The Last Word On Nothing

This post originally appeared in March 2012.

“It is with the deepest sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of your son Norman. He died after an encounter with a lion near the Keito River in Portuguese West Africa 10/5/15. He made a very gallant fight and killed the lion with his knife after a severe struggle. He was serving as scout in the N. Rhodesian forces to which I also belong.”

So begins a letter from the closest friend (and executor, of which more later) of my great-great uncle Norman Sinclair. Having fought through the Boer War and stayed on in Africa as a hunter, the Scotsman was still in his twenties when he met his unusual end during WWI. A collection of his letters, along with the Dead Man’s Penny — made for all troops who died in the war, and ironically bearing the image of Brittania and a lion — were kept by Norman’s grieving mother and came into my own mother’s hands a few years ago. She was able to trace the story through official and informal accounts, all the way to his twice-exhumed and reinterred grave, now in Dar Es Salaam.

A wilderness death by charismatic megafauna has a certain dramatic appeal. Morals spring to mind about the power of nature — how humans are still prey for natural predators and subject to the rules of the food chain. Mbalameno, a runner whose testimony was deemed hearsay by the Rhodesian Police because of the colour of his skin, says of the incident: “The Mumbukush native Silemo came to the cart for Mr. Sinclair’s big gun. The big gun was in the box of the Scotch cart and Mr. Sinclair had the key. Mr. Rensburg sent Silemo back to tell Mr. Sinclair this. A little later Silemo came back to tell us that Mr. Sinclair had been killed by a lion…We, the runners, when we got to the body cut sticks to make a kraal for the cattle.”

It would seem as if a simple miscalculation — forgetting to pass on a key — came between Norman and the technology our species relies upon to bypass threats that plagued our ancestors.

As the story emerged, however, Norman’s role as a helpless and unsuspecting victim became less supportable. Flashback to an hour before the killing:

“When our master got to the front between Salushashi stream and Mbwanda stream, he saw six or seven lions feeding on a dead roan,” says intelligence runner Matengo. “Mr. Sinclair shot three times, wounding a lionness. The lions all cleared.” As Norman mounted his horse and went on the spoor of the lionness, the runners were cutting up the meat from the dead Roan antelope and packing it onto the Scotch cart. It would seem that Norman in this story was very much aware of the food chain and was accustomed to driving away competing predators and scavenging from the mauled remains of lion kills.

“Mr. Sinclair saw the wounded lion and jumped off his horse and took his [smaller] gun from Kasemo. He couldn’t get a shot as the lionness charged him with great bounds. She seized him by the left arm and his gun fell to the ground. He half fell also and managed to get his knife out and stabbed her many times in the neck.”

Norman lived just long enough to instruct that the lion skin, his knife and watch be sent back to Scotland. Having just moved to the UK, I’m in a better position to do some sleuthing to see whether they are locatable. The last word was that the lion skin had been passed on to the Scottish boy scouts, and it’s a running joke in our family that Uncle Norman’s skin should have been given to the lion’s family in exchange. As it now appears the two were competing for the same Roan antelope, their newfound natural equality supports this. Nevertheless, his original grave, in the shade of an evergreen Meytour tree, claims that he “Died for King and Empire”.