The Lucky Lions of Liuwa

I had the very good fortune to meet the famous lioness, Lady Liuwa, and some of her pride in the Liuwa National Park in western Zambia recently. The sad story of Lady Liuwa – but don’t worry it has a happy ending – has become an icon of lion conservation in the Liuwa National Park. 

Once the last lonely lion left in the park, Lady Liuwa now has a National Geographic documentary to her name, her own Facebook page and a Wikipedia write up. Here you can see her having a great big yawn about it all, typical cat.

We were staying at the new King Lewanika Lodge which is seriously sexy. The decor blends in with the bush, the colours are ancient; animal, stone. By night you can hear the lions, the roar that breaks the night, makes you shift a little in your luxury bed, primal memories astir.   

 By day you can feel that this is lion country. The blonde grass, the woodland pockets, the thousands of plains game like wildebeest and zebra, you just know they're out there....  

Our fabulous guide Rabi tracked them down on the second afternoon Lady Liuwa and her mate and the cubs and their mother had just eaten and were visibly full and chilling out along with the sunset. This little guy, an eighteen month old cub from another lioness, was too curious and came to sit a little closer, watching us watching him.

He was by far the bouncier of the two cubs. The other guy had plainly stuffed himself silly and he just lay there on his back, shallow breathing, his fluffy young balls in the breeze.

The reintroduction of lions into Liuwa has been successful so far. Along with the two male cubs, there are two female who we didn't see. Much credit to filmmaker Herbert Bräuer who came to Liuwa to document hyenas in 2005 and ended up befriending the lonely lioness. It spurred him onto making the documentary Lady Liuwa, Last Lioness, which then generated momentum and money for lions to be reintroduced into Liuwa. 

Brauer tells here of his first meeting with the lonely lioness back in 2005: “Nothing could have prepared me for our first meeting. As I stood outside my tent, a huge lioness appeared and strolled up casually to within ten metres of where I stood - I was frozen to the spot. All my years of experience taught me to be extremely wary of lions, but it was clear that she was totally relaxed and happy. She looked me up and down, and then settled nearby, rolling and purring. I had never seen anything like it in my life".

Mystic River, Vagina Flumine

“Hippo on the left”, said my guide Kaley.

We were in canoes, paddling gently down the wild and ancient Kafue River in deepest Zambia. Kaley and I in one canoe; my friend and colleague Sally and her guide in another. 

The Kafue is big and long and flows for nearly a thousand kilometres through Zambia before joining the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe. 

She – this river is definitely a she – is the lifeblood of the Kafue National Park, Zambia’s oldest and biggest.  And very far flung. It took us an hour and a half by air charter, an hour and half by road in a 4x4 and fifteen minutes by boat to get to the remote Kaingu Lodge from Lusaka. A soul spot. Deep soul. 

Now here we were, vulnerable little humans, paddling her ancient waters, trying to hug the banks, dodge the boulders, avoid the hippos. After a bit of initial canoeing in circles, you know, trying to sync paddling and steering.

“Hippo on the left”, said Kaley again, and then: “No that’s not a hippo. Come, paddle faster, let’s go see”, and we paddled furiously towards this scene…

A young male puku – think chunky version of our impala – leapt into the river on the left and started swimming. A massive crocodile leapt into the river from the right and in a few powerful strokes and one mighty snap of the jaws caught the puku and dragged it under.

Snap.

A wriggle and some splashing. Some bubbles.

We canoed over the bubbles.  Kaley and I had a moment of being mutually startled by the life and death scene we had just witnessed, aware that we just happened to be there and see a moment that existed outside of our humanity. "I feel sad for the puku", I said to Kaley, who said the puku must have been chased into the water by a predator, perhaps a lion or a cheetah. I felt happy for the croc though, so prehistorically reptilian-crocodilian, soon to be tummy-full.

And when I looked back, the She River had closed over again. Croc one; puku nought; life moves on, birth, death, life, flow...

Vagina flumine. Flowing vagina.That’s what an old friend commented on this photograph I posted this pic of the Kafue River recently; the metaphor of river as erotic, female, primal, flowing, cyclical. Birth, life, death. It got me thinking about my old friend Thecla and it got me thinking about river porn (snuff in this case) and the wild wet mysterious place I had just been.