I don't want to be offensive, but I would strongly suggest you research the mentality of lions, especially the males. They're sort of considered the bullies of all the cats in Africa. The females do most of the work ;-) and the males aren't above killing off cubs of their own pride.
Making them cutesy ala Disney is okay if it's going to be like a children's story or something, but it's been done before.
It made me flash back actually, on an article I read in National Geographic - in regards to conflict, maybe the Cheetah? I know that the only problem, aside from Man that the Cheetah has, are Hyena's and Lions. So perhaps a reversal and have some male cheetah's bugging them over territory (female cheetah's are usually solitary aside from mating and rearing cubs so it would have to be a male or two - they share territories sometimes in a (roughly) 20 mile radius.
Then there are leopards as well - lions in a story have been overkilled, why not another kind of cat? There are more challenges for leapords, cheetah's, ocelots, (I don't recall if those are Afrikan, though)
Aside from that, the problems they face of course - is water, food, territory, and mating. That's basically it for the so-called King of the Beasts, aside from poachers and assorted humans. (Bad Kings, in my opinion)
Is the story going to be straight fantasy or a children's kind of fantasy? I can't recall any Egyptian deity that used lions in their iconic representations - but certainly did for leopards. Try looking up Afrikan myths and legends for start - and if there is a search engine - instead of Egypt - try another area. I had a good book once on myths & legends - and I can't at the moment recall the exact region of Africa, but there were fae-folk kind of being in one of their tales. I think it was Zimbabwe or Zulu - so other areas of Afrikan myth and legend - like those fae-folk, could cause problems for your lion pride.
Hope some of that helped.
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