How can we write history not only on but with the lion? Environmental historian Sandra Swart (Stellenbosch University, South Africa) challenged colonial conceptions of the human-animal relationship that were (and continue to be) based on competition and masculinity. In order to let the lion speak, as a historical subject, it is necessary to recognize that no lion is like the other, and that lions have cultures, too: pre-colonial narratives, proverbs, and early ethnographic accounts of interactions between indigenous peoples and lions offer important pathways into alternative ways of writing the history of lions and the people that share the spaces they live in.