Empire of Crime

by Tim Newark

  The police officer returned to his study of their tribal culture. Leopards were widespread in the country and there was considerable belief in the African version of lycanthropy – werewolves – men turning into animals.

  ‘Certain persons in each village or district would gain the reputation of having the power of changing into leopards,’ observed Fountain. ‘A reputation which they would do their best to encourage, as it would give them power over other people and add to their prestige and the awe in which they were held. Later they would use their reputed powers to rid themselves of their enemies. Witch doctors would be quick to adopt the idea themselves, or as they so often do now, supply the necessary charms and medicines to people who wished to acquire the power. Armed with his medicines – in which it must be remembered he has the most profound faith – the would-be leopard man waylays his enemy. Possibly he does actually believe that he changes into a leopard at the moment of killing.’

  As a result, the mutilations committed at the scene of the crime were intended less to disguise the nature of the killing and were more a ritual demonstration of the animal power acquired by the murderer. Such was the strong conviction of these killers that they had become transformed into wild beasts that their attempts at disguise in front of witnesses was rudimentary and the power of suggestion was such that many witnesses believed they had in fact seen a leopard in action.

  ‘If my hypothesis is correct,’ concluded Fountain, ‘we are fighting nothing as tangible as an organisation but rather an attitude of mind.’

  Every adult male in the region had the potential to be a leopard killer. To combat this, the strength of the local police was more than doubled and armed patrols were carried out between tribal settlements in the dangerous evening hours. Some of the patrols would sleep in the native camps to gain as much intelligence as they could on local characters and disputes.

  Individual murders were investigated and sometimes the perpetrators were tracked down, put on trial and hanged. Whole communities were shown the gory remnants of the victims and shamed into giving up information, but still the leopard murders continued. By the beginning of 1947, there was also a new, concerning twist to them: the leopard attacks were being directed at the colonial administrators.

  The murder of PC Evan Chima rang alarm bells. This was a political act and Senior Assistant Superintendent Fountain came under extreme pressure to bring the serial murders to an end.

  Some academic specialists in African culture have since argued that the witch doctors and their leopard assassins were acting as a local judiciary and police force, carrying out tribal methods of law enforcement on the torn apart victims – that is, in some ways, they all deserved their grisly deaths. If this were the case, because the colonial authorities were meddling in these affairs, the death of one of their policemen was a warning shot to stay out – in effect, a strike against British colonialism. But then how was the killing of children justified?

  That this version of events was not exactly true was revealed when the murderers of PC Chima were caught and subjected to interrogation before Fountain. Etuk Uku, the half-brother of Chief Sunday Udo Expo, was especially voluble during his confession. Having described the exact circumstances of the killing of the policeman, he revealed the Idiong cult that surrounded the leopard murders.

  ‘When anyone wishes to kill a person for some personal reason,’ explained Uku, ‘he will go first to an Idiong member and consult his Idiong. The Idiong will give instructions as to the preparation of certain medicines which will be placed in the bush near a path and which will have the effect of attracting the victim to the spot.’

  The medicine could be prepared from Afang leaves and placed in an Afang grove, attracting the victim to the location. But this magic was all part of a commercial service carried out by the Idiong witch doctors.

  ‘At the initial consultation,’ said Uku, ‘the Idiong member demands a fee, usually of five or ten manillas, but where it is decided to kill somebody, the Idiong instructs that certain parts of the body of the victim be brought back to him. These parts are usually the tongue, hair from the head, flesh from the arm and sometimes the heart and other internal organs.’

  The object of scraping the head of the victim was to prevent identification of the body. This flesh was not used by the Idiong.

  ‘The parts of the body taken to the Idiong member,’ continued Uku, ‘are used to prepare a medicine to give the Idiong juju power and attract people to come for consultations. If these parts were not obtainable, the Idiong would lose power and would not be able to answer questions put to it. Anyone who produces these human parts to an Idiong man will be paid for them. They usually pay from 40 to 60 manillas. All Idiong men will pay for these human parts. It is mostly the bigger Idiong members who do it. Idiong usually advises that murders be committed in the evening, as people will be too frightened to enter the bush after dark to search for the body.’

  It seemed, then, that though the choice of victim might at first arise out of personal animosity, many of the bodies were being harvested for organs to be used in tribal magic. This explained the death of so many children, whose body parts were especially valued.

  The cult of using parts of children in tribal magic survives into the twenty-first century. In 2001, officers investigating the appearance of a boy’s torso in the River Thames linked his death to this practice. Tests on his bones revealed that the unnamed child, later dubbed ‘Adam’, came from Nigeria. No one has yet been arrested for his murder and ritual dismemberment.

  Chief Udo Ekpo, the ringleader of the gang that killed PC Chima, was not an Idiong member, but he did consult Chief Ukpong Eto’s Idiong. Chief Ukpong Eto was a practising Idiong member of considerable local renown and lived in the centre of the area plagued by the leopard killings. The two chiefs had quarrelled over money given to them for a previous leopard murder and that was why Chief Ukpong later gave evidence against Chief Udo Ekpo at his trial for the policeman’s murder.

  As Fountain delved further, he discovered that the Idiong constituted a kind of black magic mafia in the region. An Anang trader proved most helpful in explaining their hold over the land.

  ‘Any person known to be a member of the Idiong Society is honoured by the inhabitants,’ said the merchant. ‘The influence of Idiong Society in olden days [meant] they usually had a general meeting best known to them where they arranged to sell people as slaves and to kill and make use of some parts of the deceased they needed, such as the skull, tongue, heart, intestines, hairs, eyes, lungs, right or left hand, for the sacrifice to their Idiong gods and for the preparing of charms, known as Nduoho. This Nduoho has power to conceal things which they have done from coming to light. This action of Idiong members and the power of their Nduoho make the inhabitants fear them the most because it is being sacrificed with the human flesh, openly without fear of anybody.’

  In the middle of the twentieth century, the Idiong no longer sold slaves but continued to maintain their power through leopard killings, known as ‘Ekpe Owo’.

  ‘They are still holding their secret meetings,’ said the Anang merchant, ‘sometimes in the market places and sometimes in an appointed place by them. This meeting usually consists of notable members. The inhabitants still go to any of the Idiong members they trust for prophecy and advice. The Idiong men prepare them a charm to kill a human being and receive some amount settled. This charm enables them to kill at sunset. The Idiong man will demand parts of the deceased for the sacrifice of their Idiong gods and for further preparation of any protective talisman.

  ‘The Idiong men, in most cases, never take part in the commission of the killing but have power to direct, encourag[ing] the doers to perform the action at the appointed time and place with the power of their charm, which always hypnotises people.’

  Finally, in the climax to his investigation, Fountain got a member of the Idiong to explain its hold over the Nigerian people.

  ‘Before the advent of the British government,’ s
aid the Idiong insider, ‘the Idiong Society was ruling. They had power over everything. They can command to kill anybody they have accused of any thing and there will be no other power to go against their command. They can kill any of their members who reveal their secret and may sell the person as a slave, according to their judgement.’

  According to him, the killing of victims by leopard men was a relatively new phenomenon – a variant on more orthodox methods of slaying. Having revealed so much, the informer begged the police to keep the information he had given them secret, otherwise he would suffer the fate of those who spoke out about the Idiong Society.

  Fountain now had all the information he needed to reach his own conclusion on the motives behind the leopard-men killings.

  ‘The more the question of Idiong is considered, the more it appears to fit into the general pattern of events,’ surmised Fountain. ‘It is generally acknowledged to be the most powerful and influential cult in the area, and the oracle is consulted by the people before any decision is made on any matter of major importance. What the oracle says is never questioned and practising Idiong members thrive on their consultations – they are practically all men of considerable substance.

  ‘If parts of the human body are necessary for the practice of this cult, it is certain that Idiong members would have no hesitation in encouraging their clients to murder in order to obtain them. The apparently trivial motives underlying the murders become explainable on this hypothesis, as these would be only secondary, with the sacrificial idea plus the market value of human flesh as the fundamental cause. The leopard cult would have arisen as a natural offshoot of Idiong, fostered by the Idiong priests as their main source of supply of the materials essential to their profession.’

  It was perhaps the most bizarre organised crime of all. Its demand for murder came from a commercial need for human body parts, that was its trade: not drugs or arms, but bits of flesh. As to the course of action needed to combat this barbarous business, Fountain was equally clear.

  ‘I now very strongly urge that immediate steps be taken to declare Idiong an unlawful society and that powers be given to the police to destroy all shrines, jujus, and other manifestations of this – at least potentially – evil cult.’

  The police came down hard; more locals were arrested and several of those were hanged. ‘In the course of time,’ said Fountain, ‘it will begin to dawn on the people that their medicines are not effective against the police and that murders cannot be disguised as genuine leopard killings.’ It was a bold crusade against the rule of ritual.

  The crackdown worked, to an extent, but ultimately the colonial police acknowledged that the will of the people was not with them and they could never eradicate these primitive cults and secret societies, which continue to hold influence today.

  Earlier in the century, the Ekumeku Society – ‘League of the Silent Ones’ – had terrorised the Asaba hinterland in Nigeria, directing attacks against colonial courthouses and mission stations. Missionary converts were assaulted, alongside chiefs who were too friendly with the British. The members of the secret society raided prison camps to release their comrades and closed markets, bringing trade to a halt. The British governors declared them an ‘Anti-European Club’ and sent a military expedition into the interior to root them out. At least 300 members of the Ekumeku Society were arrested and many of them were imprisoned, but it didn’t stop the resurgence of their activities a few years later.

  Organised crime throughout colonial Africa ebbed and flowed according to how tight a grip the imperial authorities could exert in distant regions. In Uganda, armed gang robbery, known as bakondo, in which truckloads of young criminals raided villages and government property, was widespread. When the Uganda police clashed with the bakondo gangs, fierce firefights broke out and several police were killed. This upsurge in violence reached a crescendo in 1954 after Mutesa II, the Kabaka of Buganda, the largest of the kingdoms in Uganda, was arrested by the commissioner of police and sent into exile.

  Matiya Kibuka Kiganira, a chief witch doctor, stepped into the power vacuum, calling himself the Buganda god of war, and demanded a return to traditional beliefs. He sold magical objects to his followers, including cowrie shells that ensured the birth of twins or that a wife was a virgin. When the police arrested him for fraud, the head constable in charge of the arresting party was stabbed to death. An enormous crowd that had gathered to protect the witch doctor had to be dispersed with buckshot and tear gas. Kiganira was sentenced to death, but this was later commuted to imprisonment, as the British feared the consequences of his death. This period of anarchy only subsided with the return of the Kabaka.

  The unrest in Uganda at this period may also be traced in part to political events in neighbouring countries. As in South-East Asia, the post-war period saw an increase in anti-colonial campaigns. The Special Branch of the Uganda Police was very active in monitoring the movement of Kikuyu rebels from Kenya into Uganda. At least two of these Mau Mau agents were arrested in Kampala in 1954 and one was charged with fund-raising for the uprising.

  Such rebellions hastened the end of imperial rule in Africa, but on occasion, and much to the surprise of the establishment, events in that vast continent managed to strike back at the home of empire in Britain.

  ‘Lady Churchill,’ said a note dated Monday, 15 March 1954, ‘this is a free warning to YOU. I as well as my brave and most ruthless gang will be out to shoot YOU DEAD at any moment in Britain, beginning from today … End British atrocities in Kenya now! Then live freely in Britain. I am demanding the withdrawal of all troops from Kenya within 2 months time …’

  The note was signed, ‘Yours most wickedly, Mau Mau Rep, General Stalin, London Branch’.

  A postcript carried an additional threat: ‘God truly knows that I have taken the oath to fulfil this duty. It must be carried out. We are also sure Mrs Lyttelton’s life is at present not so safe too. We will show you both just what we …’

  It ended abruptly.

  Lady Moira Lyttelton was the wife of the Secretary of State for the Colonies.

  The death threat note was received at 10 Downing Street, Whitehall, by Jock Colville, Joint Principal Private Secretary to Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Great Britain. The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya had begun in 1952 and its murderous events had so far been confined to the African continent. It appeared now, however, that the Kenyan insurgents were trying to bring the war to the streets of London and involve the British leader’s wife.

  Colville sent the letter on to the Assistant Undersecretary of State at the Home Office. ‘I suggested that, although it might well be from a lunatic,’ recalled Colville, ‘it would obviously be well that the police or MI5 should make an investigation with the least possible delay.’

  The note was passed on by the Home Office to the duty officer at Cannon Row Police Station, who made a few telephone calls. ‘I then went to Downing Street,’ the officer stated, ‘and saw the PCs on Numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 16 Protection Posts. I informed each one of the threat and directed them to be on the alert to detect anyone acting in a suspicious manner. I also impressed upon them the necessity of keeping the information secret. I did not post any extra men.’

  The duty officer ended his shift at 10.15 p.m., having done all he could to protect the Prime Minister and his wife, and making sure the whole process was kept discreet. Unfortunately, this was not to be.

  ‘The first intimation I had that the Press were in possession of the information concerning the threat,’ he said, ‘was when travelling to duty at about 1.20 p.m. [the next day], I saw at the corner of Bridge Street and Parliament Street a placard which read “Threat to Lady Churchill”.’

  Colville was furious.

  ‘It was with considerable surprise,’ he told the Home Office, ‘that the Prime Minister saw in the first editions of Tuesday’s evening paper, which arrived here at about 10.00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, that the fact of this threatening letter being received was known.
During the course of the morning we received many Press enquiries in this office and it was consequently decided to say that such a letter had indeed been received and that, as is normally the case with threatening letters, it had at once been forwarded to the police.’

  As a result of this leak, claimed Colville, a second threatening letter had been received from the Mau Mau’s London agent.

  ‘The Prime Minister finds it difficult to understand,’ complained Colville in a memo to the Home Office, ‘how such a leakage to the Press can have taken place. My letter must have reached you about 6.00 p.m. on Monday evening. Unless the sender of the letter is responsible for the leakage, which seems improbable, the facts must have been divulged to the Press on the Monday evening or in the early hours of Tuesday morning in order to catch the early editions of Tuesday’s evening papers. Sir Winston would be obliged if the Home Secretary would enquire into this matter and would be good enough to inform him how he thinks that the Press came to be informed.’

  The press thoroughly enjoyed the sensational revelation and a former Metropolitan Commissioner of Police was ambushed with questions, at an unrelated speaking engagement, about how the police planned to protect Lady Churchill.

  ‘Obviously, there is surveillance, and you may give her a detective to accompany her wherever she goes,’ he responded. Then, worryingly, added, ‘It would be idle to suggest that against any determined criminal you can have protection. All you can do is your best.’ This lax answer only inflamed concerns for the safety of the Prime Minister’s wife and encouraged other anti-imperialists.

  ‘Lady Churchill will meet a violent death before the end of June,’ declared a letter received by a Manchester evening paper. It was signed: ‘Freedom for Ireland, Unity is our goal’.

  In reality, the threat to Lady Churchill from the Mau Mau was never very serious. Just that month, the Kenyan rebels had suffered serious reverses in their two-year-old campaign when two of their top leaders were captured by the British. Perhaps the letter was a desperate attempt to distract attention from this loss. When Sir Evelyn Baring, Governor of Kenya, sent a telegram to Churchill a week earlier, informing him of the latest developments in his country, he was more worried by the state of the ruling whites than the Mau Mau rebels.