ROVING REPORTERS: From killing lions to saving them — how Kenya’s Samburu warriors repurposed their skills

Growing up as a young boy in Samburu, northern Kenya, Jeneria Lekilelei found that the wild held many possibilities. But none of them involved wildlife conservation. “I never imagined that something like lion conservation would exist in my community, or that it would ever become part of who we are,” he says.

Like everyone else, he would hunt gerenuks and dik-diks for meat. Elephants and lions meant the familiar destruction of property, livestock killings and sometimes the loss of human lives. So when young boys grew into warriors (traditionally called morans), they were trained to protect the community from lions, even when it meant killing them. “Warriors killed lions largely to protect livestock, and that is what our community understood,” he says. 

It was not until 2008, when he met Dr Shivani Bhalla, founder of Ewaso Lions and a National Geographic Explorer, that his perspective shifted. Bhalla had founded Ewaso Lions to promote coexistence between people and lions, and it was there that Lekilelei first became interested in their conservation. Two years later, in 2010, he founded Warrior Watch, bringing fellow morans into the effort. 

As the first warrior in his community to embrace lion conservation, Lekilelei recalls how shocked his family was. “My father thought I had gone a little mad, chasing after lions rather than staying away from something he knew to be so dangerous,” he says.

Pride of Samburu, a feature documentary made by the National Geographic Society’s Impact Story Lab, in collaboration with a team of Kenyan filmmakers, is set in the vast, largely unfenced landscape of Samburu, about 350km north of Nairobi, and takes a different approach to the familiar wildlife documentary.

“So often in nature documentaries, you see beautiful footage of lions, but you rarely see the people behind that protection,” Bhalla says. “When you do, it is often someone from outside the country who has come in to do it.”

What the film shows, above all, she says, is local people doing the conservation work themselves. “You can read about community-led conservation, but the film actually shows it,” she adds. “You see the Samburu communities out there, protecting their own land and their own lions. That is something words alone struggle to convey.

“These are our national animals. This is a Kenyan project, run by Kenyans. It is our responsibility to protect what matters so deeply to us.” 

Watching the finished film, what stayed with her most was the pride of seeing her team featured “front and centre”. She hesitates to use the word “heroes”, but says “honestly, that is what they are”. And the film is not centred on one person: it captures several remarkable conservationists.

The film follows them all: the warriors as they patrol the landscape, reading tracks, recording wildlife sightings, investigating livestock attacks and sometimes trying to prevent retaliatory killings; the team using technology to map the landscape and track lions with GPS collars, which show when a lion is moving into a potentially dangerous area; and, when a lion needs to be collared, Ewaso Lions working with Kenya Wildlife Service veterinarians to safely immobilise the animal before fitting the collar. Samburu women and children also have their own roles in conservation, which are woven into the story.

Reading the wild

Tracking a lion, Lekilelei says, is about knowing the landscape deeply. Born and raised in Samburu, he can look at a specific set of tracks and often tell exactly which lion left them and where it is likely headed. There is real satisfaction, he says, in reading whether a track is two days old, one day old or just 30 minutes old, and then following it all the way to the lion.

“I know their tracks, I know their names, I know each individual,” he says. “I would even say I know lions better than I know my own cows.” It gives him happiness, he adds, “knowing not just an animal but a story behind each one”.

It is a striking change from how he grew up. Lekilelei says he knew nothing of lions at all, even hating them, before coming to love them deeply. 

His father’s legacy, reimagined

Lekilelei does not see himself as breaking his father’s legacy but carrying it forward differently. His father killed lions to protect his people and their livestock from a threat he understood too well. But the reality is different now. Lion numbers have fallen sharply, the landscape has changed, and the human population has grown.

“In our culture, we cannot live without lions, for so many reasons,” he says. If they had continued hunting them as his father’s generation did, “we could have lost lions completely”. Lions, he says, predict the rains, give them hope and are needed for ceremonies and traditions. “So I believe I have actually carried my father’s legacy forward by making sure that this species, so important to our culture, still exists in our homeland.” Since they began their conservation efforts, the number of lions in their communities has risen from an initial 11 to 60. 

The man who once thought his son had gone a little mad would see it differently now, Lekilelei believes. “I believe he would be very happy now, seeing how much we have achieved, how many lions live around our villages today, when this species was nearly gone from our landscape.”

For Lekilelei, the definition of a brave warrior has not changed. “A warrior is still respected in our society in the same way. What has changed is simply how we show that bravery, because the landscape around us has changed, and the lion population too.” Courage now, he says, “means the courage it takes to live alongside lions, and the courage it takes for lions to live alongside us, moving through a landscape with fewer wild prey. Courage is also found in how we have managed to speak to our own community, to address the reality that our actions were driving lion numbers towards becoming extinct.”

He envisions a future where, “in three or four generations from now, warriors are no longer known for killing lions at all. I hope they use that same knowledge, that same skill, to protect lions instead, and that they can live alongside lions without anyone ever again saying, the warriors have gone out tracking, they must be going to kill a lion.” 

A hefty cost

But while lion conservation may sound noble to an outsider, Lekilelei admits that coexistence can be difficult. As space shrinks and water, wild herbivores and food become scarcer, lions are coming into contact with livestock more often. “This is not just about an animal, not just a cow. It is a livelihood; it is what people depend on to survive.”

“It is painful, and it is difficult,” he says. “You can speak to someone, calm them down, and they accept the presence of lions, and then the very next day the same lion kills another cow belonging to that person you just spoke to. It is genuinely up and down.” People are willing to live alongside lions, he says, “but then a loss happens, they lose their food, their wealth, and it becomes very difficult for that person to accept lions being near them again.”

Yet there are many reasons to protect them: the culture, the economic benefits, the education and other opportunities that lions bring to the conservancies, often more than livestock alone provide. “If you look at the bigger picture, we still believe that, yes, we will live alongside lions,” Lekilelei says.

Scars

The cost of living with lions is not measured only in livestock. The film also carries the scars of people who have been injured while protecting livestock or trying to kill lions. 

“People here have lived alongside lions for generations, and that shapes how they relate to them.” says Bhalla. “I have seen children watch lions in complete awe, and some of them, like Jeneria, do grow to love lions over time; he was 19 when that began for him.” But that tolerance has limits. “You cannot ask an elder who has lost three camels to lions to still love lions,” she says. “It is not a reasonable thing to expect, and it is not the right thing to expect either.” What matters, she says, is empathy: putting yourself in their position and understanding what that loss means.

“When lions turn to livestock because there is simply not enough wild prey, asking someone not to kill a lion becomes a hard thing to ask of them.”

Protecting lions cost Lekilelei relationships at first. “I lost many people around me, people I used to stay close to and spend time with, apart from my true friends and my brothers, who stood by me,” he says. Over time, others came to understand why. “I have gained far more than I lost.” He is now a leader in his community, guiding the transition to a new generation of warriors, and “my community has placed its trust in me”. He has also gained friendships and recognition far beyond Samburu, even overseas.

Bhalla says evaluations of the Warrior Watch programme, carried out more than once, show it has empowered warriors socially and politically. Many once felt “neglected, overlooked by their own society”; now “they have a role that matters, and they know it”.

Making the film

For Bhalla, the decision to bring the story to the screen came gradually. “It was not one single moment, really – it built up over time, watching how the team and the community have taken this project and made it entirely their own.”

She thinks of Munteli Lalparasaroi, and the strength she carries as she leads the Mama Simba women in recovering the land, restoring pasture and prey so livestock are less likely to be targeted. She thinks of Lekilelei, who has risked his life repeatedly and gives everything, well beyond what anyone could ask of him, to protect lions. “When I saw that dedication so clearly, I knew I wanted the world to see it too. This is their land, their wildlife, their story, and they are the ones doing everything they can to protect it,” she says.

Peter Ndung’u, a National Geographic Explorer and documentary and wildlife filmmaker, was one of the cinematographers behind the film. He has spent eight years working in the Samburu landscape and wanted audiences to understand what it and its community are about. The roles of women, warriors and elders are so distinct, he says, that “even in conservation you can see who takes up which roles”. 

And he wanted to show Samburu as “this really beautiful, vast and largely unfenced landscape that allows people and wildlife to roam freely”, which he calls “key in the model of conservation practised in Samburu”.

What surprised him most while filming was the coexistence. In one or two shots, elephants walk through the river, going about their business, as the community’s livestock graze and drink nearby. “It is truly something remarkable,” he says. “There’s this unspoken level of respect for each other that I don’t think I have ever seen anywhere else and it is a big part of what makes Samburu special.”

But there were challenges. “It was difficult to watch,” he says, “the Ewaso Lions team trying to manage conflict within the community when their livestock was attacked by lions” while also planning to collar lions “hiding deep in the perfect cover of the invasive prosopis juliflora species”.

Pic: Jeneria Lekilelei communicates with his team as they attempt to collar a lion. The collars help Ewaso Lions track lions’ movements across wildlife corridors for their safety. (Photo: Courtesy of the National Geographic Society’s Impact Story Lab)

Such scenes, he says, “were very tough to film because of how uncertain and unpredictable things were.” Then came a scene where collaring could not go ahead, leaving Lekilelei “so deflated because of how high the stakes were”. It was “quite disheartening”, Ndung’u says, but the film keeps it: “I think it paints a true picture to the audience of just how tough the job is.” DM

The film is introduced at the Oppenheimer Research Conference at 6pm on 7 October by Dr Kimberleigh Tommy, executive director for Africa at the National Geographic Society.

The next day, Thursday, 8 October, Tommy moderates the Tipping Points webinar, “Beyond the Lens: Reclaiming Africa’s Conservation Narrative”, with National Geographic Explorers Noel Kok, Nancy Iraba, Manu Akatsa and Nyancho NwaNri, exploring how film, photography, animation and other visual storytelling can bring research closer to the communities who experience it. It is broadcast live from the conference, 4pm to 5pm SAST. Click here to view the conference programme and access the livestream link.

This Roving Reporters story was produced with support of Jive Media Africa, science communication partner to Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation.