Scars in the Courtroom. African Scarifications Under Colonial Trials

Ritual scarifications on human skin continue to be widespread across the African continent. Throughout the nineteenth century, these scars were produced in secret initiation camps. Within the networks of slave dealers, many assumed that African societies used scarifications to identify a person. Colonial-era anthropologists adopted this notion and tried to read tribal affiliations from the scars. Under the influence of ethnology on the one hand and tropical medicine on the other, the British colonial courts of Sierra Leone turned ritual scarifications into forensic evidence: In 1913, hundreds of Africans were accused of ritual cannibal murder as members of the (imaginary) Human Leopard Societies. To prove membership of this secret society, the prosecution argued that the accused murderers were all marked with a triangle scar. This theory of leopard marks was, however, disproved by African defense counsels. This article analyses this battle over the correct reading of these scarifications in a colonial setting and concerning the ambiguity of these inscriptions as oscillating between »natural« and »artificial«.