If you’re ever forced to hike through lion country the first rule is that you should never travel at night. Lions hunt at night.
Throughout recent decades thousands – more likely hundreds of thousands – of people have made the decision to break that golden rule as they crossed walked more than 30 miles across South Africa’s biggest park. Kruger National Park’s 7,523 sq miles of savannah, thorn scrub and riverine forests is packed with more than 2,000 lions, around 1,000 leopards and a dangerous population of 17,000 elephants. The chance of survival for anyone who sets out unarmed on a nocturnal trek across Kruger (an area just a little smaller than New Jersey) is likely to be far less than one in a hundred.
Yet towards the end of the Mozambican Civil War (1977-1992) the number of refugees fleeing westwards into South Africa each year had reached an estimated 1.7 million. Kruger’s uninhabited wilderness forms most of the western border between the two countries, and a great many of these refugees had little alternative to running the gauntlet of Kruger’s predators.
Young lions watch the photographer closely. It is unlikely that they would associate the passengers of a vehicle as potential prey but a lone human on foot could be in a risky situation even by day…and at night, when the pride is in hunting mode, most experts will agree that anything could happen/Mark Eveleigh
In his book, Shaping Kruger, respected nature writer Mitch Reardon pointed out that rangers, border patrols and anti-poaching teams regularly came across half-devoured human remains, torn and bloodied clothing and discarded possessions. On one occasion a tourist guide was horrified to see jackals gnawing at the carcass of a woman but, with bile rising in his throat, he successfully distracted his VIP guests from the sight. Another game-driving vehicle came across a traumatized 11-year-old who had been forced to listen in her hiding place while lions ate her mother.
The majority of such gruesome finds, however, were never reported and to this day you’re unlikely to find the lions of Kruger on any list of the world’s most notorious man-eating predators.
Colonel John Henry Patterson made the Man-eaters of Tsavo infamous and told the story of some of their roughly 140 victims in gruesome detail, and fellow hunter Jim Corbett wrote about the Indian leopard that killed more than 400 people in Man-eaters of Kumaon. The so-called Champawat Tigress was believed to have killed 436 people in a reign of terror that stretched between Nepal and India before she was shot (also by Corbett) in 1911.
More recently, in Ghosts of Tsavo award-winning journalist Philip Caputo described the killing spree that took place in Njombe, Tanzania, when more than 1,500 people were killed by several generations of lions in the 1930s. While Caputo described that as the ‘all-Africa record,’ his book failed to make any mention whatsoever of the lion prides of northern Kruger.
Reardon, whose Shaping Kruger is the definitive book on the environmental history of South Africa’s flagship park, is one of the few to even mention the incidents: “It’s impossible to estimate the total number of people killed by Kruger’s man-eating lions during Mozambique’s civil war,” Reardon told National Parks Traveler. “Certainly more than 2,000. Although the Kruger authorities denied it at the time there was an unofficial policy of silence surrounding the man-eaters. It was hoped that the mounting death toll would discourage more refugees from attempting the crossing.”
Naturally, deaths were never reported by eye-witnesses either. The refugees who made it safely across invariably filtered into the South African populace without breathing a word of the nocturnal hell they’d passed through. Beside the lions, giant herbivores like elephants, rhinos, buffalo and hippos are dangerously unpredictable at night since they are on the alert for the presence of predators. Hand hyena and leopards are opportunistic killers who rarely turn down easy prey. A pride of lions that could dispatch an antelope within minutes will leave little evidence of a human corpse. Any scraps would promptly be cleaned up by hyena, jackals and vultures so the human remains that were discovered would have represented only a small part of the death toll and the possible extent of the slaughter remained unknown.
In his self-published 2005 book, The Man-eaters of Eden: Life and Death in Kruger National Park, investigative journalist Robert R. Frump wrote the only detailed account of Kruger’s human migration. He estimated that by 1985 around 18,000 refugees were being captured in the park by rangers and border guards.
Frump very logically pointed out that this poorly incentivized human police force (a maximum of about 820 people operating noisily along 217.5 miles (350 kilometers) of park boundary in daylight hours when the refugees were laying low) still averaged around five arrests per day. How many more, he wondered, could a phalanx of silent nocturnal carnivores – equipped with highly-attuned senses, night-vision and an insatiable hunger for protein – track down?
Africa’s most famous annual migration takes place farther north in the Serengeti and it is estimated that 4,000 or so lions in that area are responsible for the majority of the 250,000 wildebeest and zebra that die each year. The virtually defenseless primates we know as homo sapiens are infinitely easier sources of protein even than a humble impala.
Since Kruger was also home to vast herds of more ‘orthodox’ prey, most naturalists considered it unlikely that any of Kruger’s prides actually specialized in hunting humans. We can only hope that the majority of the refugees reached the western fringe of the park before they fell to the predators of what Frump, perhaps ironically, called Eden.
While many experts believe that the lions of Kruger almost certainly killed more than 2,000 refugees, Frump calculated that if Kruger’s predators managed a kill-rate of only one percent then they would have consumed an astounding 13,380 Mozambicans in the four and a half decades leading up to 2005.
Buffalo make ideal prey for a large pride of lions since the pay-off is excellent in terms of meat. Small antelope are usually too agile to be worth the effort and are usually considered unworthy of the energy expenditure needed to catch one. A human, however, is one of the most defenseless creatures in the bush/Mark Eveleigh
If they had known the terror they would have had to endure, many of the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who were desperate to escape the war would very likely have attempted the journey anyway. The possibility of death by lion may have seemed preferable to almost certain horrors at the hands of the various factions of soldiers.
To a generation of young men in war-torn Mozambique, the arduous and potentially fatal journey to Johannesburg – jompejozi they called it – became a rite of passage. For the vast majority, even the horror of life underground in the South African mines (offering, for them, unimagined wealth) was infinitely preferable to forced conscription into the brutal Renamo guerrilla units.
As the zebras, wildebeest, impala, and buffalo had long since learned, the only hope for survival lies in safety in numbers. While the refugees were forced to spread themselves far and wide along the border, there were some routes that became particularly popular. The Cahorra Bassa powerlines – running arrow-straight for 31 miles (50 kilometers) from just south of the Pafuri Border Camp to the park boundary near Punda Maria Gate – were the most reliable navigational beacons.
Thousands of heavily-laden, ill-equipped, famine-weakened men, women and children set out to trek along the lines. Often they were heavily-laden with possessions and the food they would need for the crossing. Even a healthy person traveling in daylight would take several days to cross such a wilderness. Avoiding the flashlights that might give their positions away to guards, they were guided by the moonlight on the electricity pylons and the dimly-visible maintenance track that shadows the powerlines. When predators appeared, they battered on iron pots to make as much noise as possible. It was a strategy that must presumably have been successful in the early days, but it backfired to horrendous effect once this human migration became a predictable aspect of Kruger’s natural habitat.
The Cahorra Bassa powerlines pass within five kilometers of Klopperfontein waterhole and it wasn’t long before the Klopperfontein Pride had learned to stake out the powerlines for this nightly source of protein. The noise that the refugees made with their pots – as, perhaps, they were startled by the ever-skulking hyenas – had the diabolical effect of a ‘dinner bell’ and before long the refugees were unwittingly luring the lions rather than repelling them.
A male and a female gaze fixedly at approaching wildebeest. Their eyesight — phenomenal even by day — is six times more effective than human eyesight at night. With impressive hearing and an innate sense of stealth they are almost impossible for a human on foot in darkness to detect. At least until it is too late/Mark Eveleigh
Finally a Central Kruger ranger took matters into his own hands. A member of the Shangaan tribe, he crossed back into Mozambique and traveled among the villages warning people of the inestimable risk they were taking in these nocturnal crossings.
“Cross in groups of 30 people for safety,“ he said. “Do that and I’ll make sure that the rangers turn a blind eye.”
Many took him at his word and predation dropped off in the Central Kruger sector that is known as ‘Cat Camp’ almost overnight.
Finally, in 2005, the South African government admitted Mozambican visitors for a maximum of 30 days and the human migration through Kruger dropped to a trickle as other effective gateways into the country opened up.
By that time, prides of 20 or more well-fed lions had long since put to rest the long-term myth that big cats only ‘turn man-eater’ when they’re sick or starving. The notorious Klopperfontein pride had made a name for themselves as incorrigible man-eaters. In one unprecedented incident, Reardon noted in his book, they even tried to pull a female member of the park staff from the back of a crowded pickup truck. When the decision was finally made to euthanize the pride, the team sent to shoot them simply had to summon them by battering on pots. The subsequent necropsies revealed human remains, clothing, ID cards and Mozambican cash.
The exact extent of predation on humans by the lions of northern Kruger will never be known, but many rangers still believe that most lions in the area would have feasted on humans when opportunity arose. Even today there are reports that the lion prides along Kruger’s rarely-visited northeastern boundary are unusually aggressive.
In an interview with BBC Earth, Douw Grobler (the SANParks veterinarian who hunted down the Klopperfontein pride) spoke about a pride that, as recently as 2013, caught 13 people in 18 days.
Perhaps one day park authorities will mount a memorial to the brave or desperate Mozambican refugees who attempted the crossing and to the many victims who lost their lives to the park’s predators. Perhaps then, too, that brave and resourceful Shangaan ranger – a legend to those in the know in Kruger but whose name should probably not be printed here since he was acting without official sanction – might also be officially commended for the perhaps countless lives he saved.
