British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr David Pratten

The District Clerk and the ‘Man-Leopard Murders’: Mediating Law and Authority in Colonial Nigeria

Within the daily routines of colonial courts and district offices few European officials had the linguistic skills or cultural outlook fully to understand their operation without interpreters and clerks. Clerks occupied a pivotal position as intermediaries between colonial officials and society at large. They controlled the gateways to colonial courts and bureaucracies and hence exercised great influence over these important sites of struggle for access to resources and the meanings of social relationships and authority. Exactly how important their role was, and the precise nature of the balance they struck between self-interest and official service has been the subject of the albeit limited literature on the subject of colonial clerks. Yet precisely because of their equivocal position clerks’ careers offer a window on the changing modalities of colonial rule and on the influence of Africans in the mediation and application of colonial law and authority.

This is the story of how a district clerk in 1940s Nigeria positioned himself during an extraordinary criminal investigation. On the King's birthday in 1949 a clerk called Usen Udo Usen received the Certificate of Honour for his part in bringing to an end the notorious man-leopard murders in south-eastern Nigeria. The award was made posthumously, however, as Usen had been ostracised by Ibibio society in Calabar Province and had fled to the regional headquarters in Enugu where he had died in mysterious circumstances. Honoured by the colonial authorities but publicly outcast from his own community, had Usen Udo Usen betrayed his people for promotion or was he a victim of political intrigue?

David Pratten obtained his PhD in Social Anthropology and then held his British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS. He is currently engaged in research on Democracy and Disorder: Youth, Vigilantes and the 2003 Elections in Nigeria and his forthcoming publication is entitled ‘The Man-Leopard Murder Mysteries’: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria. David has recently taken up a permanent lectureship in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex.