Wildlife Documentaries in Southern Africa

By Ian Glenn

In the 1970s, Southern Africa became the major locale for African filmmaking with an increasing use of the Kalahari Desert, Okavango Delta and Kruger Park area. This study examines the relationship between filmmaking in Southern Africa and international broadcasters and audiences, and argues that previous accounts have neglected the importance of innovations from Southern Africa.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839981524

Book preview

Wildlife Documentaries in Southern Africa

Wildlife Documentaries in Southern Africa

From East to South

Ian Glenn

Research Fellow, Communications Sciences, University of the Free State

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Ian Glenn 2023

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-1-500 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-1-504 (Hbk)

Cover: David and Carol Hughes filming the honey badger in the Kalahari.

Photograph courtesy Keith Begg

This title is also available as an e-book.

For Anne, Elsa, Tom, Paige, James and Chris

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. What do the Critics Say?

2. A Theoretical Coalition

3. Gone South: From East to Southern Africa

4. Private Lodges, Infrastructures and Guides

5. Going South: The Results

6. The Early History

7. The South Africans Enter the Game

8. Michael Rosenberg and Partridge Films

9. David and Carol Hughes

10. The Bartletts in the Namib, the Liversedges in Botswana

11. John Varty, Elmon Mhlongo and Londolozi

12. Richard Goss and Kim Wolhuter

13. Dereck and Beverly Joubert

14. Other Major Contributors

15. Going Live: Africam And Wildearth

16. Craig and Damon Foster

17. Must Love Animals?

18. The Social Turn

19. The Future of the Genre

20. The Influence of the Genre

Conclusion

Filmography

References

Index

LIST OF FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In taking so long to write this book, I have built up a long (and distinguished!) list of people who have given me information, advice, insights, memories, photographs and access to films. I am in the first place enormously indebted to the filmmakers: Jen Bartlett, Keith Begg, Craig and Damon Foster, Richard Goss, Mike Holding, Carol Hughes, Dereck Joubert, Peter Lamberti, Dee McLachlan, Elmon Mhlongo, Paul Penzhorn, Lynne Richardson, Sue Scott, Karin Slater, Jonathan Stedall, Mark Tennant, John Varty, Johan Vermeulen, Graham Wallington and Kim Wolhuter. Carol Hughes, Richard and Karen Goss, John Varty and Graham Wallington have been hospitably generous to me and my family.

To that must be added the list of those producers and others closely involved with making the films: Gail Gemmell, Lex Hes, Les Kottler, Louis Liebenberg, François Marais, Grant McLachlan, Gus Mills, Mike Robinson, the late Mike Rosenberg, Mary Seely, Ian Thomas, Greg Upton, Danie van der Walt, Ronet van der Walt, Dave Varty and Ellen Windemuth. My apologies to any people who helped me whose names I have ungratefully omitted.

The major intellectual starting point for this project occurred in a seminar on wildlife documentary that William Beinart gave to the History Department at the University of Cape Town. His paper then and his seminal work on wildlife documentaries in East Africa encouraged me to work on Southern African developments and led to a collaboration with him on a seminar paper on the move of wildlife documentary from East to Southern Africa, a paper that was in many ways the genesis of this book and provided its subtitle. Though a proposed collaboration between William, David Bunn and me never materialized, I remain enormously in William’s debt for many illuminating conversations, shared contacts and materials, the hospitality he and Troth offered me in Oxford, and for his generous comments on the finished product. I also remain in David Bunn’s debt for his work and for facilitating access to research facilities in the Kruger Park and the Wits Rural Facility.

Many other academics, archivists and industry insiders helped me locate films or gave me invaluable information, leads and answers to questions: Peter Bassett, Robin Bray, Peter Bridgeford, Jane Carruthers, J. M. Coetzee, Roelof de Bruine, Jacob Dlamini, Sam Ferreira, Susan Flood, Hermann Giliomee, the late Jean Hartley, Mike Kendrick, Kobie Kruger, Anton Lategan, Lamson Maluleke, Linda Martin, Mireschen Marx, Samantha Matthews, Alison Morphet, Trevor Moses, Harriet Nimmo, Chris Palmer, Neil Parsons, Danie Pienaar, Juan Pinto, Petra Regent, Ian Rijsdijk, Joep Stevens, Louis van Schalkwyk, Di Tipping-Woods, Paulie Viljoen, Ian Whyte, Stefan Winterboer and Nicki Young. Once again, apologies to any whose names I have inadvertently omitted.

I am grateful to the staff of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the SANParks archives in Groenkloof and Skukuza for help in locating and consulting material. I am also very grateful to various funding bodies who have helped fund travel and the acquisition of materials: the National Research Foundation of South Africa, the University of Cape Town and, particularly, the University of the Free State.

Earlier versions of some chapters have appeared in the following journals:

‘ "Silent Hunter" and Its Influence on Wildlife Documentary’. Communitas (2018): 220–28.

‘Conservation Propaganda in South Africa? The Case of Laurens Van der Post, the Department of Information and the National Parks Board’. Southern Journal of Contemporary History 45, no. 2 (2020): 83–103.

‘Telesafaris, WildEarth Television, and the Future of Tourism’. International Journal of Communication 15 (2021) 2569–85.

‘Norma Foster and Wildlife in Crisis’. Communitas (forthcoming).

I am grateful to academic reviewers of these articles for many constructive suggestions and also for the help of Harry Wels and an anonymous referee in examining this manuscript.

Peter Finlayson and Clive Thompson have encouraged my sense that wilderness and wildlife matter, as have my family who have been dragged along, usually willingly, on numerous exploratory sorties. My wife Les has provided not only the fringe benefit of access to many otherwise unavailable tourist experiences but the central benefits of intellectual stimulation and patient and cheering support.

INTRODUCTION

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.

Figure 1 The first Golden Panda awarded at the Wildscreen Festival, won by the Hugheses for Etosha – Place of Dry Water.

Figure 2 Southern African wildlife filmmakers have been successful in the USA and Europe as shown by the Hugheses’ six Emmy awards.

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.

Outline of the Book

The first section of the book in this introduction and Chapters 1 and 2 offer the claim for the importance of the genre in general and Southern African wildlife documentary in particular. This introduction opens the argument by looking at the considerable evidence, in prizes won and audiences reached, for the genre here. It also examines some of the problems facing researchers and an outline of the approach and kinds of research going into the book.

Chapter 1 keeps up the polemic on behalf of Southern African filmmakers by conducting a literature review of wildlife documentaries and pointing out how little help they are in understanding local achievements. Chapter 2 moves to consider which theorists offer the most help in viewing these films and the conditions of their production and their importance and argues that Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour and John Durham Peters offer more insights than any theorists of documentary.

The second section of the book in Chapters 3 through 5 offers a general overview of what enabled the rise of the genre in Southern Africa and the consequence of that rise. Chapter 3 suggests cultural, social, political, legal and infrastructural developments that proved important. The whole of Chapter 4 is devoted to the rise of private lodges and guiding as a particularly Southern African development that enabled previously unpromising terrain to become prime wildlife territory. Chapter 5 returns to the polemic by arguing that the factors or agents analysed in Chapters 3 and 4 allowed the local versions of wildlife documentary to differ significantly from the industry standard set by the BBC’s NHU.

The third, longest, section of the book in Chapters 6 through 16 analyses major filmmakers or programmes and, in the case of Chapter 8 on Mike Rosenberg, a major producer. Chapter 6 deals with the importance of early American and British filming in Southern Africa, Chapter 7 with the politically driven Southern African response and Chapter 8 with the importance of Mike Rosenberg and his London-based Partridge production company.

Chapter 9 deals with David and Carol Hughes, Chapter 10 with Des and Jen Bartlett in Namibia and with Tim and June Liversedge in Botswana and Chapter 11 with John Varty and Elmon Mhlongo, based in Londolozi. Chapter 12 turns to Richard Goss and Kim Wolhuter and Chapter 13 to Dereck and Beverly Joubert. Chapter 14 examines other important contributors while Chapter 15 examines Southern African attempts to provide the experience of live viewing in Africam and WildEarth. The third section concludes with Chapter 16 on the Foster brothers and Craig Foster’s My Octopus Teacher.

The final section in Chapters 17 through 20 and the Conclusion tries to summarize and re-examine some of the major questions the study raises. Chapter 17 looks at some of the questions raised in these films about the relationships between humans and animals while the complementary Chapter 18 turns to how these films portray social concerns about conservation, human–wildlife conflict and the future of wildlife. Chapter 19 speculates about what these films suggest about the future of the genre and Chapter 20 suggests some of its influence culturally and socially.

Neglecting Africa?

In mid-2021, the Wikipedia entry on Nature Documentary made for interesting if depressing reading. While I am in general an admirer of the Wikipedia model, in this case, the author or authors have produced a list of significant achievements that betrays historical ignorance and methodological naivete that would not be possible in better-established intellectual fields such as literature. In the list of significant figures, there is an almost complete neglect of African wildlife films and African filmmakers and no mention of, inter alia, Cherry Kearton, the Bartletts, Alan and Joan Root, Dieter Plage, the Hugheses, the Jouberts, Michael Rosenberg, Deeble and Stone, Kim Wolhuter, Richard Goss, the Foster brothers or the role of new technological developments such as WildEarth. The list is the equivalent of producing a list of major twentieth century literature in English by looking mainly at recent US or UK best-seller lists and ignoring who won Nobel Prizes, Booker Prizes, or was regarded as a serious figure by peers. Nor are scholarly accounts from North American or British scholars much better in recognizing these achievements.

Insider Accounts

If one starts interrogating the accounts of insiders, one emerges with a very different sense of what Bourdieu calls the field, a field which is marked out by relationships between practitioners, influences, awards and relationships rather than simply by a best-seller list (Bourdieu 1993). Though the Wikipedia entry gives pride of place to David Attenborough, he personally regarded Kenyan-based Alan Root as the ‘the most innovative cameraman the world has ever seen’ (Hartley 2010, 83). In this study, I have been fortunate enough to have the generous insights of Southern African filmmakers and industry insiders into how they worked and how their films were made and who they regarded as peers.

This book is, in part, an attempt to suggest what an insider account of the genre in Southern Africa should look like. If one goes from Attenborough to Root, one sees that Root pays tribute to Des Bartlett. Bartlett advises David Hughes and works with Dieter Plage, who also admires Root. Plage and Rod Borland are major figures in the Anglia programme Survival filming in Southern Africa. The leading American wildlife programme of its time, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, uses Southern Africa as its most important location after the United States, drawing particularly on South Africans Henk and Liz Maartens and the expertise of local conservation officials, particularly for filming animal captures. They win several Emmys during the first years of the show. Jamie Uys wins a Golden Globe for documentary for his Animals are Beautiful people in 1975. Australian-born Des and Jen Bartlett move South to what is at the time South-West Africa but becomes Namibia, winning an Emmy for their Survival special Lions of Etosha.

In London, South African-born Michael Rosenberg sets up Partridge Productions in 1974 and acts as mentor, funder and producer for a groundbreaking series of films. He works with Hughes to produce the groundbreaking Namib and Rosenberg’s productions win most of the early Golden Pandas, the British award from the Wildscreen biennial festival for the best wildlife documentary over the previous two years. He produces Etosha: Place of Dry Water, which won in 1982, Siarau: The Tidal Forest (also spelled Siaru, 1983), which won in 1984 and commissions a three-part film on the Okavango that uses both Joubert and Tim Liversedge and other cameramen – and wins the Golden Panda for Okavango – The Living Jewel (1987) (also known as Okavango: Jewel of the Kalahari) in 1988. He also wins in 1990 for Seasons of the Sea, establishing Partridge Films as the leading wildlife documentary production house in Britain in spite of the longstanding eminence and advantages of the BBC’s Natural History Unit.

In the Partridge studios, Hughes meets Dereck Joubert, who has been watching his films there. The Jouberts go on to win the Grand Teton prize, the leading award at the US Jackson Hole festival in 1992 for Eternal Enemies. Hughes also influences Richard Goss who then works with Kim Wolhuter. David and Carol Hughes produce an influential, award-winning film on the honey badger with Keith and Colleen Begg. Rosenberg goes on to work with other important figures such as Lynne and Phil Richardson and Peter Lamberti and even gives a young Australian presenter Steve Irwin one of his first international breaks.

In the new millennium, the first Golden Panda awarded went to two complete wildlife film unknowns: Craig and Damon Foster. Harriet Nimmo who was in charge of Wildscreen at the time, has told me that their film, The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story (2000) caused surprise and some consternation. Was this not an independent art-house film rather than wildlife documentary? In investigating their film, this book traces not only its links to earlier Southern African filmmakers but also examines the logic connecting that Golden Panda to the 2020 Golden Panda won by Craig Foster for My Octopus Teacher, another unexpected triumph that defeated far better funded mega-projects.

Why Awards Matter

Carol Hughes told me that David, who was often called on to serve on juries for wildlife film prizes, used to say that the awards were in many cases a lottery, determined by a fierce supporter or opponent. Nonetheless, awards matter, for several reasons. First, having awards for wildlife or nature documentaries immediately gives legitimacy to a cultural and creative field and helps define its boundaries. One way of cutting the Gordian knot of academic agonizing about what wildlife documentaries are or should be as expected in the opening of dissertations (see, e.g. Louson 2018) is to say: they are what the prizes are given for. And tensions and developments in the field are often reflected first in decisions of a jury of knowledgeable insiders rather than, for example, in what is put in academic discussions or on Wikipedia. In several cases, I report on debates and discussions within wildlife prize juries to show ways in which the genre developed and stretched its previous boundaries – and those doing the stretching were often Southern Africans.

At a certain point, too, the number of awards won by Southern African filmmakers surely is convincing evidence. Major British awards do not tell the whole story. Southern African films and filmmakers have won numerous Emmy awards and awards at other major wildlife festivals such as Jackson Hole. The Hugheses won six Emmys, the Jouberts have won eight. Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger tells James Bond: ‘Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action. ’ This book explores the ‘enemy action’ that enabled – and enables – Southern African filmmakers to dominate the genre and in many cases to overcome films with the institutional support of, for example, the BBC’s Natural History Unit.

Audiences and Influence

There is a massive disparity between popular interest in wildlife documentary and academic attention to the genre, particularly in Southern Africa. Wildlife documentaries have undoubtedly been the major cultural and entertainment export from Southern Africa in terms of audiences. For every reader of a novel by Nadine Gordimer or J. M. Coetzee or person who has listened to Miriam Makeba or viewed a sculpture by Sydney Kumalo or painting by William Kentridge, or watched award-winning documentaries like Sugarman or Miners Shot Down, hundreds, perhaps thousands, have watched Southern African wildlife documentaries.

Unfortunately, there are few reliable estimates of audiences and viewership, particularly for the contemporary era with fragmented audiences and multiple platforms. In the earlier broadcast era, however, the international viewership of wildlife films of Southern Africa was considerable. On 13 March 1978, Warren Garst of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom wrote to Tol Pienaar, head of the Kruger Park. In his letter, he says flattering things about the quality of research done in South Africa, and points out that Wild Kingdom had not filmed in South African National Parks since 1971. He then makes a critical observation about Norma Foster, at that point the preferred insider making films:

In the past, you’ve said that Norma Vorster has filmed your operations for the American TV market. We’ve made an effort to determine how widely these films are distributed. In the last two years we have found only one station, in the Los Angeles area, which has shown them. There are probably more, but the coverage is certainly not as wide as your projects deserve. Certainly not as wide as we can offer with an American audience of 35 million and a world-wide audience of 100 million in 40 countries. (Kruger Park archive NK/27)

In some cases, South Africans involved in series have been given viewing figures. Mark Tennant, one of the co-hosts of the Mad Mike and Mark series produced by Discovery for Animal Planet, indicated that they had been told that the series had been translated into 20 languages, aired in 167 countries and was watched in over 200 million households (Langkilde 2018; Tennant, e-mail, 15 November 2021).

Those figures suggest the reach and influence of the genre but questions of how reliable such figures are have grown even more complex in an era of downloads and fragmented platforms. When I asked Ellen Windemuth, executive producer of My Octopus Teacher, if anybody knew how many people had viewed the film, she said that not only do many media executives keep figures for films secret, but they also enforce secrecy on producers. There are no doubt other complex problems in knowing how many viewers there have been for a film that, by October 2021, had been translated into 35 languages, including Chinese. How does one translate a download into views?

In the case of WildEarth television, their daily viewership on online streaming platforms may have been numbered in thousands, but when, during the COVID pandemic, lockdowned families increased viewership dramatically, what was viewership then? And, when CGTN, the Chinese broadcasting giant, picked up live streaming of their show, should it be numbered in millions or hundreds of millions – or more?

Viewership figures and viewers’ votes for their favourite programmes may be unreliable and imprecise but provide some evidence that Southern African documentary makers affected audiences powerfully. David Hughes’s first work on Ridley turtles in Costa Rica played a major part in an early BBC documentary The Great Turtle Mystery that broke viewing records at the time. The 1987 BBC Wildlife on One documentary Meerkats United was once voted the best wildlife documentary of all time by BBC viewers. Who made the film? It was South African Richard Goss, using the meerkats habituated by Cambridge zoologist David Macdonald and building on work Goss did on the Kalahari for Michael Rosenberg. Though Attenborough is listed as a presenter, his role was basically that of a voice-over artist. (The problem of Attenborough’s dominant role in BBC wildlife films and the public consciousness will be examined in more depth later.)

There are other ways of suggesting the importance of Southern Africa during the past decades of wildlife film. If one thinks of iconic wildlife images or moments over the past few decades, many of those are Southern African: airborne Great White Sharks catching seals in mid-air just off the Cape coast, or meerkats banding together, or male lions duelling to the death, or honey badgers being indomitable and providing political metaphors. Or lions duelling with elephants or hyenas or buffalo. Or an octopus.

There is another way of measuring how these documentaries changed global perceptions. Fifty years ago, going on safari meant going to East Africa. Now, for wealthy foreign tourists, planning a bucket list safari means going to East Africa and to the Okavango and one of the private lodges near the Kruger Park and perhaps to lodges near the Victoria Falls or in Namibia.

The Southern Africans have also made arguably the greatest use of new technologies in their live viewing from cameras in Africam or in the live time safari drive program WildEarth (which aired for some years on National Geographic as Safari Live). WildEarth draws a worldwide online audience but has also been featured on major Chinese television network CGTN, suggesting that Southern African initiatives are driving global developments.

Why Wildlife Documentaries Matter?

It is now conventional wisdom to say that the way most of us learn about nature is through wildlife documentaries. This can be an accusation, but the argument of the book will be that this underestimates the importance of the genre. We surely learn more about human nature, our place in the universe and our responsibilities in the Anthropocene from wildlife documentaries than from a scientific paper or from Las Vegas (Venturi et al. 1972). In shedding new light on our gender roles or capacity for violence or the cost of our control of the earth, the filmmakers shake our sense of ourselves. When the Hugheses contrast the importance of insects against mammals, or Dieter Plage opens his book with a quote from Leonardo Da Vinci on man’s destructive effect on other species (Plage 1980) or Michael Rosenberg makes a series called Fragile Earth or the Jouberts compare our emotional capacities with those of elephants, they are warning us about our destructive yet precarious role.

Scholarly neglect of the genre stems, it seems, not from its lack of cultural spread but arguably from a sense that the genre is not influential or intellectually significant. The rest of this study will try to demonstrate the significance of the genre, but the genre is also politically and socially significant. Wildlife documentaries have helped make the Southern African wildlife destinations figured in documentaries among the most highly sought after – and expensive – in the world. The Southern African wildlife territory has become highly desirable and economically significant and wildlife films have played a major part in that. Rural land with free-ranging big 5 game is the most valuable rural land in South Africa, though it may be of very limited agricultural use, suggesting that film and related eco-tourism values have literally re-shaped political and social grounds of contest.

A Scholarly Apology and a Lament

The danger of engaging in polemics and discussions