'Born Free,' Revisited

Amazingly, it is now more than half a century since the publication of “Born Free,” Joy Adamson’s tale of Elsa the lioness and her successful reintroduction  to  the  wild.  Although  the  book  swiftly  became  an  international  best-seller,  it  was  the subsequent movie, released in 1966, which seized the imagination of the world.

I  sometimes  think  that  the  modern  safari  business  was  invented  by  Virginia  McKenna, whose straw-blond hair seemed  to contain the essence of the sun-bleached savanna. Like millions of others, in  the  darkness  of  the  movie  theater  I  was  transfixed  by  the  romance  of  the  Adamsons’ story and by the scale and  grandeur of the East African landscape.
 
“Born  Free” undoubtedly  provided  much of the impetus behind my first visit to Kenya, a trip that began a near-obsession  with  wild  Africa  that  has  endured  for  more than 30 years. Yet despite the dozens of safaris I  have  been  privileged  to  undertake,  it  wasn’t  until  my  recent  journey that I saw the actual places where the Adamsons had lived and where much  of the movie was filmed.

Elsa's Kopje

Elsa’s Kopje sprawls across Mughwango Hill in Meru National Park and overlooks the site of George Adamson’s first camp.  On arrival at the lodge, we found the lobby decorated with fine old black-and-white photographs, including one iconic image of George sitting  on a rocky pinnacle, rifle in hand, Elsa beside him, man and  lioness gazing out across the plains below.  For  much  of  Elsa’s  story,  however, the  Adamsons’ camp was nearly an hour’s  drive away, at the far southeast of Meru Park, on the banks of the Ura  River.  It was there that Joy spent her afternoons painting and  drawing with  Elsa at her side, and that the remarkable intimacy of their  relationship developed.

And it was there that Elsa brought her three cubs, offspring of a wild father, to introduce them to her human family, an event that George recorded in his diary as one of the most moving moments of his life. Finally,  it was at the Ura River camp that Elsa died from tick fever at the surprisingly young age of 5.  

During the course of a morning’s game-viewing at Elsa’s Kopje, our guide, George Kimaru, inquired if we would like to see the place for ourselves and to visit Elsa’s grave. So in midafternoon, we set off in a Land Cruiser on a rutted dirt road that twisted through  tangled bush, emerging occasionally onto grasslands dotted with grazing buffalo, zebra and giraffe. Along the way, we saw no one.  Eventually, we arrived at a series of rocky outcrops, each maybe 100 feet high, standing close to the tree-lined banks of a muddy river. Taking care to ensure that none of Elsa’s relatives was asleep in the long grass, we strolled over to the grave, a low pile of rocks held  together with concrete.  On one slab, roughly carved with a chisel, it said simply “ELSA JAN 1956 – JAN 1961.” Next to it was fixed a metal plaque, engraved with six lines of poetry and “JOY ADAMSON  (1910-1980).”

It is now well-known that the Adamsons’ life together bore little resemblance to the romantic idyll portrayed by Virginia McKenna  and Bill Travers in the movie.  The kindest remark about Joy that you can extract from people in Kenya today is that she had “an artistic temperament.” Soon after Elsa’s death, she and George separated, and despite the huge commercial success of the three Elsa books and the movie, George spent much of the remainder of his life in relative poverty, a condition that, remarkably, he didn’t seem to resent. It is possible to feel some sympathy for Joy, however, when you learn that she endured three miscarriages and that her passion for Elsa was clearly a substitute for maternal love for a child. Later on in her life, Joy freely conceded that she had come to prefer animals to people and asked that her ashes be scattered on Elsa’s memorial.

Having sat at the grave for 15 minutes or so, watching a family of hornbills in a nearby tree, we strolled over to the river to try to identify the distinctive boulders that can  be seen in Joy’s  photographs, and to locate the sandbank on which  Elsa  spent  hours  playing with her cubs.  The  sandbank had been washed away, but  one  of  the  rocks  looked  extremely  familiar.  On  that  sunny  afternoon, it seemed  an  ineffably  peaceful  spot.  In  Kenya  today,  it  is  increasingly  hard  to  find  places  that  have  the  feeling  of  true  wilderness. But the Ura River campsite felt  remote both physically and in time. Just a  short walk, or so it seemed, would bring us to a row of  safari  tents,  a  smoldering  fire, and George’s old Land Rover parked  in the shade beneath a tree.

In fact, even in the Adamsons’ day, the  campsite wasn’t completely detached from  the human world. There were villages just  four  or  five  miles  away,  on  the  far  side  of  the  river.  After  their  mother’s  death,  Elsa’s cubs began raiding these settlements  in  search  of  food,  and  they  had  to  be  relocated to the Serengeti National Park  in Tanzania, both for their own safety and  that of the villagers. George continued to  reintroduce lions to the wild — beginning  with Girl, Boy and Ugas, the feline stars of  the movie — but soon he, too, was obliged  to move farther away, to Kora National Park, an area then without habitation.

It is now estimated that in the 45 years since “Born Free” was released, Kenya has lost 90 percent of its lion population, which now stands at around 2,000, according to the official statistics of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Throughout Africa, lions are now  categorized  as  “Vulnerable”  on  the  Red List of Threatened Species from the International Union for Conservation of  Nature.  Many wildlife experts fear that  within 50 years, the lion will be like the  tiger, a genetically compromised species,  struggling  to  survive  in  tiny  pockets  of  protected  habitat.  Africa’s  human  population is now more than 1 billion and  is  growing  at  3  percent  each  year.  More  people  mean  more  cattle,  less  prey  and  ever-smaller wild areas in which lions can  roam and hunt. Africa’s wars have flooded  the continent with guns and, seemingly,  poison is seldom hard to find.

The  movie  “Born  Free”  may  have  filled  millions  with  a  longing  for  Africa  —  myself  included  —  but  before  long,  it  may  have  acquired  an  elegiac  quality.  Alas, in another 50 years, it will likely be  a  depiction  and  a  celebration  of  a  world  that has vanished forever.