Your roar is the great tremor in the voice of the world.
Some say your voice answers the call of the thunder there in the vast open spaces of Africa. Your spirit honors the cave dwellers of the olden days where we sought protection from the prowess and presence of your kind because you were the unfathomable predator, often silent, and terrifying, but ultimately the great foil to man.
Even our son Lysander who learned to walk and talk in Africa as a child said you are the “ghost in the grass.” Indeed, who does not know you, a beast that haunts the entire conscience of our species?
Millennia ago you may have taunted our dreams in the caves of Chauvet and forced early man to cower behind fire and tell stories of your amazing power. Still others sang songs of protection against your vaunted species.
I am still bewildered by the time a young lioness Kamunyak, the blessed one, adopted a baby oryx antelope as one of her own back in 2002 in Kenya. She had lost her family, her mother, her sister and took the oryx baby as part of her family. She amazed biologists all over the world. Whatever moved her to adopt a being so very unlike herself, we will never know, but it was born of play and fellow feeling and perhaps even something of compassion. The proverbial lion could lay down with the lamb. It was a lesson for humanity, a lesson for us all. You are a killer, yes, but you are so much more!
We grew up side by side there on the plains, on the savannah where we too began. You were so noble and magisterial in your stance that our royalty had to have you as their emblem. We have honored you all over the world in insignia, on shields, on fountains, on flags, on castles, on temples. You have been the emblem of royalty for kings for millennia and yet they have persecuted you and shot you as if challenged by your great pride, unmatchable and regal beyond compare, like the great predator of Africa that you are.
And yet you were so superb in your ability to take life and colonizers’ cattle in the 20th century that you also became vermin for the empire makers in Africa. You were so magnificent that they had to possess you in death. In our confusion we started to destroy you willfully, remorselessly, like murderers. But when you killed, it was always for food. You were stronger, faster, more cunning.
“A lion does not except for food, kill nor fight nor interfere with other living creatures,” wrote Martin Johnson in 1929. That is more than can be said of man. How many of you were there then? Half a million? More?
