume wanted to eradicate both leopards and witches at the same time! The non-existence of kept leopards neatly explains why the search for them always turns into a wild goose chase...
But why would anyone believe that the kept leopard are real flesh-and-blood "cryptids"? I get the impression that Walsh and Goldman believe that many Western researchers in Tanzania "go native". This is particularly the case with those who learn the local language (Swahili). Indeed, the authors seem to think that "going native" and adopting various "occult" beliefs is a persistent problem in anthropology! Another problem could be postmodernism (not explicitly mentioned), since the authors are critical of the idea that so-called "indigenous knowledge" has anything important to contribute to conservation efforts. Is "indigenous knowledge" a code word for native superstition? Of course, to a postmodernist this is presumably not a problem (the elusive kept leopards of Zanzibar Island simply being another Narrative), but to a conservationist NGO working on a shoe-string budget, it just might be!
I suppose cryptozoologists might be somewhat disappointed that Panthera pardus adersi has been extirpated, ironically by the same people who still fear the power of leopard-related witchcraft, but then, finding cryptids outside Indochinese wet-markets have always been pretty hard.
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