Zanzibar Leopard

Unlike most animals on this site, the Zanzibar leopard was real: a population of African leopards isolated on Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar archipelago, since rising seas cut it off from the mainland at the end of the last Ice Age. It was smaller than mainland leopards and its rosettes were partly broken into spots. Reginald Innes Pocock described it as a subspecies, Panthera pardus adersi, in 1932, though genetic work later folded it into the African leopard in 1996.

What makes it a cryptozoological case is its disappearance and the beliefs around it. Many rural Zanzibaris held that witches keep and train leopards and send them to harm villagers, a way of explaining attacks on livestock and the appearance of leopards close to farms. As human population and farming grew in the 20th century, conflict increased, and after the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution a combined anti-witchcraft and leopard-killing campaign was run under a witchfinder. The leopard was later classed as vermin.

Only six skins reached museums, and the last confirmed sighting of a living animal was in the early 1980s. A conservation plan from a CARE-funded project was dropped in 1997 when researchers found no evidence of the cat, although local officials were more hopeful and killings were still recorded in the mid 1990s. The anthropologists Helle Goldman and Martin Walsh have written about the clash between the beliefs of villagers and the views of scientists.

In 2018 a camera trap set during the filming of the TV series Extinct or Alive was reported to have recorded a leopard on Unguja. The programme’s host, Forrest Galante, stands by it, but some experts are doubtful because of unclear provenance, unclear rosette patterns and the possibility of an introduced animal. Without DNA evidence, the status of the Zanzibar leopard remains unresolved.

A small leopard with partly broken rosettes that look like spots; local accounts say it is smaller than mainland leopards.

Forest, thicket and farmland on Unguja, including areas near Jozani-Chwaka Bay and south-eastern Unguja.

The Zanzibar leopard is known to conservationists as a case in which witchcraft belief and conservation collided. It is the subject of work by Goldman and Walsh, including ‘Chasing imaginary leopards: science, witchcraft and the politics of conservation in Zanzibar’.