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 moved 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. It was with Adamson, her third husband, that her most crucial and well-known work was done. Their works were pivotal for the foundation of modern conservation.

They acquired Elsa, a tame lion cub, in 1956, after George had killed the cub's mother in self-defense. For two years Joy 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). These first two books were made into films. In addition to her books about lions, Adamson also wrote two books about Pippa, a cheetah she took on in 1964, as well as numerous other books about her life in Africa.

Joy and George separated in the 1970s, though they never divorced. On January 3, 1980 Joy was found murdered in a remote region of Kenya. George was murdered August 20, 1989 in an isolated region of Nairobi. This was an ironic end to the lives of two who had lived in such seemingly dangerous circumstances with wild animals; that their deaths were at the hands of men.

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. [4]

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.

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. [5]

Elsa the Lioness

Today the release of animals born or raised in captivity (zoos or reserves) back into the wild is a common practice. When Joy and George Adamson did it back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, it was a pioneering effort.

The success of their book "Born Free", further books and subsequent film, helped to fund the creation of Kenya's first wildlife reserves and bring the conservation issue to the world's attention.

In early 1956, George Adamson was sent to track down a man-eating lion that had been terrorizing several villages. He and his hunting party startled a lioness and her cubs in the deep bush. When the lioness charged he had no choice but to shoot. February 1st, 1956, was the day he brought the lion cubs home to Joy, two of which were later sent to a Dutch zoo. The Adamsons kept and reared the smallest cub, which they named Elsa.

Thus began the events which would prove pivotal not only for the life of the Adamsons but for the very foundation of modern conservation. After Elsa had grown to about 3 years old, the Adamsons decided to re-integrate her back into the wild, rather than send her to a zoo. This had never before been attempted. Elsa was patiently taken back into the bush and encouraged to develop her instincts to hunt and survive in the wild.

George Adamson retired from his position of Senior Game Warden at Meru National Park in April 1961, to devote himself to working with lions. To share their experiences and stimulate interest in wild animals the Adamsons wrote the book "Born Free", about their experiences with Elsa. After release it rapidly became a best-seller.

It was to be the first of a trilogy, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds (1960), Living Free: The Story of Elsa and Her Cubs (1961), and Forever Free: Elsa's Pride (1962). With the 1964 release of a movie based on the first book, the Adamsons achieved celebrity status.

George Adamson had served as an animal trainer on the Born Free set in Kenya. After filming, he took charge of three of the film's lions and returned to Meru with Joy, where they continued educating lions for life in the wild. At this time Joy was also raising a cheetah and since lions are inclined to attack other cats in their territory, the Adamsons set up two separate camps 20 kilometres apart to continue their work. Joy Adamson also experimented with a leopard, and over time, proved that with skilful and considered action, many animals raised by humans may be effectively re-integrated into the wild.

George Adamson

George Adamson was born in Etawah, India, in 1906, to an English mother and an Irish father who helped to train an army for the Rajah of Dholpur. As a youth he attended a boarding school in England. He enjoyed hiking in Scotland with his younger brother Terence and dreamed of big game hunting in Africa.

Adamson came to Kenya in 1924 at the age of 18 to work on his father's coffee plantation. Working from dawn to dusk on the plantation did not appeal to him and in the following years he tried various schemes and briefly held many diverse jobs. In 1938, at age 32, he joined Kenya's Game Department as a warden and found an occupation that suited him. Four years later he met and married Joy Bally.

Five years after he and his wife's work with Elsa and their reintegration successes, with seven lions and numerous incidents behind him, George Adamson was finally expelled from the reserve after one of his favorite lions Boy, mauled the son of a warden. The only place where the government would allow him to continue his wildlife rehabilitation program was in Kora, an isolated and almost uninhabited region of desert 402 kilometres north of Nairobi. At Kora Adamson rented an area of 1,300 sq. km. where he, his younger brother Terence (1907–1986) and native assistants were to live and work.

In 1970, long standing tensions between George and Joy Adamson that were already straining the relationship peaked when Joy declared that she hated the intense heat and isolation of Kora, and refused to go. The couple separated but decided to continue spending Christmas together.

Murders

On January 3, 1980, in a remote part of Kenya,the 69 year old Adamson's body was discovered by her assistant, Peter Morson, on a road near her camp in the Shaba Nature Preserve, where she had lived for 3 years. 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 Nakware Ekai, a Turkana tribesman who was employed by Adamson, was convicted of her murder in 1981 and sentenced to a life sentence in a Nairobi prison. Ekai had escaped the death sentence because the judge ruled that he was a minor when the crime was committed. In 2004 Ekai claimed that he had killed her after she shot him in the leg for complaining that he had not been paid, however, in 2005 he recanted his 1980 confession and claimed he had nothing to do with her killing.

At his wife's funeral, George Adamson promised to carry on her work. According to her wishes, her cremated remains were scattered by George on the graves of the cheetah Pippa and the lioness Elsa.

At age 83, on August 20, 1989, George Adamson and two of his assistants were killed by Somali poachers when they intervened on behalf of a group of German tourists at Kampi Ya Simba (camp of the lions) in Kora.

Joy and George Adamson had chosen to remain in the wilds of Kenya in spite of the opportunites that had come with the fame of their published works. They continued to care for and study the animals that had become their life's work, living in a harsh and isolated environment amidst wild and untamed predatory cats. Their unfortunate deaths at the hands of humans, makes for an ironic contrast to their lives.

Books

• Adamson, Joy, Born Free: A lioness of two worlds, New York, Pantheon Books, 1960, ISBN 1-568-9551-X
• Adamson, Joy, Living Free: The story of Elsa and her cubs 1966, ISBN 0-006-37588-X
• Adamson, Joy, Forever Free: Elsa's Pride, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964, ISBN 0-006-32885-7
• Adamson, Joy, The Spotted Sphinx 1969, ISBN 0-151-84795-9
• Adamson, Joy, Pippa: The Cheetah and her Cubs, New York, Harcourt & World 1970, ISBN 0-152-62125-3
• Adamson, Joy, Joy Adamson's Africa, New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich 1972, ISBN 0-151-46480-4
• Adamson, Joy, Pippa's Challenge ,New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, ISBN 0-151-71980-2
• Adamson, Joy, Peoples of Kenya New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, ISBN 0-151-71681-1
• Adamson, Joy, The searching spirit: An autobiography, London, Collins and Harvill Press, 1978, ISBN 0-002-16035-8
• Adamson, Joy, Queen of Shaba: The Story of an African Leopard, London, Collins Harvill, 1980 ISBN 0-002-72617-3
• Adamson, Joy, Friends from the Forest, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 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?

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• Joy Adamson  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "Joy Adamson"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.