The Marsh Lions by Brian Jackman, Jonathan & Angie Scott: book review

The Marsh Lions: The Story of an African Pride (1982, this edition 2012) is set in the Masai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya.

It is the true story of a pride of lions, followed and observed for two years from January 1978 to January 1980. There is a Postscript from February 1980 to September 1981, and this edition has an epilogue written in 2011.

Readers can follow the daily lives of the Marsh lions, which begins with Dark Mane, Old Man, Young Girl, Notch, Shadow, and Mkubwa (Big). Then comes Scar, Brando, Old Girl, and lions of other prides. But it is also the story of the wild dogs, cheetahs, leopards, hyenas, warthogs, elephants, elands, and a myriad of birds, all interacting in their communal kingdom. It is also the story of droughts and rains.

It describes the massive annual migration in June and July when thousands of wildebeest and zebra leave the Serengeti National Park in neighbouring Tanzania and cross the northern border into Kenya. In 1948 land between the Mara River and the Tanzanian border were declared a national reserve, which expanded in 1961.

In many respects the late 1970s and early 1980s was the ‘golden age’ for lions in Kenya when land was abundant and people were scarce.

Beautifully told with sentences such as, ‘In the first golden hour after sunrise, when the sentinel olive trees and flat-roofed acacias flung their long shadows across the grasslands, a Masai youth was walking over the dusty plains’ and the description of meat-eating marabou storks: ‘Hideously ugly, with scabby heads, pendulous neck pouches and leering Skid Row eyes, they stand for hours in the trees, watching for corpses in the river or surveying the Marsh for leftover kills.’

This is the African equivalent of the 1972 British book ‘Watership Down’ by Richard Adams (1920-2016), but infinitely more real, and more unpredictable. Every birth and death and struggle for life is captured in poetic, evocative writing, with amazing glossy colour photographs.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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