So promises the title page of Leopard Men, an action-packed melodrama set in Northern Nigeria and first presented at the Crown Theatre in Eccles, Lancashire, in September 1924. It focuses on a group of Europeans struggling to survive the hell that is West Africa, as they seek to impose and maintain British rule and systems of commerce on the local population:

The main interest, however, centres on a native woman's obsessive desire for Jimmy, a dissolute white trader who, having previously seduced her, has now brought his wife over from England. The abandoned Fatuma Fulani is so distraught (‘brown woman got heart same – like white woman’) that she determines to take bloody revenge by adopting the garb and weapons of a local cult whose members disguise themselves in leopard skins and attack their enemies (‘She instantly grips his throat with claws fixed to her hands’). All ends happily.