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- Herausgeber: Nature Press
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
In some rural areas of East Africa, such as southern Tanzania, parts of Mozambique and Malawi, so-called ‘spirit lions’ - man-eaters, man-eating lions - are making a name for themselves. One such area is the Nkhotakota Game Reserve in Malawi, which has been almost emptied by poachers. In a hopelessly unsuitable hire car, the author and a friend cross the long deserted reserve on their way to Lake Malawi - unaware of what awaits them there. The authentic story tells of this journey through the ghostly forest, which gradually turns into a horror trip. Illustrated eBook with numerous photos and maps.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Inhaltsverzeichnis
Malawi Secondary Road
Kai Althoetmar
Malawi Secondary Road
In the Nkhotakota Ghost Forest
Imprint:
Title of the book: „Malawi Secondary Road. In the Nkhotakota Gost Forest“.
Year of publication: 2025.
Publisher:
Nature Press
Kai Althoetmar
Am Heiden Weyher 2
53902 Bad Münstereifel
Germany
E-Mail: Althoetmar[at]aol.com
Text: © Kai Althoetmar.
Cover photo: Lion in the bush grass. Photo: Puliarf, CC BY 2.0.
The research for this book was self-financed and without grants or benefits from third parties.
"It was now about three o’clock in the morning and Francis Macomber, who had been asleep a little while after he had stopped thinking about the lion, wakened and then slept again, woke suddenly, frightened in a dream of the bloody-headed lion standing over him, and listening while his heart pounded, he realized that his wife was not in the other cot in the tent. He lay awake with that knowledge for two hours. "
Ernest Hemingway, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
I.
Why not start with a murder? Or rather, a mass murder committed over a period of years. The Man Eaters of Njombe were insidious, they killed bestially, never alone, always as a mob, their victims were unsuspecting and defenceless. Their raid lasted fifteen years, in the end they are said to have hunted down up to one thousand five hundred people. This took place between 1932 and 1947 in the district of Njombe in the south of what is now Tanzania.
Murder, bestial, mob - that is the human, anthropocentric view of what happened. Man as the centre of the world. Only his view of things counts. You can't question those who killed. They were lions. There were twenty-two animals. The tragedy was preceded by human intervention in the natural balance. In the then British-administered Tanganyika, as Tanzania was called before its unification with Zanzibar, the colonial government had killed masses of lion prey to control the cattle plague that had killed entire herds of cattle. The lions changed their behaviour. What else could they have done when gazelles and antelopes became scarce? From then on, human meat was on their menu.
Unlike most of their conspecifics, they did not hunt at night. Death came in the afternoon. At night, they walked fifteen or twenty miles from one village around the small town of Njombe to the next. There they left their trail of blood. The huts of the locals were primitive, the walls made of thin mud or just straw. The animals broke through doors and walls into the houses. Or they lay in wait for the people outside, in front of the huts, in the fields, on the paths. No one was safe anywhere. Like relay racers, the lions are said to have taken turns dragging people out of the villages and into the bush. Why were the villages not warned - for fifteen years? According to reports at the time, the deaths were taboo among the villagers, the fear was speechless. A black witchcraft spell lay over the villages like a shadow of death. Superstition had it that men had taken the form of lions. Spirit lions, ghost lions, lion spirits, supernatural powers in the shape of lions.
Even today, people in the region still believe in black magic, in the undead that take revenge on their enemies in the form of lions.
