The Mulanje Hyenas
Between 1955 and 1962, a clan of spotted hyenas killed 36 people and injured countless others in the Mulanje area of Malawi. The details of this particular case are few, alas, and we have no detail of how the clan was tracked and shot, but the sheer horrific strength and nature of the hyena and the body count make it a worthy incident with which to end this list. Occasional attacks on people are known, and fossilized dung tells us that hyenas have been preying on people for at least 195,000 years, but this clan’s behavior remains unprecedented.
The spotted hyena is amongst the most powerful of all African mammals. They can reach one and a half metres in length, and their bite force is second only to the saltwater crocodile (see above) at 4,500 newtons. As an illustration, the naturalist and writer James Clarke record the damage inflicted by a single hyena bite: ‘[the man’s] face ended below the cheekbones: his nose, palate, upper teeth, tongue, and almost his entire lower jaw were gone’. In recent years clans of spotted hyenas have even been displacing lions as the apex predator in parts of Africa.
The clan of Mulanje were seasonal man-eaters. In summer, when local people were accustomed to sleeping outdoors on account of the heat, the clan would visit the villages to take the unsuspecting. Although the exclusively-human diet of the Lions of Njombe (see above) is an especially unsettling fact, the average of around five people a year taken by this clan is an equally insulting gesture to man’s status as dominant species. The hyenas’ seasonal incorporation of human flesh into their diet reckoned people as no different from the garbage and wild herbivores that make up their usual sustenance.
Little of their victims remained after a night’s feasting. A six-year-old girl was consumed almost entirely, with only the back of her head left, and a man described as ‘the village idiot’ was reduced to bloody scraps of clothes. On another occasion, the clan was surprised mid-attack and responded by ripping off a woman’s arm and fleeing with it into the bush. With such flagrant disrespect, their jubilant, mocking laughter, habit of digging up corpses, and opportunistic nature, it is not hard to see why the hyena is one of the most loathed, and most successful, African mammals.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Arensen, John. “The Man-Eating Lions of Njombe”
Corbett, Jim. Man-eaters of Kumaon. London: Oxford University Press, 1946.
Gast, Phil. “New details: Sharks, secrets and the sinking of the USS Indianapolis”, CNN.
Grice, Gordon. The Book of Deadly Animals. Penguin Books, 2012.
Mannix P, Daniel. “The Wolves of Paris”. eNet Press. 1978.
John Henry Patterson, Frederick Courtney Selous. “The Man Eaters of Tsavo”. Cosimo Classics. 2010
Kincaid, Andrew. “Kesagake the Man-Eater”. Japan Powered.
MacCormick, Alex, ed. The Mammoth Book of Maneaters. London: Robinson, 2003.
Patterson, Col. J.H. The Man-eaters of Tsavo. London: Macmillan, 1927.
Pollard, James. Wolves and Werewolves. London: Robert Hale, 1964.