The Zanzibar Leopard

My interest in Zanzibar and my attempt to remember my life before I left the island at the age of 16 has led to some interesting connections and research. One of these is trying to find out about the Zanzibar Leopard.

My husband and I have travelled the bush of the African mainland and the sighting of a leopard is always a special event. Leopards are so rarely seen, so solitary and secretive. Lions are the opposite; they lie around the open bush for all to see. They barely blink when you arrive in a noisy smelly safari vehicle with clicking cameras. Lions will even use vehicles as part of their hunt routines to disguise their stalking of prey. But a leopard! You can never count on seeing them and if you do it may be the briefest of glimpses by night; a low slung cat disappearing as it looks malevolently over its shoulder at you, the intruder.

We have old family stories about leopards. My father grew up in Nyasaland and in the 1920s if you saw a leopard beside the road as you were driving at night, you would try and shoot it. There was a sense that they were vermin. My Uncle Fred shot a huge leopard one night and the caption in the album says, ‘Fred with his first leopard’. And the poor leopard was not even attacking our goats or any threat to my family!
Here Fred stands beside the leopard skin with pride. The pelt became a family heirloom and was used to cover the table with the tennis trophies. Looking at the picture the leopard was indeed big; I estimate it was 7 foot from noise to tip of tail.

When I lived in Zanzibar as a child, I was told that leopards were still found in the bush, in particular in Jozani Forest. This remnant thick wetland forest is in the middle of the island and it was there that the leopard made a last stand. As children we were told that there were witches on the island and they would keep leopards in captivity. To strengthen their powers. I visited Jozani forest as a child and remember the huge trees filled with lianas and the orchids that hung down from them. It was a tiny area, only two and a quarter square miles in area and declared a Forest Reserve by the British in 1960.

My mother loved orchids and we drove through the forest in the back of an open jeep looking for them. This was courtesy of the local Zanzibari land owner, Mr Jozi. The Reserve has now been extended to include other ecosystems and is called the Jozani Chwaka Bay Conservation Area. Tourists nowadays flock to the reserve to see the local Zanzibar Red Colobus monkeys.

In Kiswahili, the language of East Africa, a leopard is ‘Chui’. Maybe this word sounds like the animal’s voice or cough. The Zanzibar leopard is know as ‘Chui Konge’ and a researcher talks about a second sub-specie called ‘Chui Kisutu’ which is lighter in colour. Kisutu means a cloth used during a wedding – which might have some connection to the fate of leopards in the past.

The Zanzibar leopard is now regarded as a sub-species of the mainland leopard, isolated as the seas rose at the end of the last glacial age, about 20 thousand years ago. It is called panthera pardus adersi, a regional sub-specie. Due to its small population it has suffered from what scientist, Ernst Mayr, called the ‘founder effect’. Due to isolation there is a sharp decrease in genetic diversity and certain trait are lost while others are emphasised. Thus the island’s leopard was smaller in size and its spots had changed to be smaller and more widespread. It was Zanzibar’s top predator and with the increase in population over the last 100 years its habitat has steadily diminished. This seems to be a story of destruction that is well known, world wide.

In colonial times, from 1919 till 1964, the Zanzibar leopard was protected and could only be shot with a permit. You could hunt pigs as they were vermin, but not leopards. Meanwhile, it appears that leopards had a very bad reputation as agents of bad witches. They were purportedly trapped and then used by these ‘leopard keeper’ witches against their victims. Magic and spirits were involved. And fear too of course.

The policy changed after the 1964 revolution when a campaign was started by the revolutionary government to eradicate the leopard. Called the Kitanzi campaign, after the name of its leader, it seems to have been closely allied to witch hunting. Leopards were now seen as vermin and actively hunted even after President Karume’s assassination in 1972. The pelts had value as well as body parts. Leopard skins have always had a small market in the alternative fashion industry.
Currently there is a website offering a fake leopard skin bag called, "Zanzibar leopard baby bag".

In the 1990s’ there was an effort to start a conservation program to rescue the leopard but the researchers decided that the population was so small, if it existed at all, that its long term survival chances were non-existent. I cannot help thinking that even if they could conserve a few, it would be worthwhile. This leopard has never been studied in the wild or in captivity, little to nothing is known about its behaviour. It was last seen by a researcher in the 1980s. Surveys and camera trapping in 1997 and 2003 have not revealed any animals. Although reports of sightings continue in the south of the island, researchers seem to be ambivalent as to whether any animals remain. The leopard is once more protected.

A stuffed Zanzibar leopard remains in the Peace Memorial Museum on the Island. It crouches down in a defensive position; fangs bared in defiance, half hidden in undergrowth. It would be satisfying to think that as such it survives in remote pockets of its Island home. But I fear that this is another story of loss, of country, of wilderness and of the richness of nature. The Zanzibar leopard has slipped away into history.