The same qualities that make the leopard a king make it a threat, and the traditions carry both readings without embarrassment. A being that hunts alone, invisibly, and kills without warning is either your ruler or your enemy, and which one depends on where you stand.
Across the forest belt the leopard is a standard form for a witch to take, and accusations frequently allege exactly that. The reasoning is available to anyone: a person who kills covertly and is never caught doing it is behaving like the animal.
The leopard societies of West and Central Africa are the historical version of this. Colonial records from Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Cameroons describe associations whose members were accused of killing while dressed in leopard skins and using iron claws, and colonial courts tried and executed people for it. How much of that record is a real practice, how much is a genuine institution misread by administrators who wanted a conspiracy, and how much is a moral panic that produced its own confessions is genuinely contested among historians, and this atlas does not settle it.
What is not in doubt is that the double reading is indigenous rather than colonial. Royal and dangerous are not two traditions in disagreement; they are one tradition, describing one animal accurately.