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Cool fact 1: East African lions ate humans because they were accustomed to eating the corpses of dead slaves who had been left to rot by the side of the road. Lions do not eat people normally.
It is believed that it takes centuries for animals to develop these habits.
It does not. It just takes a bad year.
The African rail roads were beset by issues with Lions for two factors:
First, the workers were almost all imported Hindi labor
and Two there was a long period of drought.
Hindi funeral rights require cremating the body. But actually cremating a body, especially without the aid of a crematorium, is really had. What this usually translates to just lighting the body on fire, saying "eh, good enough" and dumping the mess in the nearest river (after making sure its up stream of where people get their drinking water). The savannah scrub and drought meant there was no fuel for cremation pyres, so the bodies were basically lightly grilled and left. Hungry lions came around, ate it, and then plagued the construction project, most famously as the Ghost and the Darkness.
Cool fact 5: The Barbary slave trade only ended when France invaded Algeria in the 1830s. Millions of white Europeans were enslaved by Arabs and Africans who raided the coasts all the way up to Iceland. The slaves were sold in Tunisia and were prized as sex slaves and galley slaves.
Lemme nuance this shit too: by "Africans" means Moors, who despite what the media wants to tell you, are not Big Black Niggas but more like Octoroons only instead of whites its Arabs. Slightly duskier Arabs. Basically Sicilians*. It wasn't africans and arabs, its was just Arabs.
The Barbary raiders did not take millions of white slaves - unless you want to count what went on when they part of the Fatimid Caliphate - which isn't to say they weren't pretty fucked up. They also didn't raid the coasts after the Reconquista; they DID take ships until in the early 1800's America engaged in gun boat diplomacy and fucked the Barbary States** raw & red until they were forced stop abducting whitey for fun & profit.
Also to be completely fair, the Barbars slaving ways go back to before Islam, and before the Romans. The only thing the arrival of Islam did was 1) gave them a justification for taking slaves and 2) gave them a ready & willing buyer (whoever was running the Caliphate at the time all the way to the Ottoman Empire). After about the later part of the 1600's, they were less slavers and more kidnappers, preferring to ransom captives back to European nations, or be paid bribes by the European nations to stop fucking with their shipping.
*Sorry Boot Niggers, but you know its true.
** With the exception of Morocco, who willingly agreed to stop piracy and enter into trading agreements, which caused Morocco's fortunes to very quickly turn around from the poorest Barbary state to the wealthiest.
Of course to be fair they agreed less out of the goodness of their hearts and more due to the fact their position on the very western edge of the Mediterranean and down to africa meant they had the shittiest pickings. They were not raiding large ocean-going ships, but smaller, slower litoral craft as they were easier pickings.