Sometimes I wonder whatever happened to them—the Lion Boy, the Leopard Boy. It’s been nearly 50 years, and I wonder if it all worked out well for them.
I met them at Western Illinois University in Macomb, a pretty farming village straddling the railroad, far from the urban jungle I called home. I had never strayed far from Chicago, so it felt like going to a new world when I headed to a rural state school in the farmlands at 18, where I expected to meet kids who were far different from me.
In that, I wasn’t disappointed.
There was my roommate, Dave, for example, whom I met for the first time when I walked into my dorm room. He was from a suburb just outside of St. Louis, a town so far south from Chicago that I could barely understand his accent.
Or my new friend, Lee, from mid-state Champaign, a large enough city in itself. He too had an accent, but at least I could make it out. Still, his behavior was strange, like his inability to resist staring at the sky when he came to visit me in my parents’ home near O’Hare Field. He had never seen a jet plane so close overhead.
Or all those kids from Illinois farms who had never been to a town even as big as Macomb, with a real university nestled at its edge. You could pick them out even before speaking with them because they all wore bangs down to their eyebrows that was supposed to make them look cool, like the Beatles, but always came off a bit goofy, like Moe of the Three Stooges.
But of all of the different people I met, the most different were the Lion Boy and the Leopard Boy.
It was the mid-1960’s, a time when new nations were forming all over the African continent, each young nation struggling to find its way in the world. It was a time of decolonization, and new nations like Kenya, Zambia, Tanzania and independent Congo were being formed, governed by tribes that worked together to shoulder their way forward as nations.
Their elders had agreed to pool their resources and send their best and brightest to America to learn so that they might return as young men and lead not just their tribes but their new nations out of the stone age and into the space age. They needed leaders in all fields—engineering, business, education, and even political science.
There were as many as a dozen or so such Africans on our campus, all sent by their governments to be educated in America.
Like the farm boys, there was no mistaking the young Africans when you saw them coming. Their skin was darker than that of any African-American students on campus. Some—though not all—still wore tribal robes to class.
But even that wasn’t their most identifiable difference from us.
Because when Lion Boy approached, you saw that he bore scars on his face, sliced there by elders to imitate the whiskers of the lion, which was his tribe’s totem. It was a bit harder to see the difference in Leopard Boy—until he took off his shirt to reveal the clusters of raised keloid scars all over his torso, cut there to mimic the spots of his tribe’s leopard totem.
It would be unthinkable for any American student to imagine going through such a brutal ritual at the hands of our parents or community leaders, but these young men wore their scars proudly. Any other student on campus would consider such features to be disfigurements, and in fact many of us did so. Some even called it child abuse to inflict such scars on a minor.
But their scars did not seem disfigurements to them. They were a sign that they were men, after all. And though they were our age as we walked from class to class on the campus, it seemed to us that they were, indeed, men—far more so than any of us American teenage boys were.
They had no interest in sporting events, or parties, or even dating. They were there for an education and they were serious about it, for on their shoulders would stand the future of nations.
The campus was large enough that I never got to know any of those young African men personally. I would just see them on the way to classes, none of which they shared with me because I was a liberal arts major and most of them were in the school of sciences.
But I did get to share a few words with two of them now and then—Lion Boy and Leopard Boy. I never knew their names, but I remember telling them that I admired their life’s mission, and I wished them well.
A half-century later, I think of them now and then and wonder whatever happened to them. Did they become the leaders their nations hoped they would be? Do their sons and grandsons bear the same scars that they did? Do those children appreciate the strength of those broad shoulders that bore their nation into a new and wondrous age?
I wish you well, Lion Man and Leopard Man. I hope your lives have been as magnificent and fearless as the totems for which you were marked into manhood.
You may never know it, but you have left your permanent mark on me as well.
