In a previous essay (Austen, 1986a) I attempted to trace a particular type of deviant hero in African history and culture: a ‘social bandit’ or criminal figure identified in the popular imagination with resistance against alien or indigenous oppressive elites. The search proved frustrating within its original terms of reference but it did suggest an alternative paradigm for identifying the entire relationship between cultural norms and criminal behaviour in Africa. The present article attempts to develop this paradigm through the analysis of six African narratives dealing with heroic and/or anti-heroic figures in a variety of contexts.

From the earliest years of colonial government in Kenya, cattle raiding by Africans against their neighbours, and in particular livestock thefts from European farmers, presented the administration with their most persistent policing problem in the rural areas of the colony. As the period of colonial rule in Kenya was drawing to a close, reported cases of stock theft were once again showing a sharp increase, climbing from 1578 cases in 1955 to 4243 in 1962 (Kenya Police Dept, 1955 and 1962). In a pattern by then familiar to the Kenya administration, this prompted the renewal of demands from the European settler community for more extensive and concerted government action to deal with the activities of the thieves. Settler opinion held that the continuing prevalence of stock theft had much to do with the ‘social prestige’ attached to the crime in many African communities. The unwillingness of the African public to assist in the prevention and detection of stock theft had long been interpreted as a tacit sanctioning of such theft, leading to the conclusion that, within the ‘moral economy’ of many African communities, stock theft was not thought of as a crime at all. ‘After all,’ commented the Provincial Commissioner of the Rift Valley Province in 1959, ‘stock theft is the traditional sport of the young men of many tribes, and the elders cannot be expected to act as kill-joys and stamp it out unless they themselves are liable to suffer.’ This view was applied most readily to the pastoralists of the Rift Valley and western Kenya, the Maasai and Kalenjin, who were commonly involved in crimes of this sort. The belief that stock theft was an acceptable form of accumulation within Kalenjin and Maasai society determined the nature of the legislation put forward by the colonial administration to deal with the crime. Policing and punishment were accordingly based upon the notion of collective responsibility for acts of stock theft, with wide powers to extend collective punishments to families, villages and even entire locations found to be implicated in thefts.

This article examines the extraordinary outbreak of violent deaths which occurred among the Annang and Ibibio of eastern Nigeria in the mid-1940s and was described by the colonial police as ‘probably without parallel in the history of violent crime of any country in the world’. Between 1943 and 1948, but especially after 1945, one mutilated body after another was found in quick succession in a restricted border area shared by 130 villages in the Abak and Opobo districts of the Old Calabar Province. Over 200 such deaths were recorded in a short space of time. Initially medical officers who examined the bodies of the victims seemed to agree with the local people that the deaths were caused by genuine leopards, which were a constant menace to life in the area. The local police were preoccupied with other matters and showed little interest in deaths attributed to wild animals. But vague rumours were current, especially in missionary circles, that a ‘leopard cult’ of professional assassins might be engaged in murderous activities in the area, covering the tracks of their crime by simulating the clawmarks and ravages of wild beasts. Preliminary inquiries by local officials in 1945 appeared to confirm the suspicions and, in spite of strong doubts and protests from various quarters, a large force of police was let loose on the ‘infected’ area to suppress the murder gang and any other local organisation associated with the killings. At least 102 suspects were convicted for man-leopard murders, seventy-seven of whom were actually hanged in one of the most bizarre anti-crime campaigns of the colonial period.

Dr Nwaka, in writing his paper on the ‘man-leopard’ killings of southern Annang, Nigeria, 1943–48, has performed a good public service for Nigeria. During the past few years a number of Nigerians have expressed to me the view that the killings should be written up. Now Dr Nwaka has done just this, and only after a very considerable amount of research, as his extensive references indicate. The fact that I do not accept his main conclusion is not the point. His paper forms the basis for a comprehensive discussion of the circumstances surrounding the killings from 1943 to 1948, and for this we owe him a real debt of gratitude.

This paper describes the emergence during the 1960s of two forms of neighbourhood organisation, drinking companies and vigilante groups, in Bugisu District in eastern Uganda. The main interest of these groups is that they were both explicit responses to a perceived state of anarchy and lawlessness. The drinking companies evolved to control the most popular, and the most dangerous, social activity: the drinking of beer. They were essentially voluntary associations which developed into forms of rotating credit association. The vigilantes, as a self-appointed police force, tackled the problem of community security in a different way and, patrolling their areas at night, were dedicated to the eradication of thieves and witches. Evolving at the same time and often in consort, both movements were united in their aim to provide a distinctive ‘Gisu Government’.

It has long been a cliché in the social sciences to talk about the insulation of disciplines and sub-disciplines from each other. We all know what it is like tostudy a phenomenon – poverty, crime, the family – from within one academic paradigm and then come across a quite different view of the ‘same’ phenomenon. The result is usually self-pity: ‘If only I had known what they were up to’ or ‘If only they knew what I was up to’.