Not overly fond of baiting his traps with himself, he would follow up the spoor after a nocturnal attack and shoot the resting lion by day. Within two weeks he had shot nine lion - but as many men had also been taken. The black-maned mudzimu struck again and Jock tracked it over twenty miles the following day, coming across the remains of an old Batonga woman who had provided it with a mid-day snack. He pursued it again the following day as its trail turned menacingly back towards Chrundu - but unaware that his doom was at hand, the old lion sedately killed and ate two Batonga tribesmen only a few miles from the camp at Chirundu. While taking a nap after lunch, the black-maned lion also took a round from Jock’s .44-40 which ended his marauding days. With his reward in hand, exunt Jock.

 

But God, in the form of Dr Fraser, had a score to settle with Nyaminyami. The missionary returned to Chirundu the day before Jock dealt with Ol’ Black Mane. Following a fruitless night at his boabab, Fraser was returning to his mission when he spied a lion and lioness stalking one of the white labourers who had taken refuge in a tree after Fraser shouted a warning. Fraser dropped the lioness with a clean shot from his .450 but the lion charged. Less than ten feet from the missionary, he collapsed to the ground, weighed down by an extra 480 grains of lead. The missionary’s reload had been quick and the lion’s charge had been less than it should have - because of his limp. The two main actors had now left the stage. Permanently.

 

Were they mudzimu after all? With only a few exceptions - though there were still many lion about - the reign of terror ended with the demise of the lame cat. Before the road was completed, another seventeen workers would be eaten and another eleven lion shot, but this was mainly due to the laxity that swept over the camp after the two main players were dispatched that week in 1938 - the labourers eschewed their security precautions. That these numbers could be taken as almost “normal” gives a good indication of the scope of the lion problem in general. God 1: Nyaminyami 0.

 

In 1960, following the completion of the Kariba dam all of the Batonga were relocated out of the Zambezi valley below the gorge into the Urungwe and Chewore safari areas and the Mana Pools National Park. I have in my youth hitch-hiked from Harare to Lusaka more than once along that road and walked across that bridge.

 

There was a solitary male lion in what is now northern Zambia named Chiengi Chali early in the last century, and on his own he accounted for at least ninety Africans in 1909 (the Tsavo lions claimed one hundred and thirty victims, you say?). Chiengi Chali’s reign of terror had commenced after the death of an old chief who had prophesied that he would return as a lion and deal with his enemies. The district officer’s boma at Chiengi was fortified, fires were lit, the whole nine yards...but still the lion came, saw and conquered. A large lion with a conspicuously pale coat, he came through roofs and broke down doors - and when a trap gun finally ended his spree he was found to be a young, healthy male. So much for the man-eaters-are-old-and-infirm school of thought.

 

Another variant on the mudzimu theme is that man-eating lions are reincarnations of powerful chiefs or witchdoctors. The legendary East African game warden Bill Harvey’s story of the commanding chief and wizard - or mchawi - Lijonjo has been recounted elsewhere in the African Hunter. One of his nephews, Makochera, had taken half his tribe north out of Mozambique to greener pastures in Tanganyika. After visiting them on occasion, Lijonjo had become convinced that the grass was indeed greener in the north, and proposed to move the whole tribe to Tanganyika. The catch was, Makochera insisted on becoming the paramount ruler. Negotiations broke down, and Lijonjo called upon the spirit of his father to enter the body of a lion and deal with Makochera and his family. The first two victims were taken by a lion barely a week later. Harvey took up the hunt, and on his first foray out, Makochera’s nephew Rajab who was accompanying him was eaten during a night march. The follow up the next day was unsuccessful, and the day after Harvey had left a man was killed at the door of Makochera’s hut. The tribal elders, meanwhile - who had never been amenable to Harvey’s intervention - decided to capture Lijonjo and compel him by force to lift the curse, which the old scoundrel eventually did - and literally the next day the lion all but allowed himself to be shot by Harvey’s game scouts and the rampage was ended.