Updating the Inventory of Zanzibar Leopard Specimens

Martin T. Walsh1 and Helle V. Goldman2

T
he Zanzibar leopard Pan-
thera pardus adersi was once
widespread on the Indian
Ocean island of Unguja (Zanzibar,
Tanzania), but most authorities now
consider it to be extinct, or very ne-
arly so (Anonymous 1997, Goldman
& Walsh 2002). This little-known en-
demic has never been studied in the
wild, and our knowledge of it there-
fore rests largely on historical and
ethnographic reports (Goldman &
Walsh 1997, Walsh & Goldman 2007)
and the physical evidence of museum
specimens.

Despite a history of vigorous persecu-

tion, material from Zanzibar leopards
is almost as elusive as proof of their
survival into the present. Recognizing
its potential importance for genetic and
other research, we have compiled data
on known specimens and the history
of their collection, including informa-
tion on material that has been seen or
reported outside of museums. The fol-
lowing notes summarize our findings to
date.
Museum specimens
The standard work on the mammals of
Zanzibar (Pakenham 1984) mentions
only four museum specimens. In the
course of investigating these, however,
we were shown another two, bringing
the total number to six. They are listed
below by museum and date of accessi-
on, together with our current understan-
ding of their provenance:
The Natural History Museum (former-
ly British Museum), London
1. Skin and skull of a young adult male
[BM 19.9.30.2]. This came from the
vicinity of Chwaka on the east coast
of Unguja, and was sent to the muse-
um in 1919 by Dr. William Mansfield
Aders, who held the post of Economic
Biologist in the Zanzibar Protectorate.
It was subsequently described by Po-
cock (1932) as the type of P. p. adersi.
His photograph of the skin was also
reproduced in a paper by Dobroruka
(1965), disputing the identification of
Fig. 1. Zanzibar leopard skins at the Harvard Museum of Comparative
Zoology: MCZ 40953 (left) and MCZ 36709 right (Photo J. Winther-
Hansen).
the subspecies as an island endemic.
2. Skin of an unsexed animal [BM
29.4.1.1]. This was presented to the
museum in early 1929 by John Henry
Vaughan, who was an administrative
officer in Zanzibar and sent many bird
specimens to the British Museum.
Correspondence between Vaughan
and Reginald Pocock later in 1929 in-
dicates that the latter had already deci-
ded to refer this and Aders’s specimen
to a new subspecies. Both specimens
are also discussed by Pakenham
(1984) but there are no photographs of
Vaughan’s skin in the literature.
3. Skin of an unsexed animal, pro-
bably immature [BM (NH) 84.2100].
This was donated to the museum by
A. D. Ingrams in 1984, too late to be
included in Pakenham’s study, which
appeared in the same year. Douglas
Ingrams served as an Agricultural Of-
ficer in Zanzibar in 1925-27, but the
specimen label indicates that it was
collected by his brother, William Ha-
rold Ingrams (1897-1973), who held
a series of administrative posts in the
Protectorate between 1919 and 1933,
and referred to the Zanzibar leopard in
his books (1931, 1942). There are no
published descriptions or photographs
of this headless and tailless skin.
Harvard Museum of Comparative Zo-
ology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
4. Skin and skull of a female [MCZ
36709] (Fig. 1). This specimen origi-
nated in Bungi, south-east of Zanzibar
town. It was collected in 1937 by Ailsa
Nicol Smith, Curator of the Zanzibar
Museum (1935-42), and given to Dr.
Thomas Barbour, the Director of the
Harvard Museum, where it was regi-
stered on 30 March 1938. Pakenham
seems to have been unaware of this
specimen, and there are no descriptions
of it in the literature. A colour photo-
graph of the skin (alongside MCZ
40953, which is on the left) is reprodu-
ced in Walsh & Goldman (2007).
5. Skin and skull of a female [MCZ
40953] (Fig. 1). This leopard was
trapped “by natives” and shot at Fum-
ba, south of Zanzibar town. R. H. W.

 Autumn 2008
 Pakenham’s unpublished natural hi-
story notebooks (1929–56) record that
this specimen was sent by the Zanzi-
bar District Commissioner to the Cu-
rator of the Zanzibar Museum, Ailsa
Nicol Smith, who then forwarded it to
him on 11 July 1939. Pakenham sent
the specimen to Harvard, where it was
registered on 22 June 1940. Richard
Hercules Wingfield Pakenham joined
the administrative service in Zanzibar
in 1929 and was Senior Commissioner
when he retired in 1956, after which
he continued to research and publish
on Zanzibar’s wildlife. Comparison of
the picture of this leopard skin in Pa-
kenham (1984) with that in Walsh &
Goldman (2007) indicates that it has
deteriorated considerably since it was
first photographed.
Zanzibar Museum (formerly also
Peace Memorial Museum), Zanzibar
6. Much-faded mounted skin, sex
unknown, in a display case with dried
grasses and an unattributed photograph
of a leopard trap [Z 1209] (Fig. 2).
The original label (now replaced)
stated that this leopard was shot at
Kisakasaka, south of Zanzibar town,
by the Hon. W. Grazebrook, M.C.,
and was presented by him to the mu-
seum together with the case. William
Grazebrook was a businessman and
long-term resident of Zanzibar who
served on the Legislative Council in
1926-31. There is a colour photograph
of this specimen in Walsh & Goldman
(2007).
We have issued requests relating to
the Zanzibar leopard in NatSCA News
(the newsletter of The Natural Sciences
Collections Association) and other pu-
blications, but have not located any mu-
seum specimens other than the six listed
above.
Other material
All of the museum specimens that we
have identified were collected in the first
half of the 20th century, during the Bri-
tish colonial period. We know that signi-
ficant numbers of leopards were killed
in the second half of the century, many
of them in a government-sanctioned
campaign of leopard extermination that
began after the Zanzibar Revolution of
1964 (Walsh & Goldman 2007). What
CAT News 49 
Fig. 2. Mounted Zanzibar leopard in the Zanzibar Museum (Z 1209) (Photo J. Winther-Hansen).
happened to all of the skins? In the
1970s at least some of them were de-
livered to the state shoe factory, which
processed hides and skins (Halsted
1979), but their ultimate destination is
obscure. Some pieces of skin and other
leopard body parts believed to have
magico-medicinal properties must have
remained in Zanzibar (see below). Lo-
cal leopard skins that found their way
onto the international market were pre-
sumably mixed up with others from
East Africa and the Horn. It is possible
that complete skins found their way into
private collections, but we have no evi-
dence for this at present.
When we began our research on the
Zanzibar leopard in the mid-1990s we
occasionally heard of skins being offered
for sale by local hunters, and of some
being taken to the African mainland or
the Persian Gulf (Marshall 1994, Selkow
1995, Goldman & Walsh 1997, Palmer
2005). In his dissertation for the Col-
lege of African Wildlife Management at
Mweka, Khamis A. Khamis (1995) clai-
med that he had photographed the skin
and claws of a Zanzibar leopard killed
(at an unspecified location) in Septem-
ber 1993, having paid for permission to
do so. At least eleven leopards are re-
ported to have been killed in Zanzibar in
1993 (Goldman & Walsh 2002), and it
is not possible using available records to
determine which if any of these Khamis
was referring to. We also do not know
the current whereabouts of his photo-
graph.
The only leopard skin that we have
seen ourselves outside of a museum are
two rectangular pieces in the possession
of the former Secretary of the Zanzibar
National Hunters (Wasasi wa Kitaifa),
who assisted us in our research in July
1996. These two fragments were said
to have been taken from a leopard that
was killed by hunters at Muyuni, on the
south-west coast of Unguja, in 1986.
Photographs of the two pieces that ap-
peared in our original report (Goldman
& Walsh 1997) were later lost in the
offices of the Jozani-Chwaka Bay Con-
servation Project (JCBCP), but pictures
of one of the pieces (Fig. 3) survived
and have been used in subsequent pu-
blications (the pdf version of the report
and Walsh & Goldman 2007).
A number of Zanzibari hunters
claim to be able to identify leopard fae-
ces, but efforts to collect and preserve
specimens for later analysis have so far
Fig. 3. Fragment of Zanzibar leopard skin in
the possession of the former Secretary of the
Zanzibar National Hunters, 1996 (Photo H.
V. Goldman).
proved unsuccessful. On 12 March 1997
HVG collected dessicated scat, said to
be leopard, in the vicinity of Hazun-
gukwa cave in Kitogani, south-east of
Jozani Forest. However, this specimen
was also lost in JCBCP offices before
it could be properly analyzed. A similar
fate befell a relatively fresh specimen
that was collected by forestry staff on
19 August 2001 at the site of a reputed
leopard kill (or kills) at Wangwani wi-
thin the boundaries of what is now Joza-
ni-Chwaka Bay National Park. A search
for this specimen at Forestry headquar-
ters in Zanzibar town, undertaken for
MTW on 5 April 2002, proved fruitless,
and it was presumed that a cleaner or
other staff member had thrown it away.
It was suggested that these losses
might not have been accidental, but a
consequence of the fear that many Zan-
zibaris have of the leopard and anything
associated with it. The Zanzibar leopard
is widely believed to be used for nefa-
rious purposes by witches, and unpro-
tected contact with leopards and leopard
parts is thought to cause serious illness,
one of the symptoms of which is the
vomiting or excretion of fur (Goldman
& Walsh 1997). But hunters and others
who have taken out magical insurance
against this kind of harm are more re-
laxed about handling leopard products,
which have their own magical and
medicinal uses. An American student,
Scott Marshall (1994), was shown the
claws of a leopard said to have been kil-
led three years earlier; and in September
1994 the adventurer Lajos Jozsa (a.k.a.
Louis Palmer) photographed leopard
claws in the possession of a man in a
village near Jozani (pers. comm. 2005,
Palmer 2005).
It may still be possible to obtain frag-
ments of leopard skin and other material
of local provenance in Zanzibar, if not
complete specimens. Leopard products
are no longer sold openly in the traditi-
onal herbalists’ shops in Zanzibar town,
though they are alleged to be available
in some of them ‘under the counter’.
Our own experience suggests that Zan-
zibar leopard parts might be more readi-
ly obtained from hunters and herbalists
in rural Unguja, though the possibility
of securing fresh or near-contemporary
material is surely diminishing, if it has
not disappeared altogether.
Concluding remarks
 Autumn 2008
The Zanzibar leopard was one of the
27 subspecies of leopard recognized
by Pocock (1932) on the basis of coat
pattern, morphology and geography.
Phylogenetic analysis (Uphyrkina et al.
2001) has suggested the reduction of
these classical trinomial subspecies to
a minimum of nine discrete populati-
ons, one of which (P. p. pardus) covers
the whole of Africa. Material from the
Zanzibar leopard was not included in
this study and the genetic consequences
and classificatory implications of its
geographic isolation on Unguja island
have yet to be determined using current
methods. If presumptions of the Zanzi-
bar leopard’s extinction are true, muse-
um specimens and other material that
can still be retrieved may be all that we
have for reconstructing its evolutionary
history and assessing the full significan-
ce of its loss.
Acknowledgements
A large number of people have contributed
to the research on which this article is based.
We are especially grateful to Daphne Hills,
James Hatton and Alison Harding at the Na-
tural History Museum in London and Tring;
Judith Chupasko and Mark Omura at the
Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology,
Ms. Maneno Ibrahim in the Zanzibar Mu-
seum; Bakari S. Asseid, Thabit S. Masoud,
Yussuf Haji Kombo, Sheha Idrissa Hamdan,
and Ali Ali Mwinyi in the Commission for
Natural Resources, Zanzibar; and, for help
of different kinds, Suleiman Iddi Hamadi,
Lajos Jozsa/Louis Palmer, Peter Luptak, Jill
Pakenham, John Pakenham, and Velizar Si-
meonovski.
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1
Department of Social Anthropology, Uni-
versity of Cambridge, Free School Lane,
Cambridge, CB2 3RF, United Kingdom
<mtw30@cam.ac.uk>
2
Norwegian Polar Institute, Polar Environmen-
tal Centre, NO-9296, Tromsø, Norway