George Adamson

Few men can have lived a more colourful life than George Adamson. He was born in India in 1906 and first came to Kenya in 1924 to work on his father’s coffee farm. Not taking kindly to plantation life he embarked on a varied career as locust control officer, gold prospector, beeswax trader and professional hunter before finding his vocation as a game warden, shooting man-eaters and chasing ivory poachers in Kenya’s wild Northern Province.

In 1944 he and Joy Adamson were married – the beginning of a partnership which led to the publication of Born Free, the story of Elsa the lioness which the Adamsons reared and returned to the wild. For Joy Adamson the book she wrote brought wealth and celebrity. For George, always content to stay out of the limelight, the Elsa years led to a growing fascination with Africa’s most powerful carnivores; and in 1970, when he and Joy parted amicably to live separate lives, he moved to Kora in Northern Kenya to continue his work on lion rehabilitation.

“I chose Kora because it was the only place where I was allowed to bring my lions,” said George.

“It was a sort of no-man’s land that no-one wanted.”

Except George, who paid the local district council £750 a year to rent 500 square miles of sun-stricken bush. It was in Kora that he was joined by Tony Fitzjohn, who became a tower of strength and stayed with him in Kora until 1988, setting up his own leopard rehabilitation programme nearby to George’s camp in 1981.

The 1980s were a bad time to be in Kenya. Poachers were slaughtering the country’s elephants and Kora was overrun by shifta bandit gangs – a situation resulting in the authorities’ decision to shut down Adamson’s lion project. George himself could remain, but life was made impossible for Tony Fitzjohn, who had left Kora in 1988 to take up the new challenge offered to him at Mkomazi in Tanzania.

In 1988 George received the gift of three lion cubs from Perez Olindo, then Kenya’s director of wildlife and conservation. George was overjoyed.

In October that same year three Kora rangers were shot dead by a shifta gang less than a mile from Adamson’s airstrip; but despite the ever-present threat of shifta poachers, he stayed on.

Over those years in Kora, he released over 30 lions into the wild and spent his pension mostly on petrol for his Land Rovers and camel meat for his pride.

In February 1989 he celebrated his 83rd birthday at Kora, and although times were hard, he still had the companionship of Abdi, his tracker and driver, and Hamisi Ferah, his elderly Sudanese cook who had been with him for 30 years.

Meanwhile, the poachers were growing even bolder, moving with impunity through Kora and slaughtering Meru National Park’s rare five white rhinos. Fearing for his safety, the authorities tried to persuade him to leave but he would not budge.

The end, when it happened, was as sudden as it was inevitable. On August 19th in 1989 the strangest thing happened. For months he had seen and heard nothing of the lions he had released into the wild. But that night, to George’s delight, the entire pride gathered around Kampi ya Simba, grunting and roaring all night long.

The next day he was ambushed and shot dead by a shifta bandit gang armed with AK-47 automatic weapons. Had he lived, he would have seen Kora gazetted as a National Park before the year was out; and that was the legacy Kenya’s grand old Lion Man left Africa and the world.