Patterson was a product of his time. In his time, the British ruled half the globe, and considered it the white man’s burden to civilize the unfortunate savages infesting their dominion. These savages came in all shapes and colours, and the British had endearing nicknames for each kind: Negroes, Coolies, Abbos, Gins and so on. The worth of a man is measured by the number of animal species he pushes closer to extinction, for hunting is, after all, just “game”.
The book is essentially a memoir of Patterson, of the time he was deployed to East Africa and given the charter to build a railway from Kenya to Uganda, which included building a bridge across the river Tsavo, deep inside the African jungle. The workers he uses are vast crews of indentured labourers, supplanted from India to work on the railway. The book is equal parts details of the engineering and supply-chain challenges faced by Patterson and his crew, and details of the various extinct and near-extinct animals Patterson dispatches for fun.
The titular man-eaters were a pair of young lions who terrorized the worker crews and over months killed several of them, one a night, while eluding the armed Patterson.
Once the deep-rooted racism and offensiveness is set aside, the first part of the book, specifically the hunt for the man-eaters of Tsavo and the impact the two lions had on the construction crew is interesting. Perversely, despite the intentions of the author, I was rooting for the lions. They demonstrated resourcefulness and ingenuity, and were simply defending their territory from creatures who had no business being there, in their dominion. The human toll was sad, but then, humans had no business encroaching their space.
For Patterson, the human toll of the lions was just a cold hard statistic; he just had to “Keep Calm and Carry On” with fewer coolies than before. Stiff upper lip and all that, one has to do the best in the circumstances. The rest of the book is a boring, and depressingly tedious retelling of the hunt for several animals, including rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, wildebeests, buffaloes and leopards dispatched wantonly by Patterson for no reason other than they existed.
The one saving grace was that Patterson at least considered the non-whites surrounding him as “human”. Which is more than can be said of his contemporary countrymen. Once you read the book, you will be suffused with a strong instinct to hit a punching bag until your knuckles are sore. Avoid the book to avoid the punching.