Images of Africa in Early Twentieth-Century British Theatre

Summary

Africa! Land of mystery!

Africa! Wonderful – weird!

Many stories are told,

We will now one unfold

Of those whom its flames have seared.

So promises the title page of Leopard Men, an action-packed melodrama set in Northern Nigeria and first presented at the Crown Theatre in Eccles, Lancashire, in September 1924. It focuses on a group of Europeans struggling to survive the hell that is West Africa, as they seek to impose and maintain British rule and systems of commerce on the local population:

Four white men in a station

Six looked on as a crowd,

In the hottest hole in creation

Where the ‘skeeters move in a cloud…

Where even the natives swelter

And stink with their oily skins

And under their palm-thatched shelter

Laugh at the white man's sins

Knowing that sooner or later

The Coast will claim its price

The law of our one Creator

Death, the reward of vice.

The main interest, however, centres on a native woman's obsessive desire for Jimmy, a dissolute white trader who, having previously seduced her, has now brought his wife over from England. The abandoned Fatuma Fulani is so distraught (‘brown woman got heart same – like white woman’) that she determines to take bloody revenge by adopting the garb and weapons of a local cult whose members disguise themselves in leopard skins and attack their enemies (‘She instantly grips his throat with claws fixed to her hands’). All ends happily.