Joy Adamson

Biography

On the evening of 3 January 1980 Joy Adamson set out on a walk in the Shaba reserve in Kenya and did not return. She was found by her assistant Pieter Morson (his surname is spelled in different ways in English-language writing). At first it was reported that a lion had killed her.

The post-mortem showed otherwise.

Friederike Victoria Gessner was born on 20 January 1910 in Troppau (now Opava), in Austria-Hungary, the second of three daughters of Victor Gessner, a construction engineer. Her mother’s family owned land in Bohemia. Her parents divorced in 1922, or by other accounts when she was ten, and she went to live with her grandmother in Vienna. In her autobiography, “The Searching Spirit”, she wrote of this grandmother that whatever was good in her she owed to her. In Vienna Friederike studied piano at the music academy, tried sculpture and metalwork, took up photography, had singing lessons, and then studied psychology, anatomy and medicine. It seems to me that this scattering explains a good deal: no craft held her for long until animals appeared.

In 1935 she married Viktor Klarwill. Because of his Jewish origins and the threat of Nazism, they considered emigrating to Africa. In 1937 she sailed to Kenya alone; her husband soon followed, and they were divorced that December. Either on the ship or soon after arriving she met the Swiss botanist Peter Bally. They married in 1938, and he gave her the name Joy, since her earlier names seemed to him too complicated. He also awakened her interest in botany. She began drawing plants and illustrated books on the flora of East Africa (at least seven volumes, among them a gardening handbook). The marriage broke up after about four years.

Her third husband was George Adamson, a game warden in a wildlife reserve; they met in the early 1940s and married in Nairobi in 1944. With him she collected and drew fossils, reptiles and insects. After the war, in London, she prepared an exhibition of her flower watercolours at the Royal Horticultural Society, and it won her the Grenfell Gold Medal. In 1949 the colonial government of Kenya commissioned her to paint people of twenty local tribes: in traditional dress, in masks, chiefs and healers. Over her lifetime she produced more than five hundred paintings and drawings, many of them shown at the museum in Nairobi.

In 1956 George, carrying out his official duties, shot a lioness that had been attacking people. Three cubs were found nearby. The two larger ones were sent to the zoo in Rotterdam, and the smallest, Elsa, stayed with the family. When Elsa was older, the Adamsons decided not to give her to a zoo, and for several months taught her to hunt on her own, taking her further and further from the camp. Before them, no one had managed to return a lioness raised in captivity to the wild. Elsa went off with a young male lion and came back with three cubs, the first in such a position to keep contact with people. The couple kept their distance and approached the cubs only to photograph them.

Joy’s notes and George’s journals became “Born Free”, published in 1960. Several publishers turned it down, but it then spent thirteen weeks at the top of The New York Times bestseller list, and it has been translated into thirty-three languages in all. Its success rested on Elsa’s story and on dozens of photographs. Elsa died in January 1961 of a tick-borne disease. Her cubs began killing local farmers’ livestock, and they were moved to Tanganyika, to Serengeti National Park. The sequels were “Living Free” and “Forever Free”. Joy gave the proceeds of her books to wildlife protection, together with a fund named after the lioness.

In 1964 she was given a female cheetah, Pippa, who was seven months old; Joy hoped to release her into the wild. Pippa had four litters, and “The Spotted Sphinx” and “Pippa’s Challenge” were written about her and her family. In 1972 a book of Joy’s paintings, “Joy Adamson’s Africa”, appeared. From the late 1960s George wanted to work with lions and Joy with cheetahs, and they came to live apart, though they never divorced and spent every Christmas together. In her last ten years she travelled the world giving lectures on the threats facing African wildlife. In 1976 she acquired a leopard cub, Penny, eight weeks old; the book about her, “Queen of Shaba” (1980), appeared after the author’s death. In 1977 the Austrian government awarded her the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art.

The police solved the killing: the wounds were too clean to have been made by an animal. The man charged was Paul Nakware Ekai, a former labourer whom she had dismissed. By some accounts he confessed in 1981, by others he never admitted guilt. He was sentenced to indefinite imprisonment; he escaped the death penalty because the court held that he might have been a minor when the crime was committed. Joy’s body was cremated, and her ashes were scattered or buried by Elsa’s grave in Meru National Park. George outlived his wife by nine years and in 1989 was killed in a shootout with Somali poachers. In Opava a memorial plaque hangs on the house where she was born, and in 1994 a crater on Venus was named after her.