The initiation societies of Sierra Leone and its neighbours are closed, and this article describes what they are rather than what happens inside them.
Poro for men and Sande, or Bondo, for women are the institutions through which a person becomes an adult member of the community. They control initiation, hold authority over land and custom, discipline members, and historically arbitrated disputes and regulated trade in ways that chieftaincy alone did not. Sande is unusual in West Africa for the prominence of its masked figure, worn by a woman, and both societies retain wide membership. Their internal proceedings are secret by rule, and the atlas names them as closed rather than reconstructing them.
The colonial record contains a body of material that has to be handled carefully. Between the 1890s and the 1910s British authorities in the Sierra Leone protectorate prosecuted a series of killings attributed to a human leopard society, and a special commission court convicted and executed a number of people. K. J. Beatty, a participant, published an account in 1915 that treated the society as an established cannibalistic institution.
Historians now read the same record in genuinely opposing ways: as evidence of a real society, as a colonial construction assembled from confessions under pressure, or as a misreading of a real but different institution. Christine Whyte's study of the trials sets out how contested the evidence is, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it.