[MSN] Kenya is demanding that a US museum returns the remains of two lions that killed at least 140 Indian workers in the 1890s before being shot by a famed British railway engineer, officials said Monday.

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Kenya wants US museum to return maneating lions 
Published: Monday September 10, 2007

Kenya is demanding that a US museum returns the remains of two lions that
killed at least 140 Indian workers in the 1890s before being shot by a famed
British railway engineer, officials said Monday.

The killing of the railway workers by the infamous "Maneaters of Tsavo" over
a nine month period briefly halted the construction of the Kenya-Uganda
line, a project so perilous it was dubbed the "Lunatic Express."

Railway engineer Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, whose adventures
formed the basis of the Oscar-winning 1996 movie "The Ghost and the
Darkness" starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer, shot the cats in December
1898.

Researchers believe an outbreak of rinderpest reduced the lions' normal food
supply and led them to develop an unsual appetite for people in the Tsavo
East National Park, 300 kilometres (200 miles) southeast of Nairobi.

Poor burial practice among railroad workers, many of whom died of injuries
and disease, also may have given them easy access to human flesh.

Twenty-six years later Patterson sold their remains, consisting of the
lions' skulls and hides, to the Chicago Field Museum for 5,000 dollars.

Now though Kenya wants the remains back and for them to be part of an
upcoming exhibition in the United States on Kenyan history.

"We realise that these artifacts are part of our Kenyan heritage and we will
use international protocols to repatriate them back," National Museum of
Kenya (NMK) spokeswoman Connie Maina said on Monday.

The Kenya Tourism Board agreed: "We will follow the right channels to get
the remains of the our maneaters back to us. They are part of our heritage
and history and it is good to have them back," spokeswoman Rose Kwena told
AFP.

In 2006, heirs of colonial-era British officer Colonel Richard Henry
Meinertzhagen, returned a walking stick, authority baton and v-shaped prayer
rod belonging to a ethnic Nandi traditional chief that had been in Britain
since 1905.

The chief, Kiotalel arap Samoei, was decapitated for leading a fierce fierce
opposition to the construction of the "Lunatic Express" from the Indian
Ocean Port of Mombasa through Nandiland in the Rift Valley to Lake Victoria.

In 2005, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki vowed to find the missing skull of
Samoei so he could be properly honoured as an early hero of the independence
movement.

Last year, Illinois State University and Hampton University returned two
memorial wooden statues known as "vigango" that were stolen from the coastal
Mijikenda tribe.

Researchers have tracked down 294 "vigangos" at 19 American museums. The
Hampton University Museum alone is reported to be holding 98 of them.

Mijikenda elders say the theft of the statues more than two decades ago from
the graves of revered elders was to blame for the community's foundering
fortunes.

Other African countries, notably Ethiopia and Kenya, have launched drives to
recover some of artifacts that were taken home by foreign travellers and
colonialists.

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