The man’s face ended below his cheekbones: his nose, palate, upper teeth, tongue and almost his entire lower jaw were gone. Only his eyes and the upper part of his head remained intact. And yet he was alive and moderately healthy and had taught himself to swallow food. He had received one bite, just one snap, his friends explained, and that was all there was to it.
The hyaena had come during the night, as they always do, and had smelt food around the village. It had gone deep into the village until it had come to a hut where the smell of food was strongest, and there it had stopped (as its tracks indicated the next morning). It must have seen the men who were sleeping outside because the night was warm. It had loped forward to the nearest man and again paused indecisively two metres (seven feet) from him. Then it had moved silently forward until its nose was an inch from the man’s face. It could smell the food around his mouth. The sleeping man, gradually becoming aware of the appalling odour of the animal’s breath, opened his eyes. The hyaena clamped its terrible jaws over his mouth and nose and, with the ease of a man biting a biscuit, it bit cleanly through.
There are hundreds of Africans throughout the continent who have had their faces mutilated or limbs severed by the spotted hyaena (Crocuta crocuta)1, and I can think of three or four mutilated tourists around the world too.
Throughout Africa the hyaena, according to some, is a greater problem than the leopard, and in Mozambique some say it is an even greater problem than the lion.
Hyaenas are responsible for an annual loss of life caused either by outright man-eating or from its devastating ‘hit-and-run’ methods, which can cause lethal infection or cause a victim to bleed to death.
Because of the habit in parts of Central and East Africa in particular of leaving the dead and, in the quite recent past, the dying in the bush for predators to dispose of, a number of carnivorous animals have grown used to eating human meat. Many a man-eater began its career by acquiring a taste from the bodies of the unburied and, in the past, from eating the bodies of condemned criminals who were sometimes tied to trees. Some people leave their dead in the bush for superstitious reasons, but also as a practical way of disposing of them: the scavengers of the wilds are very thorough and very efficient; ecologically there can hardly be a ‘greener’ method for disposing of the dead.
In the Zambezi Valley, in Ethiopia and no doubt other areas, prostitution and Aids have produced a regular crop of abandoned babies and orphans for hyaenas to dispose of.
The 2009 FAO report on human-wildlife conflict records:
In Sudan, because of the lack of proper housing children often have no choice but to sleep outside at night thus becoming vulnerable to nocturnal predators. A death census showed that in addition to being at risk to human trafficking, more than 280 orphans died in Nyamlell in 2006 because they did not have a safe place to sleep at night. Hyena attacks were shown to be the number one cause of death.2
It is noteworthy that in the Zambezi Valley man-eating hyaenas are found mainly between Kariba Dam and Mana Pools – two of Zimbabwe’s prime tourist areas. This is where until the 1960s it was customary for some clans to leave their dead for hyaenas. Even though the then Rhodesian authorities (Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980) tried to eradicate the custom, there has been a lapse in control in recent years. It is probable that the old slave routes along which the slave traders, over many centuries, left dead and dying captives for scavengers to eat have left a legacy of genetically predisposed man-eating hyaenas.
According to the 2009 FAO paper, spotted hyaena attacks on humans throughout Africa are considered to be common, with ‘dozens of deaths reported each year’. Theodore Roosevelt, when in Uganda in 1908 and 1909, noted that spotted hyaenas regularly killed people in East Africa who were suffering from sleeping sickness as they slept outside3. There are frequent reports from throughout tropical Africa of hyaenas taking the sick and dying outside their huts and of hyaenas scavenging battlefields after various internecine wars – right up the present. A particular hot spot at any given time is along the Ruvuma Valley in Niassa (Mozambique), on the centuries-old Arab slave route. The World Wildlife Fund in 2004 reported that in the space of an unspecified year 35 Mozambicans were killed in Niassa by spotted hyaenas along a stretch of road just 20 kilometres (12 miles) long. The 2009 FAO report mentions, in the same (Niassa) province bordering Tanzania, hyaenas, in one year, attacking 52 people, 28 of whom died.
There is a great deal of difference in the habits of hit-and-run hyaenas that bite off a person’s face or limb and a hyaena that kills in order to eat its victims. The former is behaving normally. In Africa both the spotted hyaena and the striped hyaena of North and northeast Africa have the habit of foraging around camp sites and on the outskirts of villages (rather like bears in parts of North America). Because of this they become used to people, though they remain wary of them. They are non-aggressive and, except in freak circumstances, would never attack a man who is awake. Hyaenas, although classically the scavengers of the bush, have recently been found to be far more predatory in nature than was supposed. In East Africa ethologist Hans Kruuk found that lions often reversed roles with hyaenas – lions followed hyaenas to feed off their kills4. But the hyaena’s methods are far from bold. Frequently they enter camps at night, drawn irresistibly by the smell of meat, and they might steal and eat anything from a saddle or a pair of shoes to a tanned skin, a rifle stock (if it smells of blood) or even cooking pots. They snatch canned food and crunch the tins open in their jaws. The strength of their jaws is fascinating. They can leave teeth marks in forged steel and many Africans have had hunting spears chewed until they are unusable, merely because they forgot to clean the blood off the blade.
In many people’s eyes there are few four-footed creatures quite so repulsive as the spotted hyaena, and certainly there is hardly a species so denigrated. You have to listen to them eating the bones of some carcass in the veld or hear their witch-like sniggering, giggling, moaning, shrieking and screaming with ‘laughter’ to appreciate the horror they can engender. They are enormously strong, with large heads and black, powerful jaws. Hyaenas will appear on the scene of a hunt, drawn by the sound of a rifle shot. Both spotted and striped hyaenas have been known to bite at the undersides of live cattle and eat their entrails as they fall to the ground; they are also said to patrol round the fence of cattle kraals and snatch off the muzzles of any inquisitive cattle that put their heads through the fence.
Although a normal hyaena will bite a sleeping man and might even snatch a newborn child and carry it off, there seems to be a definite difference between these opportunistic hyaenas and the man-eaters. In the Mlanje district of Malawi, there was a particularly bad period of man-eating, beginning in September 1955 when a man was killed and eaten on a well-beaten track between two villages. Fred Balestra, a local farmer, who later shot a pair of man-eaters in this district, was unable to find out whether the man had been asleep at the time of the attack, but he believes the killing was done by a single hyaena. It appeared that the killer shared its meal with four or five others and all that remained of the victim were a few shreds of clothing and a patch of blood5.
This proved to be the first of a chain of killings that continued for several years. Balestra said the local people had known of previous episodes of man-eating involving hyaenas. They referred to the man-eaters as lipwereri and said they were bigger and stronger than the normal hyaena, which they called fisi. That these man-eaters were in fact bigger than normal was borne out by the weights of the two shot by Balestra, who found them to be 71 and 77 kilograms (156 and 170 pounds) respectively.
Seven days after the villager was killed, an old woman was dragged screaming from her hut at night by a hyaena that had broken through the straw door. The hyaena dropped her when a neighbour rushed up, but by then her arm was missing and she had been badly bitten around the neck. She died soon after the incident. The third and last killing that spring was a child of six who was killed while sleeping on a veranda. The hyaena killed her by biting her face off and then, along with other hyaenas, ate her entire body, leaving only the back of the head. Balestra believes that they left the head purely because they were disturbed by village dogs. The following year five people were taken and from then until 1962 the number fluctuated between five and eight each year, of whom about 70 per cent were children. In 1961 all six victims were children – four were eaten in January. It is noteworthy that all the attacks took place during the summer months when people sleep outside their huts. At one stage the government used an air-force plane to bomb the caves in which it was suspected the hyaenas were sleeping during the day, but the raid produced little effect and the killings continued over a belt of country 80 kilometres deep and 20 wide (50 by 12 miles).
Balestra, as the only man prepared to hunt the hyaenas, believed for a time he was up against lycanthropy: quite often victims would be taken from the midst of their sleeping families and yet nobody heard a thing. This was probably because they were seized by their faces and killed before they could utter a sound. Whatever the case, it also gave rise to fears of witchcraft and many witnesses were reluctant to give information. There are people in Africa who sincerely believe there are no wild hyaenas in the world – that they all belong to witchdoctors. This belief is furthered by the witchdoctors themselves, some of whom keep hyaenas as pets, rearing them from pups. Balestra says they go even further and, by a method that makes one blanch, they get them used to eating human flesh and then hire them out to settle scores. George Rushby, who worked as a game ranger in Central Africa for some years, shot hyaenas that had beads interwoven in their hair and some of them had mysterious patterns cut into their flesh. He also records finding a hyaena wearing khaki shorts. One shot by him was claimed by a witchdoctor as her lover and she gathered it up and carried the reeking animal away6.
Tourists, from time to time, come up against hyaenas.
A fishing group was camped on the Zimbabwe side of the Zambezi downstream of Chirundu at New Year, 2004. They turned in at 9 pm but Di Patterson, finding it too hot to sleep inside her small tent, decided to sleep on the stretcher outside. She was aware of the threat of hyaenas…
She recalled:
At ten to twelve I was jerked to wakefulness by the sound of scrunching bone and the most disgusting smell as a hyena bit into my face and hand and started dragging me. I screamed and screamed. It must have been only a few seconds before the brute, realizing that he’d bitten off more than he could chew, let me go and vanished into the night. As I knelt in the dirt, the blood pouring from my face, I realised that my hands and feet still worked and that I could still think so I must be all right!
She was quickly evacuated to Kariba, and then by MARS (Medical Air Rescue Service) to Harare hospital. She said afterwards with remarkable fortitude:
I do believe that I am living proof that prayers are answered. From the moment that hyena let go everything was positive. I did lose my eye but the surgeon managed to reattach my eye-lid, which is a big plus for holding in a false eye, and still has hopes of finding tear ducts.
After the first operation he thought he would have to do a couple of skin grafts, but during the second op, ten days later, he found that it wasn’t necessary. The bone man managed to put my very graunched hand back together with skewers and I will probably get full movement back.
I really have no hang-ups about my injuries or disfigurement. I am still alive. My injuries could have been much more horrific.7
In August 2007 an eight-year-old Johannesburg girl, Christin Chalwin-Milton, was sleeping on a chair next to her tour group’s camp fire at Third Bridge camp in Moremi Nature Reserve in Botswana. It was just after 11 pm when a hyaena crept up behind her and took her head in its jaws. Her father, Ralph Chalwin-Milton, stormed at the animal shouting, and scared it off. Christin’s head was open from her eye to behind her left ear, which was missing. Chalwin-Milton found the ear and put it in ice.
The little girl was driven to Maun for primary care and then flown to Johannesburg where reconstructive surgery was carried out, but all her facial muscles and nerves, as well as her hearing and sight, were impaired.
Although the Chalwin-Miltons were aware of bush etiquette, Christin was the victim of those who were not. One rule is never to feed animals in the wild, but people leave meat outside the camp in the hope of attracting scavengers during the night – and this is one reason why animals such as hyaenas lose their natural fear of humans.
Four years earlier and in the same area, also late at night, a hyaena dragged an 11-year old American boy out of his tent and killed him. His mother in a nearby tent heard nothing until some workers raised the alarm after seeing the hyaenas dragging the boy’s body into the bush.
As I was working on this book in June 2011, a 13-year-old schoolboy camping with his class in the Imfolozi section of the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in KwaZulu-Natal had his face mutilated during the night. The boys had been warned about keeping food in their tents; although the sweets and chips in the tent were hardly food for a carnivore, it seems likely that those are what caused the hyaena to tear open the tent and bite the boy. The screams of his classmates scared the animal away.
One of the guests of the late Ted Steyn, chairman of the Northern Tuli Association in Botswana’s Tuli Block, was dragged from her tent by a hyaena that had bitten into her shoulder. Her cries woke her husband who seized a rifle. He was unable to shoot the animal for fear of hitting his wife, so he used the rifle to club the animal, which fled. Fortunately the hyaena had not used the full force of its jaws and the woman recovered well.
Almost simultaneously there was a massive explosion in the open-sided kitchen at the other end of the camp, where another hyaena had bitten through one of the gas pipes; the gas leak was ignited by a pilot light under one of the paraffin-fuelled refrigerators, causing the gas tank to explode.
Some years ago Alan Calenborne was with his son Giles, then a schoolboy, on a field expedition in Botswana. Towards the end of the day they had some kilometres to walk before reaching their vehicle. The sun was low and they were following a game fence. It was then they noticed they were being followed by a hyaena. Calenborne, who was not armed, became wary of the animal as the distance between them decreased. Then there were two. Each time he turned the hyaenas had lessened the gap between them. He threw stones and stormed at the creatures, but they continued to follow. It grew darker and by now they were being tailed by five.
Eventually he and his son reached the Land Rover, but he has wondered ever since what might have happened had darkness fallen.