THE MAN-EATING LIONS OF TSAVO (PT 1): THE GHOST AND THE DARKNESS
1001 Heroes, Legends, Histories & Mysteries Podcast
Jon Hagadorn
4.4 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The incredible true story (the 1996 movie is largely fiction) of a British railroad project in Kenya in 1898 that was being harassed by man-eating lions which would attack coolies in the night,dragging them out of their tents screaming for help. Coolies, African workers, teamsters, and British authorities were mauled over a peroid of 9 months, with an estimated death toll of 150. A man named Lt. Col John Henry Patterson tracked the lions for months, finally bringing them down in December of 1898. He wrote a book called 'The Maneaters of Tsavo' from which we quote passages often as his account is first-hand and gripping. It also reveals the history of Kenya at the turn of the century with British, Portuguese, and Arab influence. His book, while in the public domain (1907) is also featured at Amazon, and we highly recommend it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one heroes, legends, histories, and mysteries |
| 0:36.2 | podcast. This is your host and storyteller, |
| 0:39.1 | John Haggardorn, and I've got quite a story for you today. This story has all the elements |
| 0:44.7 | necessary to make it a perfect fit for this podcast, a hero, an African shapeshifter legend of sorts, |
| 0:51.7 | which gave two shamans the power to wreak havoc on the builders of an unwanted |
| 0:55.6 | British railway a history and region steeped in British Portuguese and Arab colonialism and a definite |
| 1:02.3 | mystery being that of two man-eating lions working tandem to kill railway workers |
| 1:07.6 | lions which managed to elude all efforts to kill them for nearly nine months, |
| 1:13.0 | by constantly changing their attack locations, and seeming to constantly outguess their pursuers. |
| 1:19.0 | It all happened in 1898, in Kenya, British East Africa, where Britain had invested heavily in a railway |
| 1:26.1 | which would connect the East Coast port of Mombasa with Uganda, |
| 1:30.3 | about 130 miles west of Mombasa through some of the wildest country imaginable, |
| 1:35.4 | a haven for wildlife and a feeding ground for big lions. |
| 1:40.6 | Into this wild area, Britain plant a railroad, which would deliver goods far inland and bring |
| 1:46.3 | the richness of Uganda out in terms of everything from minerals to tusks, and to build that railroad |
| 1:52.2 | required 17,000 laborers from India and partially Pakistan, along with scores of African natives and |
| 1:59.4 | British supervisors. |
| 2:08.6 | The laborers, who were called Coolies, set up tent communities which stretched about 16 miles along the route that was being used to lay track, |
| 2:13.1 | with the biggest section located near where the track needed to cross the Salvo River. |
| 2:21.1 | For that huge job, which required building a large trestle and fitting iron girders into the rock face of cliffs on either side of the river, |
| 2:31.1 | as well as blasting a path through rock for the railroad to get to that trestle, an experienced 30-year-old engineer named Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson was brought in. |
| 2:36.1 | As if by some strange fate, almost at the same time Patterson arrived, |
... |
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