Pendjari is a dry savanna park in northern Benin, and the lions in it are not the animal you are picturing. Genetically, the nearest relatives of West Africa's lions are not the lions of the Serengeti but the last wild lions of India. Fewer than four hundred survive anywhere, and about a hundred of them live here, a quarter of the whole subspecies. Seeing one was always hard work. A lioness slides low through waist-high dry grass and is gone before you have the glasses up, and guides often spent a whole day with you for a single sighting, usually at first or last light, near water. Nobody is out on those tracks now: the park has been closed to visitors since 2019, and it is watched by rangers rather than guests.
What they are guarding is the last intact large-mammal country in West Africa. The largest elephant population left in the region lives in this complex, and Pendjari is where you had the best chance of seeing them: family groups filing between stands of Borassus fan palms on their way to water, ears out, silent on the sand. Northwest African cheetah still cross this savanna, but so few that researchers count them in single digits and go years between confirmed photographs. The park runs on water. As the dry season bites, the pools shrink to a few muddy hollows and everything needs the same one. Hartebeest walk out onto cracked mud to drink beside a long raft of spur-winged geese, and a grey heron works the brown shallows alone under a leafless baobab. That is exactly why the lions come. For decades the park's safety rested on a bargain: the villages around it policed the bush and took a share of what it earned. When management changed hands in 2017 and the rules tightened, that bargain frayed, and armed groups pushed in from across the borders. The lions are still counted, and the count still holds: a quarter of a subspecies whose nearest relatives are not in East Africa at all, but in India.