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Only those who see ékpê-ówó know for certain,
but those who see ékpê-ówó will surely die.
By the beginning of 1947 it seemed that the myriad of petty and mundane motives at the heart of the murder mysteries amounted to a damning indictment of the colonial system as a whole. Like the Women's War before it, the man-leopard episode appeared to witness the unravelling of a decade of colonial policy. Both ékóy íbáàn and ékpê ówó, the Women's War and the leopard men apparently exposed the failings of colonial policies relating to chieftaincy, taxation, justice and the palm oil economy. This appeared to apply in equal measure to the judicial apparatus (judges in open court as well as clandestine tribunals), everyday disputes (divorce, adultery, debt and land), political matters (chiefs, pretenders and usurpers) and economic changes (exchange rates and price controls). In several crucial spheres where colonial intervention had disrupted Annang ways of seeing and doing things, those processes had begun to collapse.
Seen against a broader regional perspective the leopard murders might not have seemed so exceptional. There was a regional resonance to the malignant properties of leopard symbolism during this period. Reports were made from the Ogoni town of Kono in Opobo Division, for instance, that chiefs had failed to arrest those men suspected of being in possession of the poisonous whiskers and bile of a leopard shot dead a year previously.1 And three men were convicted in Calabar when they were found to be in possession of leopard's whiskers.