The Adamson Experience

The story about Elsa the Lioness and a book called Born Free continues to capture the hearts and minds of people everywhere. Nev’s travel escapades to Elsa Kopje allowed her an experience of the famous Adamson Story which is quite thrilling we must say.

The Adamson story as it pertains to Kenya, really starts in the 1930’s; George Adamson had joined the Game Department, and was stationed up in what was then known as the Northern Frontier District, in the late 1930’s. He had been born in India in 1906 and educated in England. When George and his brother Terence were young adults, their parents planned to move from India to the Cape in South Africa. They crossed the Indian Ocean by ship, and docked in Mombasa, where the ship was due to lie at anchor for some days awaiting new passengers. The Adamsons decided to explore Kenya while they waited – and never left. George’s parents ended up buying a coffee farm near Naivasha in south western Kenya. Terence became an engineer, and was responsible for much of the road construction in northern Kenya; George is quoted as saying that one coffee bean was identical to another, so he didn’t see anything challenging or exciting about coffee farming! He never really found his niche in life until he joined the Game Department – and there found what he was born to do.

Joy was born Victoria Gessner in 1910, in what is today part of the Czech Republic, of Austrian descent. She married quite young, and her first husband, Count Viktor von Klarwill, sent her out to Kenya to escape the German expansion into Europe. On the journey over she met Swiss botanist Peter Bally, who discovered that Victoria was a very talented artist; it was also he who nicknamed her Joy. The two fell in love and soon married. Peter and Joy spent a number of years travelling around Kenya together; he collecting and studying specimens, she illustrating them. Joy’s illustrations were used in a number of publications and guide books, and are recognised as being in a class of their own in terms of accuracy. She also illustrated all of the indigenous tribes in Kenya; a large collection of her original works are housed in the National Museum in Nairobi.

It was during one such expedition, in 1942, that Joy encountered George Adamson, on the banks of the Tana River, where he was based at the time. She fell in love with him, and the two were married later that year.

As relevant to the story of Elsa the lioness, we skip forward to 1956, when George was called to deal with a lioness that was causing problems north of Meru, close to the town of Isiolo. When he went to investigate, he was charged by a lioness whom he had to shoot in self-defence – and then discovered that she was lactating. A search was conducted, and in a rocky outcrop that the lioness had come charging out of, 3 tiny cubs were found.

Joy’s original book was Born Free, written in 1960; she then went on to write Living Free and Forever Free in 1961 and 1962 respectively – and the trilogy tells the whole story of Elsa and her cubs, and their release into the wild. The story was also the basis for the movie Born Free, released in 1966 and starring Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, who later went on to found the Born Free Foundation; originally named “The Zoo Check Foundation”, in 1984; later renamed The Born Free Foundation in 1988. 

Bill Travers passed away in 1994, but Virginia is still very actively involved in the Foundation – whose current President is their eldest son, Will.

Soon after the making of the movie, in the late 1960’s, George and Joy separated; they remained close friends, and had much in common, but couldn’t live together. Joy was notoriously eccentric and a rather unpredictable character, as is quite often the case with very artistically talented people; she was also known to be quite overbearing, and George would say that he could only tolerate her “in small doses”. 

George set up his camp just at the base of Mugwongho Hill, where he remained until relocating to Kora National Park, which adjoins Meru to the south east, in the early 1970’s. Joy continued in what had been their original camp – and went on to do a cheetah project here in Meru, she had acquired a cheetah cub who had been orphaned here, and whom she raised and successfully released back into the wild; she wrote a further two books, The Spotted Sphinx and Pippa’s Challenge – and Pippa the cheetah is also buried in the north western part of Meru National Park.

Joy then moved down to Naivasha in south western Kenya. She had always wanted to do a project on all three of the big cats; and in the mid-1970’s she was given a leopard cub that had been orphaned up in the Samburu region. She took the cub down to Naivasha, and when she was big enough, Joy moved to Shaba National Reserve, which lies in the Samburu region – not far from where the leopard, whom Joy had called Penny, had come from in the first place, and she set up her camp there. Shaba is an area rich in natural leopard populations – so it was a perfect choice for her to release a leopard back into the wild; which she did very successfully. Leopard by nature are a very shy, elusive animal – so Penny took to being released into the wild very easily. Penny had one set of cubs that Joy was able to see and photograph; she never had contact with the cubs, like she had had with both Elsa’s and Pippa’s cubs, but she did see them; 1979 was really the last time that Joy would see Penny. Shaba is a very rugged and remote area, full of granite “kopjes” and caves, so Penny was able to disappear into that wilderness very easily. Penny was collared, but her collar has never been found, so we have every reason to believe that she lived out a full life in that area.

Joy remained in Shaba until she was murdered there in January 1980, by a staff member whom she had dismissed over a salary dispute. She used to go for a walk from her camp every evening, and in January 1980 she set off for her normal walk; when she had not returned to her camp by about 7:30 in the evening, her staff became worried and went to look for her; they found where she had been attacked and had tried to crawl her way back to camp, but had not made it; and while they were out, her attacker ransacked her camp and stole some items that were later found on him, which was how he was convicted. 

Joy had always stipulated that she wanted her ashes here in Meru; so when she was murdered, George had her cremated, and scattered half of her ashes over Elsa’s grave, and the other half over Pippa’s grave.

George had moved to Kora National Park by this time. Kora is well known as the location of the story of Christian, the lion cub who had been bought in Harrods in London, raised in a flat in Chelsea, and later brought out to Kenya by his owners, and successfully reintroduced into the wild by George Adamson.

George was having terrible problems with poachers in Kora in the late 1980’s – Somali “shifta” pastoralists bringing their livestock into the Park were a constant problem. George had called in the security forces a number of times to flush them out, and in retribution they set up an ambush for him, between his camp and the airstrip, which he drove into in August 1989.

So, both George and Joy Adamson, having devoted their lives to animals and conservation, were killed by people, tragically. 

After George was murdered, virtually all of the wildlife in Meru and Kora was wiped out by the poaching – more bush meat poaching as opposed to ivory, so all species were affected – to the extent that the Kenya Government were considering de-gazetting Meru as a National Park; it had been gazetted as a National Park in 1966, but with all the wildlife gone, and security a risk, the Government were considering abandoning Meru and handing it over to the local people for agriculture; there are 13 permanent rivers that rise in the Nyambeni Hills and flow all year round; so the area is very well watered, very fertile and quite flat; so could have been ideal for cultivation.

However, Meru plays a pivotal role in the conservation of wildlife in central northern Kenya, so the decision was made to bring in security forces to flush out the bandits and secure the Park; once the situation had stabilized in the early 1990’s, an extensive operation was launched to reintroduce wildlife back into Meru, which has been tremendously successful, as Meru National Park as it is today has probably the widest species diversity of any wilderness area in East Africa; including a very successful rhino breeding sanctuary in the north western corner of the Park.

It is also known as one of Kenya’s birding “hot spots”. Aside from that, Meru is such an aesthetically beautiful area, characterized by dramatic scenery and tremendous habitat diversity. One can encounter riverine forest, open grasslands, granite kopjes and volcanic lava plains, all within a very short space of time.

It is this diversity that lends itself to such a range of bird and mammal species.

Look Forward To A More Experiential Visitors Experience In Part 3…