TANGANYIKA: Murder by Lion

“The beast.” said the local court in the dispassionate tones of bewigged British justice, “appears to be a human being who has been brought up to kill on the orders of those in charge of him, and to kill with bestial ferocity. While employed in its inhuman task, the creature disguises itself in the skin of a lion, or partly in lion skins and partly in baboon skins.”

Such bizarre beasts—human beings usually hopped up with hashish and kept in captivity by local experts in black magic —are no strangers to the orderly process of British justice in Africa. In much of Africa the trained, crazed killers masquerade as leopards, perform their dark deeds in leopard fashion by pouncing on the backs of unsuspecting victims from the low-hanging branches of forest trees, slashing their backs and necks with razor-sharp knives fitted to their fingers like claws. In Tanganyika, however, lions are man’s most prevalent enemy. There the fashion trend is toward lion skins. Some 40 years ago in the bush of Mkalama District, the private stable of lionmen trained and kept by one ambitious “sorcerer” (a practitioner of black magic as opposed to a witch doctor, who deals in white magic) committed an estimated 200 murders in a single three-month period.

Like a Dog. Except for a brief outbreak in 1946, when 103 cases of leonine murder were reported, Tanganyika’s lion-men were relatively passive until late last year when a nve-year-old girl was dragged into the bush near Dodoma, killed, disemboweled and dissected. Soon afterward, local justice learned the reason. A native woman had a grudge against her son because he had thrown her second husband’s bow and arrows out of his hut (a grave insult). With the support of her sister, she sent a messenger to hire a lionman from a.sorcerer in the next village. “It was a human being,” the messenger told the court, “and it was a woman. It walked like a dog and it sat like a dog. Its head was like a human, but it was covered with a lion skin. I was not afraid of it because Muhandi, the sorcerer, told me that it was a soft lion and would not harm me.”

Ghee & Porridge. For several weeks, the vengeful women kept the human lion in their house, feeding it on ghee and porridge, and laying their plans. Then they sent it after the son’s favorite niece. The child’s mother watched in horror as the thing ran off with her baby in its mouth. All that was found of the child later was a few pieces of skull, her toes, kidneys and some scraps of cloth. The Tanganyika court found both women and Lion Trainer Muhandi guilty of murder. The sorcerer appealed on the ground that he had not even seen his lion for three months before the murder.

Last week. in the austere severity of a fogbound London, Her Majesty’s Judicial Committee of the Privy Council listened solemnly to the case of a murder by a lion-woman in the heart of Africa. Muhandi’s appeal was denied; he would be hanged for murder, along with the two women, in accordance with the sentence of the Tanganyika court.