Paper short abstract:

Communities in British Sierra Leone reported about a nature gone wild, with leopards and other predatory animals attacking humans. This paper reads such police statements as mindful African insights about ecological crises initiated by colonial exploitation and destruction of African rainforests.

Paper long abstract:

From the 1880s to the 1920s, many communities in African colonies – from Sierra Leone in the West to today’s Tansania in the East – reported about a nature gone wild: Man-eating animals such as big cats, crocodiles, large apes and snakes would attack weak people and especially babies and children. Local African discourses judged this animal behaviour as ‘new’, ‘unnatural’ and the more metaphorical narratives were putting this animal aggression down to arcane and evil new white and black elites practising ritual murder and cannibalism under the animal disguise.

While such statements in police and court rooms have hitherto been considered as political expressions of a general indigenous resistance to colonial rule and taxation, the proposed paper reads them as mindful reports of concerned Africans about ecological crises of flora and fauna initiated by colonial exploitation and destruction of African rainforests. The case study of Sierra Leone demonstrates that in the nineteenth century, the British colonisers had widely accepted the indigenous forest and farm management systems. The Poro male initiation societies decided over sewing, harvesting and closed season in forests and on fields based on their secret ecological knowledge. But with the Hut Tax War of 1898, the colonial government fought against ‘poro bans’ to further exploit the forests and its inhabitants with all the Empire’s might. However, when facing the results of colonial Anthropocene injustices, African ecological expertise and agency can be made visible in a continuum between judicial accusation and warfare.