The Man-Eaters of Njombe

The Man-Eaters of Njombe were a pride of lions in the Njombe district of southern Tanzania, then the British territory of Tanganyika, that preyed on the Bena people between 1932 and 1947. The pride is usually said to have numbered about fifteen lions, and estimates of their victims run from about 1,000 to 1,500, which would make it the worst outbreak of man-eating by lions ever recorded.

The lions behaved unlike most: they killed during the afternoon and used the night to travel 25 to 30 kilometres to a new village, so no one knew where they would strike next. Many people believed they were not ordinary lions but were controlled by Matamula Mangera, a deposed headman and witch doctor, who had unleashed them on his own people in revenge. A likelier cause is that a colonial campaign against the cattle disease rinderpest had killed off much of the lions’ wild prey.

After the Second World War, the game ranger George Gilman Rushby was sent to stop them. Tracking them on foot, and nearly killed by charging lions several times, he and his scouts killed the pride a few at a time; after two lionesses were shot in 1947 the attacks stopped. Rushby wrote that the famous man-eaters of Tsavo were very small fry compared to these. Local people believed the killing ended only because Matamula was restored to his post. Rushby later proposed what became Ruaha National Park.