By the year 1898, pretty much every nation in Europe was leaping over each other to carve up the vast continent of Africa to ensure control of rapidly depleting resources. Many of the top thinkers of the day believed in the Malthusian notion that it was only a matter of time until growing human population consumed everything on Earth, and every nation wanted to make sure they had more than their fair share. It should come as no surprise, that the people who got the short end of the stick in all of this were of course the peoples of Africa. However, perhaps the worst off of all were the peoples of East Africa. Not only was the Arab slave trade still going strong, but a pandemic called Rinderpest had wiped out large portions of their cattle herds and the local big game. As a result, they weren’t really in a position to tell the Europeans to go fuck off.
Now of course the Europeans weren’t without some kind of moral compass. Which is probably why when the British seized control of what is today Kenya and Uganda, they stubbornly insisted it was in order to stop the Arab slave trade. Which might very well have been true, but seems kind of secondary considering the first thing the British started doing was building a railroad from Lake Victoria to the Indian Ocean in order to move resources out of the heart of Africa as quickly as possible. The construction of this railroad was a rather slow endeavor. For some reason, most of the local Africans weren’t really down with helping out, forcing the British to bring in thousands of Sikh laborers from India. Of course, these laborers and the locals didn’t get along well, so violence was not uncommon.
Despite these issues, by 1898 the railroad was largely complete, expect for a key section crossing the region of Tsavo, including a river of the same name. The locals called Tsavo the “Place of Slaughter” which was a pretty apt name given it was often crossed by Arab slave caravans, who were not all that careful in avoiding inventory slippage, which is just a really nice way of saying a lot of god damn newly minted slaves died because of their brutal treatment. Unfortunately for the British and their Sikh railroad builders, Tsavo was where they ran into a new and unforeseen problem. Namely, two very large lions which started killing and eating a shit ton of workers. Not really big fans of getting dragged kicking and screaming from their beds in the middle of the night, the workers built fences from thorny brush and lit bonfires to protect themselves, which did absolutely nothing. As a result, the workers became convinced that the lions were actually supernatural demons, and many fled the area, halting construction on the railroad and bridge.
Now one might wonder why two lions might go on such a killing rampage, to which people who actually live around lions would probably roll their eyes because lions have a tendency to eat whatever the hell they want. However, the situation in Tsavo at the time certainly didn’t help matters. Rinderpest had killed off a lot of the big game, forcing many lions to look for other types of food to eat, such as the long line of dead and/or dying slaves left behind by the Arab slaver caravans. Of course, once the British stopped these caravans from moving through the area, new food sources were needed, and since many lions already had a taste for delicious people meat, the crowded together Sikh workers probably seemed like the perfect alternative.
The head engineer of the bridge construction, John Patterson, was not really down with the whole situation, by which I mean he wanted to get his damn bridge built. Having hunted tigers before in India, he took it upon himself to hunt down the killer lions. Unfortunately, Johnny-boy was not really all that up to the task since he really had zero clue what he was doing. He hunted the lions over a ten month period, including building convoluted traps and snares, but rarely managed to even see them. In the meantime, the lions killed somewhere around one hundred people. The British sent other big game hunters to assist, but Patterson insisted on remaining in charge because once you get a hard on for killing lions, there is really only one cure. Finally, mostly thanks to pure luck, he managed to kill both lions in December.
The railroad was finished not long after, though not before Patterson had to hunt and kill a third man-eating lion which repeatedly attacked a new train station in the area. The bridge was blown up by the Germans just fifteen years later during World War I. As for Patterson, he stayed in Africa, shooting random animals for awhile, and later wrote a book about his adventures that of course made him look like a giant dick swinging hero. This book helped make safari hunts popular, since there has never been a shortage of people wanting to feel like big dick swingers. As for the railroad, it remained active for decades, shipping the wealth of East Africa to Britain, at least until Kenya and Uganda gained their independence in the early 1960’s, at which time it was allowed to largely deteriorate.
Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Colonel_Patterson_with_Tsavo-Lion.jpg