ASC Seminar: The Man-Leopard Murder Mysteries

Michel de Certeau wrote that the historian is not in charge of speaking the truth, but in charge of “diagnosing the false.” In that spirit, this seminar will attempt to diagnose the ways in which a series of ‘human-leopard’ killings in Nigeria between 1943 and 1948 came to be labelled as ‘ritual murders’ when, in all probability, they were not. It tries to show how the ‘ritual murder’ label was no simple reflex of the colonial imagination. It was mutually constituted and contested by police and colonial officers, of course, but also by Nigerian court clerks, chiefs, an educated elite, and by the circulation of murder narratives from elsewhere in the continent as well as from popular fiction. Please register

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