Across West and Central Africa the leopard is the king's animal, and the association is enforced rather than merely expressed. Among the Asante, the Kuba, the Bamileke and at Benin, leopard skin, leopard teeth and leopard imagery are restricted to the ruler and to those he permits, and the killing of one may have to be reported to the palace.
Benin made the point in metal. The oba kept living leopards and had them led in procession, and the palace held pairs of brass leopards and ivory leopards as regalia, some of them now among the best known objects taken in the punitive expedition of 1897 and held in European museums. A pair of ivory leopards in the Royal Collection and the brass leopards in the British Museum are from that seizure.
The logic is about how the animal behaves rather than how strong it is. A leopard hunts alone and silently, takes what it chooses, and is rarely seen doing it. A lion is a king in European heraldry because it is loud and social and at the top of a visible hierarchy; the leopard is a king in West Africa because it does not need any of that.
The Kuba nyim and the Bamileke fon both use the leopard as the central emblem of office, and among the Kuba the ruler's praise names include it directly.