African Nature Notes and Reminiscences

by Frederick Courteney Selous

Natives living in very small communities, in wild districts where game being still abundant, lions also are consequently fairly numerous, are often troubled at night by these animals. In such cases a man-eating lion usually proves to be an old and almost worn-out beast, which having grown too weak to catch and kill its usual prey, has been driven by hunger to approach the haunts of men. Urged on by its desperate need, such a lion knows no fear, and will not hesitate to enter a small native village or even to force its way into a hut in search of food.

In 1879, whilst hunting elephants in the country to the east of the Chobi or Quito river, I met with a very primitive tribe of natives living in families or very small communities in isolated villages along the bank of the river. Their huts were of the flimsiest description, being formed of a light framework of poles, over which a few grass mats had been stretched; but the two or three, up to half a dozen, ill-made huts which formed each village were always surrounded and protected by a carefully made stockade, the poles forming which were all sharpened at the end and hardened by having been charred in the fire, and so placed that they slanted outwards and would have been very difficult to surmount from the outside. The natives informed me that they had taken this trouble as a defence against lions.

"HE HAD EVIDENTLY BEEN SITTING OR LYING BY A FIRE WHEN CAUGHT."

One morning, in this same district, I came upon most of the skeleton of a man who had been killed and eaten by a lion a few days before. He had evidently been sitting or lying by a fire when caught, and had probably been overtaken by darkness when on his way from one village to another. This man's spears lay close to his bones, so that he must have been holding them in his hand when he was seized. None of my Kafirs would touch them. Apparently it was not etiquette to meddle with the belongings of a dead man, though I think that most of the members of my retinue would not have been above stealing anything they might have found lying about, belonging to a live one.

In April 1878 a lion entered a small Banyai village near the river Umay, in Northern Matabeleland, a short time after I had left it, and, not being able to make its way into any of the huts through the small doorways, all of which had been very carefully barricaded, climbed on the roof of one of them, and tearing away the grass thatching, forced its way in from the top. There were three or four women inside the hut, and it killed them all; but, having gorged itself, was apparently unable to make its escape through the roof again, and was speared to death by the men of the village the next morning through the framework of the hut, after the mud plaster had been removed in places.

A native servant of my own, whom I had left behind in this village, was present when this lion was killed, and he told me that, as soon as it was dead, a huge bonfire was built, on which the carcase of the man-eater was thrown, and the fire kept up until it was quite consumed.

The most cunning and destructive man-eating lion—probably because it was not an old and weakly animal, but in the prime of life—that I ever heard of in South Africa was one which once haunted the neighbourhood of the Majili river, a tributary of the central Zambesi from the north. I gave some account of the doings of this bold and ferocious beast in the course of an article which I contributed to the pages of the Fortnightly Review some twenty years ago, and as I have the kind permission of the editor and proprietor of that publication to do so, I will now retell the story as I originally heard it from one of my own native servants shortly after the occurrences related took place.

In the early part of 1886 two half-caste elephant-hunters, Henry Wall and Black Jantje—the latter for several years both before and after this time a trusted servant of my own—crossed the Zambesi at its junction with the Quito or Chobi, in order to hunt elephants in the country to the north between the Majili and Ungwesi rivers.

They soon heard from the natives that there was a man-eating lion in the district which had already killed several people, and they were therefore careful to see that a strong fence was made every night behind their camp, and sufficient dry wood collected to keep up good fires during the hours of darkness. The two half-civilised hunters were accustomed to sleep by themselves within a strong semicircular fence, the open end of which was protected by a large fire. All but one of their native boys—wild Batongas and Masubias—slept together, lying in a row with a strong fence behind them and a succession of fires near their feet. The boy who would not sleep with the others, always lay by one or other of the fires by himself.