Think about lions, and you’re probably thinking about the Marsh Pride. These cats live on the Maasai Mara game reserve in western Kenya and were turned into celebrities in the 2000s by natural history TV programmes, led by the BBC’s Big Cat Diary. Lion: The Rise and Fall of the Marsh Pride (BBC Two) serves as a best-of summary of those films, charting the history of the pride via archive clips and the first-hand observations partly of Maasai tribesmen and other Kenyans, but mostly of Big Cat Diary presenters Simon King and Jonathan Scott.
King and Scott personify that strange relationship humans develop with the animal kingdom when they monitor it in detail. We instinctively want to impose human narratives on what we see, and so Big Cat Diary gave the Marsh Pride names. The two men affectionately recall how Scar and Scruffy used to be in charge, with Scruffy’s incomplete mane belying his greater fighting spirit. Fans subsequently got to know Simba, Blondie, Sienna and resourceful single mother, Bibi.
King describes the betrayals, psychological battles and epic deaths as “Shakespearean”, while the urbane Scott talks more as if he’s reporting on bygone military operations or perhaps a cricket team: an upsetting skirmish with buffalo is referred to as a “debacle”. Scott, incidentally, must be sick of people observing that his swept grey mane, thick moustache and searching brown eyes make him look like a lion in a shirt. But in a film about mankind’s uneasy symbiosis with nature, the thought that this observer might have gradually acquired a leonine countenance is difficult to resist.
Both men assign dramatically interesting characteristics – cunning, cowardice, pragmatism – to the lions, and Big Cat Diary thrived by tracing every contour of the animals’ lives, as if they were characters in a soap. But when viewing a retrospective spanning multiple generations, and keeping in mind King’s observation that such intrigues have been going on undocumented for millennia, the whole enterprise starts to look absurd. Mother Nature must have looked on in bewilderment as we cheered for certain lions while booing others and fearing their perennial enemies, the buffalo and the hyena, seeing perfectly normal outcomes as good or bad, happy or sad.
King recalls returning to Kenya in 2004, after some time away from the pride: “They had been doing very well in our absence.” Once the cameras were rolling again, they followed Bibi and her efforts to keep her cubs safe from two new male arrivals on the Marsh Pride patch. The filmmakers wondered who was likely to kill the children and sire their own. King desperately hoped this wouldn’t happen – “You shouldn’t necessarily feel so invested, but you do” – and was delighted when the cubs were spared.
But on King’s next visit two years later, a new male leader named Notch had fathered young with Bibi. It was assumed Notch had killed Bibi’s old cubs; what had previously been billed as catastrophic was, when the show was renewed for another season, quickly reconciled so the drama could begin again.
The documentary itself functions like a drama, opening with a flash-forward to the near-present, where some atrocity has taken place. What is it? Threaded between the regular, seasonal intrigues is a bigger arc, hinted at via increasingly frequent references to the Maasai culling lions.
A tale develops about the malign expansion of humanity and, somewhere in the dusty shadows, about the dead hand of modernity. Around the turn of the millennium, the Kenyan government encourages the Maasai to leave their nomadic lifestyle behind and live in settlements. As fences are built and the keeping of cattle grows, the traditional practice of spearing the odd troublesome cat is replaced by poisoning, a brutal and indiscriminate tactic that puts the Marsh Pride’s survival at risk.
The strange dynamics of the Mara reach a peak when the poisoning of lions begins to affect a tourist industry that has exploded in the wake of nature programmes. Because some humans have put the Marsh Pride on TV, more humans come to look at the lions, only to be told by the humans who make a living from conducting tours that some other nearby humans, the ones who herd cattle, have killed several Marsh Pride lions because these animals are a threat to their animals.
This is a twisted circle of life, with questions raised about how the west interacts with places such as Kenya. Naturalists are surely right to say that the Kenyan government ought to stop the poisoning, but it is hard not to let out a hollow laugh when campaigners express dismay that they still didn’t ban it even after CBS’s revered investigative strand, 60 Minutes, produced a hard-hitting report.
People with cameras have taught us a lot about the Maasai Mara. Whether they’ve ultimately helped the Marsh Pride is less clear.
