"Baba ya Simba" George Alexander Graham Adamson

Somalis blamed for Adamson Murder

By JANE PERLEZ N.Y. Times News Service KORA ROCK, Kenya
George Adamson, protector of lions and their environment, was killed here Sunday in an ambush a few kilometres from his isolated camp in northern Kenya, officials said Monday. Adamson, 83, was on his way to pick up visitors at his dirt airstrip when his Land-Rover was attacked by gunfire from three bandits, said the director of the Kenyan wildlife department, Dr. Richard Leakey.

Leakey said he believed the attackers were Somalis. Ethnic Somalis have been blamed for most robberies in remote areas of Kenya. Two of Adamson's Kenyan assistants, who were with him in the vehicle, also were killed.

Adamson and his wife, Joy, created the legend of Elsa, the lion of Born Free. Mrs. Adamson, who had been separated from her husband, was killed in 1980. An employee at her camp was convicted.

While Adamson's first love was raising lions and releasing them back to the wild, he was attached to all wildlife. As he watched first rhinoceros and then elephants disappear from the surrounding Kora National Reserve, he became a harsh critic of what he considered the government's lax attitudes toward elephant poachers.

Leakey said after visiting Kora on Monday that he believed Adamson's killers were "from a group of poachers."

In 1980, after Adamson's brother Terence was mauled by a lion, the Kenyan government forbade him to receive any more cubs. But last year the officials relented, and Adamson was given three orphan cubs. He also played host to lions that came from the reserve to his enclosure at nightfall.

Adamson, who was born in India in 1906, arrived in Kenya in 1924 when it was an English colony. In 1933, he became an assistant game warden. A year later, he married. In 1956, as a senior game warden, Adamson shot a female lion and later found three cubs. Two were sent to a zoo. The Adamsons kept the smallest and called her Elsa. Her story became the book and movie Born Free.

The Vancouver Sun, Tuesday, August 22, 1989

BORN FREE: a joyless end

Con Coughlin took a headstone to the unmarked grave in Kenya of the lions' friend and hero of Born Free, George Adamson. He found desolation at Kora.

"Who will now care for the animals in the reserve, for they cannot look after themselves? Who will raise their voices, when mine is carried on the wind, to plead Kora's case." - George Adamson, 1986

There were baboons, warthogs, camels, zebras, giraffes, guinea-fowl aplenty and even an ever-attentive vulture, but there were no lions the day we laid the headstone on George Adamson's grave.

Kampi ya Simba, Lion's Camp, a row of neat, deserted wooden huts three miles south of the Equator, together with the quartz rocks that mark his grave, are all that remain of the work of a man who made his name returning to the wild lions not born free.

In any other setting the camp's features might be put down to one old man's eccentricity: the upturned jawbone of an elephant that served as a surprisingly comfortable lavatory seat, the petrol tank strung from a joist that provided the morning's cold shower, and by each hut a small slit trench into which the occupants could dive for cover from attack by marauders.

The makeshift defences could not save George Adamson's life last August. Answering a distress call from a young German girl assistant who had been waylaid by Somali bandits some distance from the camp, he drove straight into an ambush and, together with two assistants, died instantly in a hail of gunfire.

Piles of National Geographics and wildlife magazines, useless machinery parts and unanswered letters from well-wishers identify the shack that was Adamson's home for 19 years. By the perimeter fence, cages in which young cubs were prepared for their return to the wild lie empty.

Behind the camp stand the two distinctive sandstone hills - one Adamson nicknamed "Kora's Tit" because of the boulder at its top - that marked Adamson's camp amid the seemingly endless wilderness of Kora's grey thornbush scrub are still, save for vultures. From here Adamson's lions would scan Kora in search of game and roar their mating anthems.

With Kampi ya Simba deserted, with no one to feed them or care for them, the lions that were the pride of Adamson's life have scattered throughout a land that is about the most inhospitable East Africa has to offer.

Adamson's prophecy in his autobiography, My Pride and Joy, published in 1986, that after his death no one would replace him and continue his unique work caring for lions, has been quietly fulfilled.

So desolate has Kampi ya Simba become that the decent, humanitarian gesture of laying a simple, granite headstone on his grave the other week became a major feat of organization. Terry Mathews, a former hunter turned sculptor and lifelong friend of Adamson's, organized the headstone, but had been unable to place it for several months because of the difficulties of getting to Kora.

When I arranged for a light aircraft to take me to Kora to see what had become of Adamson's mission, I arranged to take the headstone, together with Terry's son Rick, who had volunteered to care for Adamson's lions after his death but was turned down by the Kenyan authorities.

We flew to the bush airstrip five kilometres from Kampi ya Simba, but, because of the risk of attack from Somali bandits, we had to wait for an armed escort to arrive from Asako, 25 kilometres, before we could drive to the camp.

Ombui, Kora's new game-warden, was taking no chances as he drove across the dirt track. Six guards, armed with American automatic assault rifles, accompanied him, and two were left to guard our Cessna 206 as we drove to the camp, passing the spot where Adamson was murdered. It was protection like this that Adamson often requested, but rarely received.

Ombui brought with him two of Adamson's most long-standing employees, Mohammed, the camp's former headman who was in the jeep when Adamson was killed, and Abdi, his lion tracker, to lay the headstone. Though they are no longer employed, both Abdi and Mohammed have seen some of the Simba ya Georgi, George's lions.

"They are very different from the wild lions. They are not afraid of humans like the others," Abdi explained. "Sometimes at night they come to the camp and wait at the place where George used to feed them. But when no one comes they drift off into the scrub."

There are an estimated 70 lions that owe their presence at Kora to George Adamson. Some, such as Growe and Dennis, he returned to the wild. Most, however, are the generations of offspring from the 17 lions he introduced during his 19 years at Kora.

"Because they are more friendly to humans, they are more at risk now that George is dead," said Abdi. "The Somalis are always trying to kill them. Instead of running away when they see an armed Somali like the other lions, they stand their ground, expecting to be fed."

There have been no announcements, no press conferences, nothing published about the closure of Kampi ya Simba. But in the 11 months since Adamson died, the authorities responsible for administering Kora, upgraded by the Kenyan government to national reserve status shortly before his death, have ensured that Adamson's mission died with him.

The official explanation for not appointing a lion expert to take over from Adamson was that the security situation in Kora, a 1,200-square-kilometre park in northeast Kenya, made it too dangerous.

Because Kenya lacks the resources, very little is done to secure the border with Somalia, with the result that Somali herdsmen, and sometimes bandits, move their camel and goat herds into the more fertile Kenyan pasture. It was an issue over which Adamson had many heated arguments with the Kenyan authorities, especially when the trespassing Somalis accused his lions of attacking their herds.

Underlying the Kenyan authorities' reluctance to continue Adamson's work is the fact that most of the country's wildlife experts were deeply opposed to Adamson's mission during his lifetime and are determined to ensure that it will not continue.

Within days of his death, Kenyan wildlife officials in Nairobi arranged to transfer the three remaining cubs in Adamson's care to a reserve in Botswana, a move that prevented Adamson's friends and supporters from organizing a replacement lion expert.

Then the authorities ordered that all of Adamson's black African helpers - Abdi, Mohammed, the driver, the cook, some of whom had worked at Kampi ya Simba for more than 10 years - be paid off.

At first, the multi-million-dollar Elsa Trust, the association established by the late Joy Adamson to channel the vast profits generated worldwide by the cinematic success of Born Free into wildlife preservation, offered the state derisory sums of little more than about $110 Cdn each. Only after the intervention of Adamson's friends were the figures revised, but still below $5,000.

In January, the authorities sent a small team of Adamson's friends, together with a police escort, to Kampi ya Simba, to remove the remaining personal effects. The death knell for Kampi ya Simba was sounded on Aug. 2 when another team undertook the hazardous 200-kilometre journey from Nairobi to dismantle the camp buildings and remove them to a tourist park farther south at Lake Naivasha.

Responsibility for Kora rests with Richard Leakey, the anthropologist who, as director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, is spearheading Kenya's much publicized anti-poaching drive.

"At some point we would like to develop Kora to its full potential as a national park, but it would be extremely foolhardy to make any kind of commitment before the security of the area could be guaranteed," he said at his Nairobi headquarters recently. But in appointing a long-standing adversary of Adamson's, Peter Jenkins, to take over as director of the Kora reserve in September, Leakey has given a clear indication that he backs the Kenyan environmentalist camp which opposed Kampi ya Simba from its establishment in 1970.

Jenkins' son Mark was, as a baby, mauled by Adamson's favorite lion, Boy, in 1969. But his opposition to Adamson has a more rational base. As lions are not yet an endangered species, resources are better served protecting the rhino and elephant, which are. Because Adamson's lions are less frightened of people than wild ones, they could be more intimidating to tourists. Jenkins has also argued that the introduction of Adamson's lions to Kora has upset the natural ecological balance.

The only other organization in a position to save Kampi ya Simba is the Elsa Trust which, unfortunately for the lions, displays the same anti-lion bias as its founder did in later years. Though married to George for 30 years, Joy Adamson drifted apart from her husband following the success of Born Free.

She always considered the success of the story of how they raised Elsa as a lion cub until they returned her to the wild as her own personal triumph, and in later life, when she became more involved with leopards and cheetahs, supported various attempts to close George's lion camp, which she thought attracted too much cheap publicity.

Peter Johnson, Elsa's director since Joy Adamson set it up in the 1960s, said at the trust's Nairobi offices recently that he had considered finding an expert to look after the Adamson lions, but decided the prospect was too expensive.

"Also, we have to be guided by the Kenya Wildlife Service," he said. "We got the distinct impression that the lions do not have much of a future at Kora, so it would make more sense to invest our money in schemes which are more in tune with the way the authorities intend to develop Kora."

The Sunday Telegraph, reprinted in The Vancouver Sun, Aug. 18th, 1990

For more information on George Adamson and the lions, visit the <a href="http://www.mkomazi.com" target="new">Tony FitzJohn/George Adamson website</a>

More biographical information on George, Joy and Terence can be found at <a href="http://www.fatheroflions.org/" target="new">Father of Lions

The movie "To Walk With Lions" starring Richard Harris as George gives a much more realistic account of George's relationship with Joy than the the Hollywood version, Born Free.

Wikipedia says "George Adamson was born 18 February 1906 in Dholpur, Rajasthan, India (then British India)"