Simba Mbili
Our research project explores the powerful imaginaries and the transnational histories of the lions of Tsavo. These lions became famous at the turn of the 20th century for bringing the construction of the Kenya-Uganda railway to a halt by attacking and eating a huge number of African and Indian workers. That two lions could inhibit this key British imperial infrastructure provoked outrage and international debate. Since 1925, the taxidermied lions have been housed in Chicago at the Field Museum, where despite hopes to have them returned to Kenya, they remain until today.
This story has been narrated, over decades, in popular books and films, as part of a heroic white man narrative. Yet, more than a century after their demise, it seems to us that this is far from a dusty colonial hunting story. These lions continue to move people to study, re-imagine and claim them. For whom are the lions significant and what emotions, reactions and situations do they trigger in Kenya today? We try to unearth, and bring together, pieces of their histories which have been suppressed or dispersed, and belong to different geopolitical spaces and practices over four continents.
This work tries to raise a set of questions about the transnational histories, museum afterlives and futures of these two lions, covering four central topics: restitution, conservation, labour and extraction.
On this website, conceived in close discussion with La Villa Hermosa in Brussels, you will find a growing number of interviews which approach the story of the lions from multiple perspectives. These voices open up, multiply and also decentre its storytelling which has relied heavily on the version of events told by Col. Henri J. Patterson, the British engineer who eventually killed the lions in December 1898. Patterson’s book The Man-eaters of Tsavo and other East-African adventures (1907) became a blue-print for further multiple re-narrations of the events in the decades to come. As well as listening to the full interviews that we did with interested parties, it is also possible to listen to fragments of them, which in turn link to other fragments in a variety of ways. This decentralised, non hiérarchical approach is an attempt at disrupting the lingering power of colonial era stories, enabling you, as the listener, to determine which elements of the story you would like to hear and to construct your own path through it.
This research project has been developed over several years, and has had various iterations. Growing out of the project International Inventories Programme (2018-22) in which we encountered the lions, we first presented this research in the form of a sound installation/slide show in the Invisible Inventories exhibition. We are grateful to Junniah Wamaitha for recording the vox-populi and Raphael Kariuki for conceiving the sound design in this work.
Our second stage of research has been carried out within the context of the project Reconnecting ‘Objects’. Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums. QUARRY_v1 tries to narrate our research project, and is presented within the Branching Streams. Sketches of Kinship/Flux ramifiés. Esquisses de parentés at Théodore Monod Museum from May 18 to Sept. 2024. This work forms part of a larger installation which includes works by Khouma Gueye, Camilo Sandoval and Nathan Schoenewolf.
*Simba Mbili, “two lions” in Kiswahili. This title refers to a side-story to the Tsavo lions. We discovered afterwards that it is also the trademark of a popular curry powder in Kenya.