The Tsavo Lion Attacks of 1898 (Episode 68)

In 1898, an ambitious railway project intended to connect Kenya and Uganda  to the coast ran into trouble when construction hit the Tsavo River valley in Kenya. There, two of the local lions - both oversized, fearless, and very smart - spent nine months terrorizing the labor camps with nighttime attacks, killing between 35 and 135 laborers and injuring dozens more. 

On this episode, we're discussing those lions, aka The Tsavo Man-Eaters, aka The Ghost and The Darkness. We'll get into how they behaved, attacked, escaped, and were ultimately hunted down by the project's construction manager, J. H. Patterson (who narrowly escaped being eaten himself).

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Sources:

"The Man Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures" by J. H. Patterson, 1919

"Tsavo Man Eaters" by A. Black for Atlas Obscura, 2012 

"Tsavo Lions: Were bad teeth to blame for these man-eaters’ taste for humans?" Staff writer for the Field Museum blog, 2018

"Man-Eaters of Tsavo", by P. Raffaele for Smithsonian Magazine, 2010

"A Cultural Leap at the Dawn of Humanity" by E. Yong for The Atlantic, 2018