The Lions of Njombe
This pride of fifteen lions in southern Tanzania killed around 1,500 people between 1932 and 1947. In terms of numbers, this makes them the greatest man-killers of all time, though the morbid may wish to work out whether the more-famous Man-eaters of Tsavo (see above) were more prolific in terms of their shorter career and fewer numbers. Like all career man-eaters on this list (as opposed to the opportunistic sharks and crocodiles of the Pacific War), the Lions of Njombe possessed preternatural cunning, evading capture or death by conventional means, and were driven to prey on people by exceptional circumstances.
Most lions hunt in pride at night, and can usually be found lounging in the sun close to the previous night’s kill. Not so the Lions of Njombe. The pride was so expert in man-eating that they would travel by night and strike by day, when lion-attacks are least feared. They would also avoid detection by splitting into smaller groups so as to perpetrate several attacks at the same time. When people grew weary and spent more time inside, the lions would jump on the huts’ roofs, claw at the thatching, and simply drop in to procure helpless victims.
The local Bena people, who traditionally lived in disparate, isolated villages, now crowded their homes around the main road for protection. The once-cultivated country fell into overgrowth as people were too terrified to stray far from home (as unsafe as that proved to be). Locals started to speak of the lions as were-lions, sorcerers who could take on leonine form, unsurprising in the light of the unusual behavior of the beasts. Many would not even call the beasts lions, instead referring to them as dudu ya porini (‘insects of the bush’) for fear of inviting their ire.
Attempts to hunt them proved futile. A brave pair of Italian Prisoners of War volunteered to shoot the man-eaters from a platform placed in a tree, but a large male lion climbed into it and spent the night clawing at the terrified men clinging precariously to the tiny branches at the top. Game Warden George Rushby, the man tasked with hunting them down, was also nearly killed several times by charging cats that showed neither fear nor respect. Rushby discovered that the lions lived exclusively off human flesh, eschewing vast herds of fat cattle for the feeble child herding them.
With no other choice but to track the lions on foot and risk being attacked himself, Rushby began picking the lions off a few at a time. After the death of two lionesses in 1947, the man-eating ceased, and life returned to normal in Tanzania. The accepted theory for why the Lions of Njombe turned to man-eating, as with the Wolves of Paris (see above), is that attempts to contain a rinderpest epidemic dramatically reduced prey animals, forcing the pride to look elsewhere for nutrition, resulting in a taste for human flesh that they could not resist.