Recently, we were watching the two Kambula mothers at Carcass Clearing, with their eight cubs milling about between them and both of the Gijima Males lying alongside a wildebeest kill. You might have read in my previous post about why those two mothers now choose to raise their litter inside the Gijima Males’ territory, despite everything. What that post stopped short of was what happened next.

Many of you who follow the Virtual Safari will already know what unfolded that morning, after the Gijima Males dragged their wildebeest kill through the clearing and settled to feed on the edge of the thicket. For everyone else, here is the fuller account.

A kill that loud does not stay private for long. The Ntsevu Pride were not far away, somewhere between a few hundred metres and a kilometre to the north. Lions pay close attention to the sounds of other lions. A pride hearing a disturbance in the distance will often come to see what is going on, weighing up what they are hearing before deciding how boldly to approach. The squabbling of a pride on a carcass carries a long way, and it carries information: there is food here, and there are lions on it.

The Ntsevu lionesses came to investigate. They arrived, took in the scene, and then did something I did not expect. They skirted around the edge, past the kill and lay down right in the middle of the clearing, perhaps forty or fifty metres from the carcass.

At first, the two Kambula mothers did not notice them. Some of the cubs did. A few broke away from the carcass and started edging towards the newcomers, ears forward, with all the confidence of youngsters who have not yet learnt what there is to be afraid of. Then the mothers caught sight of the Ntsevu females and walked towards them with real intent, before stopping short. The remaining cubs were milling about nearby, every bit as curious, and some of them ended up within twenty metres of the other lionesses, and later came all too close.

This was the part where I found myself holding my breath. Female lions can be fiercely territorial. They compete with neighbouring prides for ground, prey and water, and those contests can turn lethal. Lionesses from rival prides will attack one another, and cubs are especially vulnerable in these encounters. Larger groups win far more of these disputes than smaller ones, and on the numbers alone this was five Ntsevu Females against two Kambula Mothers with eight small cubs scattered across a clearing. On the face of it, this should have gone badly.

A Brief History

It did not go badly, and to understand why, you need to know a little about the history of these two prides. I will warn you now that this is where lion naming gets complicated, and I make no claims to having kept it all straight on my first attempt either.

The story starts with six young lionesses born in 2013 into the Mhangeni Pride. Around 2016, they broke away from their mothers and set up on their own, roaming the ground shared by Londolozi and our neighbours. Here they were named the Ntsevu Pride in 2017, ntsevu being the Shangaan word for six. Next door, our eastern neighbours named them the Kambula Pride, after the Kambula Koppies where they spent much of their time. Same six lions, two names, and years of cheerful confusion for anyone trying to follow along.

Under the Birmingham Males, the pride flourished. Among the cubs born during that era were a set of daughters born in 2018, two of whom are the Kambula mothers we were watching at Carcass Clearing. The older lionesses lying in the middle of the clearing are, quite literally, their mothers and aunts.

Then came the fractures. The arrival of the Ndzhenga Males in late 2021 began splitting the pride apart, and two of the original lionesses died in 2023. In 2024, the two reserves agreed to formalise the split. The three remaining originals would keep the name Ntsevu, and the larger group of their daughters, led by the last original lioness, would officially become the Kambula Pride.

When the Gijima Males arrived last year, the Kambula Pride splintered again, leaving these two mothers on their own.

The Ntsevu lionesses, meanwhile, have raised their own most recent litter through to near-independence. The two young females from that litter have now been somewhat accepted by the Gijima Males, and all five have been seen back in their old territory, with the older females mating with the same two males who fathered the Kambula cubs. Which brings us back to that morning at Carcass Clearing.

Prides that have split from a common line tend to tolerate each other far more than they tolerate unrelated neighbours, at least in the early years after the split. That tolerance fades over time, as the two lines drift apart and the shared familiarity thins. The risk of serious conflict when they meet rises accordingly.

The Ntsevu and Kambula lionesses lived together as a single pride until only a couple of years ago. The older females would have watched the Kambula mothers grow up from cubs. Whether they recognise them as daughters in the way we would understand it is impossible to say, but familiarity counts for a great deal with lions, and it seemed to count for a great deal that morning.

A Young Cub Learns a Lesson

Two of the eight cubs were bolder than the rest, and one of them pushed its luck all the way. It walked straight up to one of the young Ntsevu females, close enough to touch. She responded the way any lion would to an uninvited youngster in her face. She gave it a swat.

Not a bite, and nothing more than that. Just a swift, unmistakable swat that sent the cub scurrying back across the clearing to its mothers and the rest of its siblings, presumably having learnt more about lion etiquette in two seconds than in its previous six months.

What stays with me is who was involved. That young female grew up on the Ntsevu side of the split. She would never have met the Kambula mothers, let alone their cubs. To her, that cub was simply an annoyance, and she treated it as one. Depending on exactly whose daughter she is, she may well have just disciplined a niece or nephew without the faintest idea of it. And all of this happened a few feet from the older Ntsevu lionesses that had raised the Kambula mothers. If any lions in that clearing understood what they were looking at, it was them: a litter of eight that carries their line forward, and their legacy, sired by the same males they are now mating with.

The cub, in other words, had wandered straight into its own family. I cannot tell you what they recognised, if anything. Tolerance between related prides fades with time, and the young females joining the Ntsevu Pride now have no shared history with the Kambulas at all. One day the old lionesses who remember will be gone, and the encounters between these two prides may look very different. Could they reunite? Stranger things have happened in the bush. For now, though, eight cubs are growing up within earshot of their grandmothers and cousins, and we will be watching with bated breath as the next generation of lions at Londolozi fares alongside them.