Confession of the Lioness

Author’s Note

In 2008, the company I work for sent fifteen young people to serve as environmental field officers during a program of seismic prospecting in Cabo Delgado, northern Mozambique. During the same period and in the same region, lions began to attack people. Within a few weeks, there were more than ten fatal attacks. This number increased to twenty in about four months.

Our young colleagues were working in the bush, sleeping in campaign tents, and moving around on foot between villages. They were an easy target for the lions. Hunters were urgently needed in order to provide protection. And, of course, this urgency was all the greater because of the need to protect the country folk of the area. Our advice to the oil company was that it should take complete responsibility for protecting against this threat: The lions that had been eating people needed to be eliminated. Two experienced hunters were contracted and traveled from Maputo to Palma, the town at the center of these attacks. Once in town, they recruited other, local hunters to join the operation. In the meantime, the number of victims killed had increased to twenty-six.

The hunters underwent two months of frustration and terror, responding to daily calls for help until they managed to kill the murderous lions. But it wasn’t just these difficulties they had to face. It was suggested to them time after time that the real culprits were inhabitants of the invisible world, where rifles and bullets were no use at all. Gradually, the hunters realized that the mysteries they were having to confront were merely symptoms of social conflicts for which they had no adequate solution.

I lived through this whole situation at close quarters. The frequent visits I made to where this drama was taking place gave me the idea for the story that I am about to tell, which was inspired by real facts and people.