KENYA: The Woman Who Loved Lions

Author Joy Adamson lived free amid her animals

Only one thing is certain,” wrote Joy Adamson in her autobiography, published just last spring. “People get out of life exactly what they put into it.” Joy Adamson embraced East Africa and shared her embrace with the world. During more than four decades in Kenya, she sketched and painted the region’s luxuriant flowers and plants, captured portraits of its tribespeople in their fast-vanishing traditional costumes, and—most of all—made the great cats of Africa her friends. No lion on earth ever became more famous than Elsa, the cub that Adamson reared from infancy and then painstakingly trained to return to the wild. Through her book Born Free, its sequels and the film, Adamson made her lioness as popular and familiar as Lassie. Feeding the tiny cub with a baby bottle, pushing her on a homemade swing, nuzzling her with fearless affection, Adamson seemed more mother than keeper.

She was born Joy-Friederike Victoria Gessner in Troppau, Silesia, into the civilized elegance of the Habsburg Empire just before World War I. Even then, on the family estate, she would often accompany the resident gamekeeper through thickets filled with deer and foxes. She went on to study widely—music, dressmaking, metal crafts and premedical subjects—and in 1935 was married to an Austrian businessman. But two years later she went off on vacation to Kenya where, she recalled later, she “fell in love with this wonderful country,” and stayed. A second marriage, to Botanist Peter Bally, 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. In recent years, 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 as she approached her 70th birthday later this month.

Last week at the Shaba Game Reserve in central Kenya, as dusk fell on her camp, Joy Adamson indulged herself in her customary early evening habit: she set off, alone, on a stroll away from the camp. This time she did not return to hear the nightly news, as she always did. A search party was formed. Soon it found her lifeless body about 100 yards from the camp on a nearby trail. She had been badly mauled across the chest and an arm “by great claws,” a friend reported, “no doubt a lion.”