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: