Introduction

Why did South Africa and the Kruger National Park (KNP) in particular not become a major early locus for African wildlife filmmaking? Why was the most visited and best-known African wildlife reserve, the place which probably drew more tourists than the rest of the continent’s wildlife reserves combined, not the continent’s first and most prominent locale for wildlife filming?

A first obvious point is that the KNP is in many ways a difficult place to see animals and to film them – at least compared to the savannahs of East Africa, or the waterholes of Etosha. The road network for tourists covers only a small part of the total surface of the park and limits access to most of the park. Trees block views and animals can disappear easily. For most of this period, almost all of the park was closed for the summer months because of dangers of contracting malaria. Anybody filming animals is likely to be disturbed by other tourists viewing or vying for good viewing spots. The Kruger Park also has obvious signs of human shaping: roads, rest-camps, telephone wires and fences. These too may have discouraged filmmakers looking to create an illusion of an untouched wilderness.

A neat example of the problems filmmakers faced and the ways they tried to liven up footage could be found in a French television news item aired on the 1 July 1954, with the title ‘Sans Barreaux’ or without bars. In this insert, reporter Jean Hudelot is shown entering the park at an entrance gate. Animals are photographed from the car window. A sleeping lion is roused by the reporter banging on the car to wake him up. Inserted in this is a sequence of the intrepid reporter hiding behind some bushes to view the game and then moving fast back to his car. One scrupulous editor somewhere annotated the sequence: some scenes were shot in the Bois du Boulogne! Clearly a series of shots of a rather portly reporter in a car and animals rather more distant than they would be in a zoo were not felt to be entertaining enough, and the journalist or editor in Paris decided to add drama by having the reporter out of the car.

Introduction

Carol Hughes, eventually perhaps habituated enough to trust me with a major revelation, one day said her husband David’s mantra was: ‘Not the BBC’. Why, given some of his most important films were made for them and that he had in part been trained by them, and given the general esteem in which the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU) and David Attenborough are held, might he have seen them as a negative principle? To understand the distinctive strengths of Southern African wildlife documentaries, it is useful to extract some of the NHU’s key operating principles as they were at once the source of its distinctive achievements but also point to some of their weaknesses and to the niches in the wildlife ecosphere the Southern Africans tried to fill.

The NHU

The histories of the BBC’s Natural History Unit examined earlier (Bright, Davies, Gouyon, Louson) illustrate the strengths of this institution but also suggest its corollary weaknesses. As I argued earlier, the weakness of the accounts of the NHU is both theoretical and historical in that they try to extract the NHU from the larger competitive broadcasting and production contexts. To try to write the history of the NHU without looking at what other broadcasters were doing or who was winning the ratings wars or industry accolades is to miss the way in which the field (to invoke Bourdieu) was developing and changing.

Let us put aside the greater home audience for most US productions and note that for much of the past half century, the NHU was not even the dominant wildlife broadcaster in the UK. Survival, with a strong component of Southern African material and with a South African born producer Mike Hay, was drawing much larger audiences (Gouyon 2019, 116). Partridge, as Davies pointed out, won the big competition prizes for most of the 1980s. And it didn’t stop there. Ellen Windemuth recalls in 2000 walking to collect the Golden Panda for the Foster brothers’ The Great Dance past rows of shocked BBC figures. If that didn’t happen in 2020 when Craig Foster won for My Octopus Teacher it was only because the event that year was virtual because of the COVID pandemic.

Introduction

This chapter explores why and how African wildlife documentary moved significantly from East to Southern Africa in the late 1970s and 1980s, at a time when southern Africa faced considerable political turmoil: the struggle for independence in South-West Africa/Namibia; the June 1976 upheavals in Soweto; the battle for independence in Mozambique and Angola.

Chapter 4 will examine the importance of the rise of private lodges and a guiding culture in more detail and Chapter 5 outlines, through a critical comparison of Southern African with British productions, and particularly those of the BBC’s NHU, what the distinctive strengths and achievements of Southern African wildlife productions were and are. These chapters thus summarize much of the material that will be covered in more detail in later chapters that take a more historical and chronological approach.

Drawing on the theoretical insights of Bourdieu, Latour and Peters, this chapter examines three major sets of factors, agents and infrastructures: the background of the filmmakers; the legal, economic and political factors enabling the development of a local industry; and the crucial agents and infrastructures that enabled Southern Africans to go beyond relying on outsiders who made films in Africa. These cultural, political, economic and technological factors made it possible for Southern Africa to move from being simply a site for colonial or imperial production to being a place where Southern Africans were, arguably, producing the most interesting work in the genre. Given the difficulties subordinated formerly colonial cultures have in achieving this kind of cultural status, the achievement and the conditions for it matter.

The Filmmakers

Who were the filmmakers producing the major documentaries and what brought them to Southern Africa during this period if they came from other countries? I asked Jen Bartlett why she and her husband Des, both Australian-born, but the first major filmmaking couple in East Africa who had worked with Armand Denis and inspired Alan and Joan Root, had ended up in the Namib and spent the last years of their career in Southern Africa. Her answer succinctly sets out the push and pull factors involved in their eventual settling in Namibia:

Introduction

John Varty did not come to wildlife filmmaking through any of the conventional routes. After the untimely death of his father meant that he had to give up plans to become a professional cricket player in England, he and his brother David persuaded their mother to let them take over the family hunting farm Sparta and turn it into a tourist destination. Both brothers have written important accounts of the development of Sparta into Londolozi (Varty 2008, 2014). Varty then became involved in wildlife filmmaking as a result of helping write scripts for Rick Lomba’s films that looked at the problems of excessive land use by commercial cattle farming and of new game fences. Varty was given a film camera as some kind of recompense when Lomba could not pay him and so ended up with the means to record animal behaviour.

Guides and Londolozi

The earliest Londolozi films showed Varty using his camera to record knowledgeable guides at Londolozi. The first, Focus on Africa (1983), starred Ian Thomas as photographer and him and his tracker Phineas Mhlongo as knowers of the bush. A fair amount of this film amounts to what one could see as advice to people thinking of going on a photographic safari: Thomas suggests what lenses would be optimal for use in (stills) photography and the film then shows him in action, for example intrepidly in a river with camera, trying to film hippos or animals drinking.

But the film had another motive besides giving photographic advice and the origin of the film lay for Varty in his sense that he should try to portray bush lore or what made for successful guides. Ian Thomas recalls:

Introduction

Any study like this faces the challenge of how to do justice to the individual energy and efforts of filmmakers like the Hugheses and Jouberts but also to indicate the other forces shaping the emergence and development of the genre in Southern Africa. No one study could do justice to thousands of films and television broadcasts that emerged during this period. At the same time, the description of the conditions favouring the development of a creative industry without a sense of the creative power of the product seems trivial.

But the analysis of books and Wikipedia entries about wildlife films and nature documentaries suggests that nobody really has much idea of what one should be saying about them. Should a scholarly study provide a chronology of films and filmmakers with some analysis of key developments (Bousé 2000; Mitman 1999), or a kind of check of the social acceptability and influence of the statements in the films (Chris 2006), or look at the inner workings of one production company like the NHU? (Davies 1998; Gouyon 2019; Louson 2018).

Let me put the problem a little differently. Imagine you are asked to say something intelligent about the opening scene of Kalahari – Wilderness without Water (1983) in which eyes emerge from the dark and then a mysterious and barely known animal, a brown hyena, comes into focus close to the camera and chews on some old bones, with commentary on how well adapted for survival in the Kalahari they are. Literary scholars produce annotated scholarly editions of important texts, and on Amazon Prime Video now, one can with a click of a computer mouse see all sorts of details about elements of the scene: the actors; the music playing; the original plot. What might an Amazon Prime Video or scholarly edition of an important wildlife film list? It seems to me that none of the scholarly studies has a coherent idea of what should be there or how that would help our understanding of the film and its strengths. It seems we need theory.

Introduction

While industry awards and insider accounts suggest, contra Wikipedia, that Southern African locales and filmmakers have been central to the genre in the past half-century, what have academics made of their contribution? In spite of its reach, there is almost no criticism within Southern Africa of the genre or its major figures or of Southern African practitioners from international critics. Part of the difficulty – and appeal – of doing this study is that there is so little scholarly material. Hundreds of millions, probably billions, of people may have watched and been influenced by these films, but there is hardly any analysis of them.

Studies of African Wildlife Documentary

The late Jean Hartley wrote the only book on African wildlife documentary: Africa’s Big Five and Other Wildlife Filmmakers (Hartley 2010). She had an unparalleled insider’s sense of the industry because she acted for a quarter of a century as the leading ‘fixer’ or local agent, based in Nairobi, for many British and American film crews wanting to film in Kenya or elsewhere in East Africa. She also had what must have been the world’s leading private collection of wildlife films on DVD and video as well as a large collection of books on wildlife film. When I visited her in Nairobi, she generously gave me access to her collection of filmed material and shared her insights and recollections.

Her major claim, as the title indicates, is that five major figures emerge as the most distinguished practitioners of African wildlife documentary: Des Bartlett, Alan Root, Bob Campbell, Simon Trevor, and Hugo van Lawick. (Only Van Lawick makes it onto Wikipedia.) What distinguishes these figures was that they settled in East Africa and worked there for long periods, knowing the animals and terrain intimately and often innovating in trying to find new ways of filming, as in Alan Root’s balloon trips or underwater contraption to film hippos at Mzima Springs.

Hartley quotes David Attenborough explaining why he did not try to make television programmes in East Africa: ‘I realized I was on a hiding onto nothing, with people like Armand Denis and Alan Root actually living there and being able to devote far more time than I could’ (99).

Introduction

While several Southern Africans had tried to make films in the Kruger National Park and elsewhere in Southern Africa before the arrival of the Wild Kingdom and Survival teams, the successes and themes of the foreign crews seem to have spurred several local initiatives in the early 1970s – some with distinctly political motivations attached to them. In particular, the South African Department of Information saw the positive possibilities of wildlife conservation highlighting South Africa’s successes at a time when its trusteeship of South-West Africa was coming under increasing scrutiny.

Before 1974

In his summary of developments in the KNP before 1945, Stevenson-Hamilton commented that:

David Bunn has analysed ways in which some local insiders had privileged access to water-holes or prime viewing spots for photography (Bunn 2003), but when it came to film, the foreign professionals seemed to enjoy privileges that were resented by locals who complained, for example, that the Americans could use ‘skerms’ or hides whereas they were not allowed to.

Beinart and Coates state that the Kruger had made several films attacking elephant poaching, but I have found no trace of those (Beinart and Coates 2002). The most influential of the local amateur film-makers may have been influential as an example of what not to do! Michael Rosenberg speaks in an interview of how he watched his father filming at random and then struggling to compose anything coherent with his footage. His father’s experiences led Rosenberg to decide to do things differently and to shoot more purposefully, but had his father not experimented and got things wrong, Rosenberg may never have started filming and editing in the way he did.

Rhinos

If one judged the influence of documentaries by how the culture at large takes them up, particularly in feature films, then the rescue of the white rhino from extinction in the Natal (now KZN) Parks Umfolozi and Hluhluwe should have been a central theme.

A conclusion is the logical place to wonder, uneasily, about the flaws, weaknesses, inconsistencies, unfulfilled campaign promises and other problems of one’s effort. The morning prayer from the Book of Common Prayer gets the feeling: ‘We have left undone those things / which we ought to have done; / and we have done those things / which we ought not to have done; / and there is no health in us.’

As for what I did that I should not have done? I leave readers – and critics – to decide on that. Left undone? I would have liked to know more about how husband and wife partnerships worked and work. While the standard model may have been the man photographing and the woman recording sound and taking photos, that was certainly not the case throughout. Perhaps Carol Hughes and Jen Bartlett and the Jouberts will still write memoirs. I struggled to get a complete list of film festival prizes because the American awards, whether of Emmys or of other major festivals, proved hard to find.

I would have liked to know more about audiences and the countries where people watched these programmes. Tol Pienaar claimed that Norma Foster’s Wildlife in Crisis had been viewed ‘behind the iron curtain’. Where and what did those viewers make of it? How many people watched WildEarth broadcast in China and what effect might those viewings have? How reliable are claims that some programme was the most watched or the most popular? For whom, when, compared to what? And what effects do wildlife films have on audiences?

And, for a book invoking Latour, where is there a consideration of editing and special effects and all the other people who help produce the final product? What of the role of somebody like David Dickie who brought Pink Floyd into Namib and edited so many of these films? What might there have been that made them ‘his’ films? Though I managed to interview Elmon Mhlongo, what about the many other African figures involved, particularly the San? Surely more should have been said about joy in nature, whether primal or Wordsworthian or in San hunting?

Introduction

As previous chapters have shown, filming wildlife in South Africa was difficult, in part because of the regulations and terrain of the Kruger Park, which for much of the period was the only place in South Africa where free-roaming Big 5 game were found. Places such as the Kalahari and the Okavango offered more obvious rewards. As Kim Wolhuter put it after filming for the first time in the Serengeti in 2021: ‘My first time to east Africa. Was insane. Now I see why all those international crews don’t want to film in our bushveld, cos they’ve been spoilt with those open plains’ (Wolhuter, 20 November 2021).

This chapter analyses how the growth of private eco-tourism lodges around the Kruger Park, and particularly in Mala Mala and the Sabi Sand, turned the bushveld into an area where people could film successfully, overcoming the difficulties of the local terrain. The first part of the chapter explores the development of the private lodges; the second part the infrastructural and technological developments there that forwarded both tourism and filming; the third part the rise of career guides and their importance; the fourth part the importance of habituated animals. In conclusion, it considers the implications of these developments and which films they affected.

The Growth of Private Lodges

Many of the farms adjoining the Kruger Park’s western boundary were originally hunting farms owned by wealthy white businessmen. This area had originally been part of the Sabi Game Reserve which included the current Kruger Park. In 1926, the National Parks Act was passed and the land to the west sold off to private owners – mainly for hunting. In 1961, the Kruger Park, concerned about possible foot and mouth disease and the effects of hunting on its western boundary, fenced it in. In 1962, Mala Mala moved from hunting to photographic tourism and started the development of luxury safaris. In 1993, when hunting in the Sabi Sand had ended, the fence was removed, allowing for the free movement of game across the whole area.

In the neighbouring Sabi Sand Reserve (often referred to as Sabi Sands), hunting still continued on many of the farms.

Introduction

Many people told me I should interview Michael Rosenberg if I wanted to understand wildlife documentary in Southern Africa. He had, I was told, won more Golden Pandas than any other producer and numerous awards elsewhere. He had discovered one great new filmmaker after another. While he was clearly a global figure in wildlife documentary, he seemed to have had a disproportionate influence on developments in Southern Africa. I found out he had returned to South Africa from England and was living in Durban. While in Durban for the Durban Wild Talk Africa conference in July 2013, I went to where he was staying to meet and interview him.

We had a lengthy and cheerful lunch where he was eager to share his insights and background. Early on, he said pithily, about his career and what his company, Partridge, had achieved, ‘They say you can’t fart against thunder, but we showed you could!’ He gave me copies of lists of his films and awards and, when I eyed his cases of DVDs produced by Partridge avidly, said that we should meet again and see what I needed, pointing out that he didn’t have the rights to share the films as he no longer owned Partridge.

I tried a few times after our meeting to see him again but he responded once or twice by saying he was in ill-health. I was busy with other projects and my last year of departmental headship and didn’t pursue it strongly enough. He died in November 2015 before I could interview him again.

Biography

In 2002, Michael Bright interviewed Rosenberg for WildFilmHistory and this is the single best introduction to his life and vision. He had a privileged introduction to wildlife in that his father, a businessman who owned a steel production company, had bought land next to the Kruger Park where they spent time every year, with his father filming but being frustrated by the results. As Rosenberg put it: ‘He had no idea what he was going to get, he had no idea why he wanted it, and I have his films today which prove that he had no idea how to put them together’ (Rosenberg 2002).

My wife Les Aupiais is, among other things, a magazine editor. In 2008, she asked me to interview and help her write about wildlife filmmaker Kim Wolhuter (Aupiais and Glenn 2008). When I spoke to Wolhuter and asked him about what had inspired him, he asked if I knew Carol Hughes as she and her late husband David had been the leading wildlife filmmakers of their time. When I confessed not, he put me in touch with her.

Carol invited me to visit her in her house on the banks of the Crocodile River, just outside the Kruger Park. When I walked into her study, I saw six Emmy statues and a Golden Panda, the British prize for the best wildlife film of the year (Figures 1 and 2). David and she had won the very first Golden Panda, in 1982, for their film Etosha: Place of Dry Water (1979). I had no idea that any South African filmmaker had won that many awards and suspect that very few South Africans do. When South African filmmakers win awards, local media usually make a fuss, yet here there were signs that the leading wildlife filmmakers of their time were hardly recognized in their own country At that moment, I felt, indignantly, that a study of wildlife documentary in South Africa was long overdue. Much later, it is even more so.

The big idea of this book is that, starting in the early 1970s, wildlife films made in Southern Africa, mostly but not exclusively by Southern Africans, started winning major international awards and mark a crucial move away from East Africa as the centre of African wildlife film. More than that, they start influencing modern trends in the genre and provide some of its most important achievements. This study tries to understand the importance of the genre and understand why the Southern African achievements have often been marginalized in popular or scholarly accounts. In part, then, this is a quest for justice for a Southern perspective and for achievements from the global South.

There are many other excellent filmmakers who have worked in Southern Africa in the past 50 years who in a longer book would get closer examination. In many ways, they fit the paradigms already established: many of them worked with Mike Rosenberg and Partridge; they spend lengthy time in one place; they establish striking bonds with individual animals; they come from a guiding culture and use that expertise in their films; they break away from the NHU model; they break into the US and British markets. Perhaps unfairly, I have omitted not only important local programmes such as 50/50 that probably were the main domestic environmental and wildlife viewing for most South Africans but also other important figures such as Richard Matthews and Michael Holding who seem to me to belong to rather different schools and traditions.

Keith and Colleen Begg

After completing their double-headed achievement of four years’ work on honey badgers in the Kalahari with the Hugheses, from which Colleen Begg emerged with a PhD and Keith with an important supporting part in an influential film, they did and do important advocacy work. Keith worked on the conflict between commercial beekeepers and honey badgers for the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Carnivore Conservation Group and since 2003, the couple have been working in northern Mozambique in the remote Niassa National Reserve. They studied badgers here and produced another film called Badger Quest: Honey hunters of Niassa (2008) which examines not only the honey badgers but how local people use honeyguide birds to locate hives. Their interest in the traditional relationships of the local Cyao people with nature led to Spirit Creatures: Niassa’s Invisible Realm (2104).

At present they are managing the Niassa Carnivore Project which aims to secure lions and other carnivores in Niassa Reserve by promoting coexistence between lions and people while navigating the complex political situation in an area where something close to civil war is raging. What emerges from this filmmaker–scientist partnership is that conservation work and the recording of that work may be one way of couples not collaborating simply on a film but on a larger social and environmental project.