LONG LIVE THE LION KING
In the 25 years since Disney released the original The Lion King, Africa’s lion population has halved. Now the remake has revived interest in their preservation. By Brian Jackman
In 1994, Disney’s The Lion King took the world by storm, becoming the ninthhighest-grossing animated film of all time. This year, following his successful remake of The Jungle Book, director Jon Favreau released a similarly photorealistic state-of-the-art version for Disney. In their search for authenticity, Disney’s writers visited Kenya’s lion country, discovering locations such as Borana Ranch on the Laikipia Plateau, whose sweeping views and spectacular granite outcrops provided the inspiration for Pride Rock and the Pride Lands. For seeing real lions, Kenya is hard to beat. This is where I saw my first wild lion 40 years ago in the Maasai Mara National Reserve, and the memory is as fresh as if it happened only yesterday. I’d flown down by light aircraft from Nairobi at the end of the rains and the land was still green as we bounced from thermal to thermal over endless plains on which herds of buffalo stampeded away beneath our wings. Even before we touched down on the rough dirt airstrip I knew it would be love at first sight. The kiangazi was just beginning, the dry season that would tempt the migrating wildebeest to pour in from the Serengeti, and the ripening grasses had not yet been eaten down. Instead they stood tall, rippling in the wind like the waves of the sea towards a horizon so far away that it seemed like the edge of the world, heralding a time of plenty for the Mara lions.
We had driven out at first light to find the cats before they went flat and hadn’t gone far when I spotted an adult male perched on a termite mound. He was still quite a long way off, so I watched him through my binoculars, a magnificent sight with his mane backlit by the rising sun.
Then he began to roar through half-closed jaws, and with every cavernous groan his breath condensed in the sharp morning air like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils. All other sound ceased, as if the whole world was listening, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
Since then I have lost count of the lions I have seen and heard, but from that day on they have continued to walk through my life and my dreams.
Who can fail to be moved by their majestic profiles? Even in repose, lions exude an aura of imminent drama. They are the ultimate predator, their mere presence holding the constant possibility of unimaginable violence. Long since hard-wired by evolution for a life on the savannah, they are the apex predators of a parallel universe far older than ours, and for
three years I was privileged to enter their world, waking each morning to the sound of their thunderous voices and driving out into the red dawn to join them.
That was in the late ’70s when a young wildlife photographer called Jonathan Scott introduced me to a pride of lions whose territory lay around Musiara Marsh in the heart of the Mara. Together we produced a bestseller called The Marsh Lions, a true-life story revolving around Scar, Brando and Mkubwa, the coalition of pride males that ruled Musiara.
I didn’t know it then, but what I had stumbled on was the greatest wildlife showcase in Africa. Until 1977, few people had even heard of the Maasai Mara. Serengeti was where you went if you wanted to see lions. Then Kenya and Tanzania fell out. The border was closed and you could no longer drive down to the Serengeti from Nairobi, and that’s when the Mara came into its own.
Today, tragically, these glorious carnivores
“Who will speak up for the lion when my own voice is carried away on the wind?” George Adamson was a founding father of lion conservation, perhaps best known through the book and film Born Free. He was murdered in Kenya in 1989.
are in decline almost everywhere except in the Serengeti and the private conservancies adjoining the Mara, leaving them with only 8% of their former range. In the 25 years since Disney released the original version of The Lion King, Africa’s lion population has halved, leaving no more than 20,000, of which perhaps only 3,000 are the big adult males everyone wants to photograph. That is why this latest version of The Lion King could not have come at a better time. Disney has already donated $1.5m to lion conservation and now hopes to raise a further $1.5m through its Protect the Pride campaign, whose aim is to double the lion population by 2050.
Not all conservation groups are happy, arguing that $1.5m is a mere fraction of The Lion King’s billion-dollar franchise profits. But there is no doubt that their contribution is desperately needed.
Climate change, trophy hunting and conflict with the pastoralists who live alongside lions — all have conspired to loosen their grip on the land they once held; but above all it is loss of habitat to the inexorable advance of the modern world that is putting their lives at risk.
Yet, miraculously, lions continue to grace our world, and the magic they exert upon the human psyche remains as strong as ever. “Who will speak up for the lion when my own voice is carried away on the wind?” asked George Adamson. Conservation organisations including The Tusk Trust (tusk.org) play a vital role, as does ecotourism, whose dollars underpin the survival of wild places where lions can still be seen. And this year The Lion King will add its own clarion call, appealing to the future generations on whose shoulders the very survival of the species will rest.
Media Group Limited [2019]