West with the Light by Brian Jackman

Author:Brian Jackman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784778361
Publisher: Bradt Travel Guides Ltd
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

The most extraordinary lion behaviour I ever witnessed took place at Kora, where George Adamson of Born Free fame lived in the wilds of northern Kenya.

It happened in January 1980, the day after Joy Adamson’s funeral in Nairobi. Only two months earlier I had been interviewing her at her camp in the Shaba game reserve. Now the world-famous author of Born Free – the bestselling story of an orphaned lion cub – was dead, murdered by one of her former camp staff.

When the news reached the Sunday Times, I was sent to Nairobi to cover the story and it was there I met the grand old Lion Man of Kenya for the first time. By then the couple had long since separated. George said he much preferred the company of his lions to that of his wife and invited me to meet them.

Having filed my story, I flew back to Kora with him, where the first thing we did was to jump into his decrepit old Land Rover and set off into the bush.

We stopped on the banks of the Tana River, and George got out. ‘Arusha,’ he shouted, in the way you might call for your dog. ‘Come on, old girl.’ And at the sound of his voice, she emerged from a thorn thicket, a full-grown lioness with blood on her muzzle from the waterbuck she had just killed.

What happened next is engraved forever on my mind. From where I sat in the front of the vehicle, I watched spellbound as the lioness ran at him, then rose on her hind legs and draped her huge forepaws over the old man’s shoulders, grunting with pleasure as he hugged her tawny body and made little moaning lion noises of his own in reply.

The extraordinary saga of Born Free brought international acclaim for Joy but led George, her retired game-warden husband, to Kora, where he would devote the rest of his life to the high-risk business of returning lions to the wild.

‘I chose Kora because it was the only place where I was allowed to bring my lions,’ George told me. ‘It was a sort of no man’s land that nobody wanted.’ He rented it from the local council – £750 a year for 500 miles of unforgiving wilderness straddling the Equator – and built a home he called Kampi ya Simba: Lion Camp.

Here he lived in a wire compound with his raggle-taggle pride of rescued lions roaming free on the other side. Among them was Boy, who had starred with Virginia McKenna in the Born Free movie, and Christian, a fifth-generation zoo lion who had come to Kora via Harrods and a King’s Road furniture shop.

Among the human residents that shared George’s extraordinary existence were his brother Terence, Hamisi his devoted cook, and Tony Fitzjohn, a wild young Englishman with shoulder-length hair and sawn-off shorts who had hitchhiked to Kenya to work with animals.

Like the lions, Fitzjohn was an orphan. He was also tough and capable and could turn his hand to anything, from stripping down a Land Rover to fixing the two-way radio.

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