Joy Adamson

Joy Adamson (January 20, 1910 – January 3, 1980) was a popular wildlife conservationist of the 1960s and an author, best known for her book, Born Free, which described her experiences in saving the life of a lioness, Elsa.

Mrs. Adamson was born Joy Friedericke Victoria Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, Austria-Hungary (now Opava, Czech Republic). In 1937 she went to Kenya, then a British Colony. In 1944 she married George Adamson, a British game warden in Kenya, and adopted Kenya as her own country, living on the shores of Lake Naivasha.

She acquired Elsa, a tame lion cub, in 1956, after her husband had killed a lioness in self-defense. For two years Elsa and George trained the animal for a return to the wild, and the subsequent book about Elsa, Born Free (1960), was an international success. Adamson followed the book with Living Free (1961) and Forever Free (1962). Two films were based upon her books: Born Free and Living Free. In addition to her books about lions, Adamson also wrote two books about Pippa, a cheetah she took on in 1964.

Joy and George separated in the 1970s, and on January 3, 1980 Joy was found murdered in a remote region of Kenya.

Early Years

Joy Adamson was born on January 20, 1910 as Friederike Victoria Gessner in Troppau, Austrian Silesia (now Opava in Czechia) into the civilized elegance of the Habsburg Empire just before World War I. She spent her childhood in the manor of her mother's relatives. An active child, she enjoyed such sports and games as playing lion-hunt with other children, swimming and tennis. She would often accompany the resident gamekeeper through thickets filled with deer and foxes, listening to his tales of wild animals.

As a young woman, Joy she lived with her grandmother in Vienna, Austria. There she took singing lessons, learned to play piano, studied fine arts such as sculpture and metal-crafts, learned restoration, typing, short-hand, photography and equestrian skills. Later she became interested in psychoanalysis, which was very fashionable in Vienna at that time. For some time she dreamed of studying medicine in university.

In 1935 she married the successful businessman and amateur ornithologist, Victor von Klarwill. Intending to settle in Kenya to escape the threatened occupation of Austria, they arrived in Africa to "acclimatize" on May 13, 1937.

Life in Africa

Arriving in Kenya with her husband two years after her marriage, she recalled later, she "fell in love with this wonderful country," and stayed.

During her initial voyage to Africa, Friederike Victoria met the Swiss botanist Peter Bally who soon became her second husband. It was he who first gave her the name "Joy". In March 1938 after Peter Bally received a post in the Nairobi Museum, Joy Bally moved to Kenya permanently. She assisted her husband by painting the plants he collected, eventually illustrating seven books relating to East African flora. In 1947 the Royal Horticultural Society of Great Britain awarded her the Grenfell Gold Medal for her work. [1]

This marriage foundered in 1944 on safari, when Joy met a British-Irish game warden named George Adamson. They were married later that same year.

Childless themselves, the Adamsons fashioned a wilderness family out of Kenya's foundling animals. In 1956, after George had shot a ferocious lioness, the couple rescued her just-born litter. The two stronger females in time went off to a Dutch zoo. Elsa, the weakest, stayed behind to become first a pet (she rode on their Land Rover roof, often slept in George's tent) and then a problem. When Elsa by chance met and roamed briefly with a pride of wild lions, the Adamsons determined to release her and let her return to freedom. In preparation for that, with seemingly endless patience, they taught Elsa to hunt and kill for food.

Elsa and the three cubs she mothered were only the Adamsons' first experiments in returning animals to the wild. George continued to work mostly with lions, including some who had performed in Born Free. But Joy turned in the 1960s to cheetahs, successfully de-taming an engaging creature named Pippa and launching another three books. While plowing book and movie profits into an international conservation project called the Elsa Wild Animal Appeal, she also turned her attention to rehabilitating leopards for the wild, a project that she was on the way to completing at the time of her death. [2]

Joy participated in excavations in Rift Valley in Kenya and in Ngorongoro Crater, Tanganyika, now Tanzania) with the world-famous archaeologists and anthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey.

Near the end of the 1940s Joy Adamson began painting the natives of Kenya, portraying them in their traditional clothing and ornaments in order to document and perpetuate their disappearing customs. In six years of travel through the remote regions of Kenya she painted representatives of 54 main tribes (700 pictures). Her paintings can be seen in the Nairobi National Museum and in a few local administrative centres. [3]

Murder

On January 3, 1980, in a remote part of Kenya, Adamson's corpse was discovered by her assistant, Peter Morson (sometimes reported as Pieter Mawson). He assumed that Joy had been killed by a lion, and this was what was initially reported by the media.

Further police investigation found that Joy's wounds were too sharp and bloodless to have been caused by an animal, and concluded that Joy was murdered with a sharp instrument. The authorities questioned her former employees, as Adamson had a reputation for firing many of them. Paul Wakwaro Ekai, a labourer employed by Adamson, was found guilty of murder and is serving a life sentence in a Nairobi prison. Ekai escaped the death sentence because the judge ruled that he was a minor when the crime was committed. In a 2004 interview with The Guardian newspaper, Ekai claimed that he had killed her (with a gun and not a sharp instrument as previously thought) after she shot him in the leg for complaining that he had not been paid.

Books

• Born Free: A lioness of two worlds (1960) ISBN 1-568-9551-X
• Living Free: The story of Elsa and her cubs (1966) ISBN 0-006-37588-X
• Forever Free: Elsa's Pride (1964) ISBN 0-006-32885-7
• The Spotted Sphinx (1969) ISBN 0-151-84795-9
• Pippa: The Cheetah and her Cubs (1970) ISBN 0-152-62125-3
• Joy Adamson's Africa (1972) ISBN 0-151-46480-4
• Pippa's Challenge (1972) ISBN 0-151-71980-2
• Peoples of Kenya (1975) ISBN 0-151-71681-1
• The searching spirit: An autobiography (1978) ISBN 0-002-16035-8
• Queen of Shaba: The Story of an African Leopard (1980) ISBN 0-002-72617-3
• Friends from the Forest (1980) ISBN 0-151-33645-8

External links

• Joy Adamson at the Internet Movie Database
• Website about Elsa
• World Book-Joy Adamson
• Was Born Free author Joy Adamson killed by a lion—or murdered?

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