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.

The scientific understanding of risks pertaining to technological activities has fundamentally reshaped interactions between science and politics, knowledge and power in contemporary Western societies. These transformations have been particularly acute for nuclear power in the sense that the dangers intrinsic to this technology, that is, explosions, leaks, low or high-level radioactive pollution, military proliferation and radioactive waste management, can potentially bear dramatic and irreversible consequences. These have upset the time and space parameters traditionally applied to assess the scope of industrial accidents. The zero-risk bias has long been discarded for nuclear and most modern industrial technologies. Already in 1953, American physicist Edward Teller, one of the pioneers of nuclear physics, contributed to shattering the then widespread myth of technical omnipotence, by contending that absolute safety was not possible, and that all a scientist could do was to mitigate nuclear hazards by predicting them through probability and containing them to the most minimum risk. By stating that uncertainty remains a fundamental component of all nuclear technologies, thereby highlighting the limits of scientific certainties, Teller flagged the key notions of choice, compromise and acceptability.

Political justification resting on an officially sanctioned rationale is a key component of public policy agenda-setting, just as the construction of legitimate knowledge is all too essential in good governance. Yet, in democratic systems, political decisions to initiate, restart or cancel a nuclear programme can no longer be unilaterally adopted based on scientific experts’ opinions alone, nor on the premise that their allegedly rational knowledge must be the bedrock of an ideal societal development. Political concertation and negotiations on acceptable technological choices are now premised on risk/benefit calculations and bargaining over utility, usability and acceptability. As Nielsen predicated, technological acceptability is two-fold: it has both a practical (based on costs, reliability, utility and yield capability), and a social dimension. This latter point is crucial for nuclear debates. Since nuclear decisions reflect societal development choices, they are weighed against key guiding value principles, which go beyond mere economic, political or event technical parameters. Similarly, the very notion of risk has been approached as a socio-cultural process, resting on both objective and rational arguments but also value-laden moral sentiments and perceptions which embody the ethical scope of energy choices.

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.

Introduction

This chapter examines how Southern Africa was the first area to explore new technological capabilities and the possibility of live broadcasting of wildlife in Africam and WildEarth. Africam was the original African live wildlife television sensation, founded in 1998, with a high international viewership and enormous valuations during the early dot.com valuation bubble, valuations which subsequently dropped almost completely. Given the slow Internet speeds in South Africa at the time, it consisted of updates every 30 seconds from static cameras at African waterholes. As Internet speeds have increased, the number of live webcams recording nature has grown exponentially – a recent article pointed to more than 17,000 such sites, many grouped on sites such as Explore.org, EarthCam and Africam.

An interview with Africam CEO Paul Penzhorn in 2019 suggested that the main appeal of the show now is not in grainy images and the hope a wild animal will turn up to a waterhole, but in a quality feed with good sound. Penzhorn said many of their viewers liked to have the programme running on large televisions almost as a peaceful fourth wall or wallpaper and that, particularly during COVID, it offered calm, surprise and authenticity.

The original founder of the programme was Graham Wallington and his ambitions for the programme and the ultimate failure of this business model – a saga recorded in the book The Show Must Go On by Peter Armitage, who acted as CEO of the company for some time – led to him moving on from Africam to found WildEarth (Armitage 2003). When I first visited the WildEarth production team in the Sabi Sand, I was able to interview Wallington, who, to my surprise, mentioned a prediction by Arthur Clarke, science fiction writer, futurist and screenwriter of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke’s prediction and the reality of the Southern African programme make for an illuminating comparison.

Live Time

In 1976, speaking at a celebration of the centenary of the invention of the telephone, Clarke gave several wide-ranging predictions about the future of communication (Clarke 2011).

Introduction

The careers of Richard Goss and Kim Wolhuter and the collaborations between them help illustrate the continuity of a Southern African wildlife film tradition and its ongoing developments and innovations. Goss’s first involvement in wildlife film was as a scientific advisor on an early Partridge Fragile Earth production, Kalahari, Wilderness without Water (1983), produced by Phil Agland with photography by Anthony Bannister and Goss. Goss explains that though he was brought on as scientific advisor, Bannister was unavailable for much of the shoot because of the illness of a child, so that he took over most of the filming.

This film arguably had more influence than the other films in the series. The first is that it established Goss as a leading filmmaker and indirectly helped develop Wolhuter’s career. The second is that it introduced meerkats to the wildlife viewing public. Kalahari begat Meerkats United (1987) which, as Tim Clutton-Brock admits, begat Meerkat Manor (Clutton-Brock 2007, 15). The third is that it marked a ground-breaking attempt to film predators at night. A fourth was that it showed intriguing sequences of honeybadger behaviour and probably led to Colleen Begg coming to do her PhD in the area with Gus Mills as supervisor.

Goss drew on the work of two scientists doing ground-breaking work in the area: Gus Mills, attached to SANParks, doing an MSc on brown hyenas; and David Macdonald of Oxford University working on meerkats. Mills, with long experience in the area, and an award-winning wildlife photographer himself provided a general outline of what to film to Partridge (e-mail, 28 October 2021), and no doubt guided Goss to some of the most intriguing sequences: a brown hyena eating melons; or a honey badgers hunting a gecko under the bark of a tree (Mills 2010).

Macdonald was working with habituated meerkats and though they played only a minor role in Kalahari, they were central to Meerkats United (1986) which became one of the BBC’s most popular and successful wildlife films ever. Attenborough’s narration and the football club analogy played some part in the success of this film, but Goss’s innovative camerawork was the major factor. Goss also worked with Macdonald to film episode 7 of Velvet Claw (1992) that focused on meerkats.

Introduction

In moving away from the BBC NHU blue-chip aesthetic, these filmmakers not only moved to a stronger connection with animals but also to a stronger consideration of social elements. Instead of the relationship Monbiot posited of the pristine nature portrayed in wildlife documentaries justifying the creation of parks and wildlife reserves (Monbiot 2002, 2018), most of these filmmakers highlighted social dangers to animals and their habitats or the tensions between wildlife and human development.

Conservation and Wildlife Film

As earlier chapters showed, the Wild Kingdom episodes regularly stressed the problems of animals like cheetahs and leopards being hunted for their skins and discouraged the use of their fur. They also regularly echoed the World Wildlife Fund’s concerns about endangered species. The Survival filmmakers showed the dangers of disease or the need to re-locate threatened animals. In South Africa, Van der Post talked of the toll white hunters had taken but praised conservation efforts, as did Norma Foster, who gave a far more detailed account and justification of the conservation work of wildlife authorities.

In the late 1980s, several films examined the dangers the African environment faced and the pressure human developments were placing on the environment. The most extreme, almost philosophical, version of this was in the Hugheses’ feature film The Missing Link (1988) which showed the fate of the last member of a rival hominid race, presumably with his group eliminated by homo sapiens. This film thus arguably became a way for the Hugheses to warn of the dangers modern man poses to the environment and fellow creatures.

The most extended and explicit treatment of the pressures modern African man was placing on the environment came in a film by investigative journalist Rick Lomba. His End of Eden (1986) looked harshly at almost all the agents of environmental degradation in Southern Africa and across Africa more generally. In his analysis of the problems the more arid regions of South Africa faced (and that probably appeared even more acute after a series of droughts in the 1980s), he attacked a range of actors he saw as responsible. The first to blame were the white settlers, as he claimed that fewer than 1 per cent of wild animals remained 150 years after white settlers came.

Biographical

David Hughes was born in Springs in the Transvaal (now Gauteng) in 1937. Like many other filmmakers, he benefited from a childhood close to nature in the Eastern Transvaal (now Mpumulanga). In an important interview in the Chicago Tribune in 1988, interviewer Terry Smith described it:

Hughes was sent to Michaelhouse, an exclusive boarding school in Natal where he matriculated. Carol Hughes suggests that the tradition in South African boarding schools to let students out for a ‘ramble’ on Sundays suited Hughes: ‘Michaelhouse, situated in the Natal midlands was a great place for David to go off exploring & turning over rocks on weekends, but a drag to have to be back for church Sunday evening’ (E-mail, 2 May 2021).

He then studied Zoology at the University of the Witwatersrand, gaining a PhD in 1964 for a dissertation titled ‘Ecological investigations of the fauna of mountain streams’. His research for this dissertation was in areas near Barberton, in Mpumulanga to which his parents had by then moved. After a postdoctoral year at Queen Mary College in London, Hughes moved for an 18-month stint to the Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiology in West Germany, where Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen were based and he became interested in animal behaviour. He was also friendly with a fellow Wits trained South African zoologist, Lyall Watson, well-known author, and travelled on several holidays with him.

Hughes then joined the research and teaching staff at the Rosenstiel School of Marine Science at the University of Miami.

Landscape

The Missoula floods of the Pleistocene (2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago) transformed the Willamette Valley. “Floodwaters transformed the Willamette Valley into a lake 100 miles long, 60 miles wide, and 300 feet deep.” Eventually the water from the lake was drained into the Columbia River. Over thousands of years, this event was repeated hundreds of times and covered the valley floor with 15 feet of the soil carried from Washington, Idaho and Montana. The drainage of the Willamette River eventually included the rivers of the Cascade Range to the east, the Oregon Coast Range to the west and the Calapooya Mountains to the south making it at 11,487 square miles the largest watershed entirely contained within the state. It is also one of the 13 large river systems in the United States and has one of the second largest waterfalls by volume, Multnomah Falls at Oregon City. Beginning in 1900, the Army Corps of Engineers built 15 large and small dams along the Willamette and its tributaries primarily to produce hydroelectricity but also to create recreational reservoirs and prevent flooding (Figure 11).

The Willamette Valley's climate was, following the last glacial period, increasingly warmer. The valley floor was subject to periodic floods and was referred to as the valley of the tall grasses that included camas, fern and such various species of grass as willow, ash, hardhack, horsetails and members of the sedge family of grasses. The vegetation on the hillsides was dominated by lodgepole pine, spruce and fir. Western hemlock was also present in the foothills of the Coast and Cascade Ranges. Elk, deer, bear, coyote and cougar along with small animals still roam the hillsides that border the valley.

Community

Willamette Valley was the initial home of the diverse Kalapuyan groups that ranged from headwaters of the Willamette River to where it flowed into the Columbia. They lived in the hillsides along the river in separate villages often associated with Willamette River tributaries. During the warm months, they camped out with minimal cover but built stable plank houses for the cold months. They were hunters and gathers with a diet that included a diverse combination of animal (deer and elk) and vegetable (tarweed seeds, hazel nuts and acorns) resources.

Background

After schooling in Cape Town and compulsory military service where they were placed in the South African navy’s film unit, Craig and Damon Foster looked as though they might follow the example of many young white English-speaking South Africans and leave the country. But they were drawn back in part by the initiative of a school friend James Hersov who wanted to make a documentary film about the San and managed to get the support of CocaCola. The brothers spent several years in the Kalahari with the San and two films resulted.

The first film, Tracks (1999), centred on the theories and technological innovation of South African tracking expert and theorist Louis Liebenberg and on attempts to use San expertise and Liebenberg’s Cybertracker software for the cause of conservation. This version also used American National Wildlife Federation representative Judith Kohler as a commentator who argued that San knowledge of the Kalahari provided a more holistic and profound understanding of the area than western science. The second film was The Great Dance (2000) which was a surprise winner of the Golden Panda for best wildlife documentary in 2000 (Figure 16.1). A comparison of the expository style of the earlier film with the poetic style and narration of the later one helps understand how the Foster brothers’ views and interests shifted and how this shift shaped their later film careers.

Tracks

The earlier film uses several narrators whose views are in narrative and visual tension. The opening of the film offers a glimpse of mystical powers as a narrator says that people dream of being among animals and invisible to them, but that the San, through their tracking ability and what it reveals of animal behaviour and movements, can actually do that. ‘Mystical narrator’ says that the San can transform themselves in the dance.

The second narrator is Louis Liebenberg and for him the film was a way of at once expanding on his influential hypothesis of tracking as the origin of scientific hypothesis formation (Liebenberg 1990) but also of showing the advantages of his patented Cybertracker software as a way for the San to serve conservation by logging the presence of animals through their tracks.

Located at the edge of the High Desert Basin and Range region of Malheur County, Ontario, Oregon, is at the confluence of the Snake, Malheur, Owyhee and Payette Rivers. It was initially the home of the Northern Paiute who hunted the high desert country and fished in the rivers. Each tribe of the Northern Paiutes occupied a specific territory, generally centered on a lake or wetland that supplied fish and waterfowl. Communal hunt drives, which often involved neighboring bands, would focus on rabbits and pronghorn. Individuals and families appear to have moved freely among the bands. The Northern Paiute were displaced by settlers on their way to western Oregon who decided to settle in what has become known as Treasure Valley.

Settlers began arriving in Ontario in the late 1800s. Ontario built a post office in 1883. Not long after in 1884, a short line railroad was built, and Ontario became the shipping point for eastern Oregon cattle ranchers to markets on the west coast. The completion of irrigation projects, the Nevada ditch in 1881 and the Owyhee ditch in 1890, from the Snake and Owyhee Rivers, made agriculture in this semi-arid climate possible. The region became known for growing onions, sugar beets and potatoes as well as alfalfa hay, alfalfa seeds, carrots, milk, peppermint oil, wheat and grains. Ontario became the home of Treasure Valley Community College in 1962.

Riye Hideko Fujita was born in 1924 in Yamaguchi, Japan, hear Hiroshima. She was trained in classical Japanese dance, Nihon Buyô, under the traditional iemoto system in Japan from the age of six. Her education was comprised of a rigorous schedule of lessons that began after the end of her regular school day. Her training was originally in both music and dance—she played the three-stringed samisen—but eventually she focused on dance. During World War II, she became part of the Japanese government's military propaganda as a performer for state-sponsored programs. After the war ended, she resumed her dance studies, and following tradition, served as a cook, housekeeper, baby sitter and maid in her teacher's home.

Introduction

How have wildlife documentaries from Southern Africa influenced viewers directly or indirectly? Have they influenced other cultural products or led to financial, political, social or legislative changes? In a conversation with Kobie Kruger, Jamie Uys’s son-in-law, he asked whether any of Attenborough’s serious documentaries had the effect on public views of conservation and hunting that Disney’s Bambi, for example, had. Perhaps Uys’s own light-hearted but sympathetic portrayals of wild animals did more to change attitudes than many earnest documentaries – but what evidence is there, or could there be?

Without more detailed audience figures and a different kind of research project, most of what follows in this chapter is speculative and impressionistic but may at least open up future research possibilities. The first section examines what influence these documentaries had on other cultural products, particularly films; the second section what influence these films have had on attitudes towards animals and conservation; the third section looks at the financial and political effects of these films; the fourth at their impact on social relationships and particularly on gender relationships.

The Cultural Influence

At various points in the study, parallels with other films or genre emerged: for example in the similarity between the Hugheses’ shocking revelation of spider predation and Alien. In one case, however, it seems that these documentaries had some effect on the most influential film about African animals in the last 30 years: Disney’s original animated Lion King (1994). Though sources such as Wikipedia give a long history of planning and trips to Kenya tohelp the animators, Dereck Joubert suggests that their films were highly influential:

Introduction

This chapter tries to use the history of the past half century of wildlife documentary in Southern Africa to predict what the future of the genre is likely to be – in Southern Africa and more widely. Looking back at Christopher Parsons’ book on how to make wildlife documentary, published half a century ago, suggests some of the ways in which rapid technological developments can change a field drastically, but also suggests some likely continuities (Parsons 1971).

Is the Golden Age Gone?

The fragmentation of television markets and the growth of social media have put considerable pressure on a traditional model in which leading broadcasters could afford to fund leading filmmakers for a considerable time in the field to enable them to make authentic films. Dereck Joubert, for one, is pessimistic about a trend to quantity rather than quality and looks at the flood of digital images and rise of social media with some trepidation:

We are back again with Carol Hughes’s analogy of the hand-knitted, perhaps designer, garment compared to the mass-produced copies. But the change in wildlife film production norms is part of a larger television industry shift with declining audiences for classic television platforms reducing advertising revenue and funding for projects, new digital technologies reducing production costs and a move to social media and new platforms.

After having explored the factors which presided over British nuclear decisions between 1979 and the mid-2010s, the next step is to turn to the decision-making process per se and look into the way technical decisions were debated and elaborated. The current theoretical consensus around governance holds that the 1990s have been characterised by a transfer of power from the institutional centre to the civil society through a new political balance conceptualised as ‘participatory democracy’. A manifestation of neoliberal governance, participatory democracy was grounded in the defence of citizens’ freedom of choice and empowerment, which was framed as an ideological reaction to address the prevailing popular crisis in confidence towards politics. This conceptual framework quickly attracted political and academic interest by the early 2000s, especially in the fields of risk analysis, political communication, political or social sciences. It was framed as a means to shore up democratic capital especially for controversial public policies. According to its intellectual and political advocates, participatory democracy also eroded the state's command and control capabilities and helped approach political deliberation more horizontally. Theory was translated into several political attempts at improving citizens’ participation in the decision-making process through public inquiries, public consultations or citizens’ juries, for instance. These initiatives were at first favourably welcomed and praised by many. They were seen as innovative means to ward off a general rise in political apathy and scepticism regarding political efficiency to eventually open a new age of transparency and rejuvenated accountability in British politics. New adjectives such as ‘pluralistic’, ‘discursive’, ‘interactive’, ‘deliberative’ or ‘reflexive’ blossomed, to be associated with a potential democratisation of public policy.

These participatory devices or instruments were thus introduced in science and technology policy areas as a means to acknowledge what social scientists had been advocating since the early 1980s, namely that technological choices are not fundamentally technical in nature but are value-laden and as such, should be submitted to public scrutiny and appreciation. These democratic experiments resembled a rekindled interest in consensusbuilding around decisions which are not only technically feasible or economically attractive but also socially acceptable. Too often modelised as a linear process based on rational and scientific assessments, policymaking then emerged as a constellation of various vested interests, values, actors and emotions vying, interacting or colliding.

Introduction

As earlier chapters have shown, many filmmakers were drawn to the new possibilities offered by the scenery and wildlife in Namibia and Botswana. The Skeleton Coast, the Namib, Etosha, the Kalahari, the Okavango Delta and other Botswanan wildlife locations were firmly on the map as a result of earlier filmmakers and outsiders have continued to visit to make films. But three couples – Des and Jen Bartlett, Tim and June Liversedge, and Dereck and Beverly Joubert – who spent decades on home ground location have undoubtedly produced the most significant body of work in and on Namibia and Botswana. While the Okavango is fortunate to have had two such powerful teams as the Jouberts and Liversedges working there, my judgement is that the Jouberts were more innovative and Chapter 13 will examine the ways in which they benefited from their devotion to location.

As the quote from Wallace Stevens suggests, lengthy attention to a single subject often yields spectacular results: visually, ethologically, scientifically. While a visiting film crew, prompted by scientific work in the field, or drawing on other films, may come and record powerful scenes, it has usually been the locals who, through patience and time in the field, produce more holistically powerful and compelling narratives and original findings on animal behaviour. The Stevens poem also suggests the danger of repetition so analysis of these films will show the many ways – through new technologies, new camera possibilities, new focal points, new discoveries – in which these filmmakers tried to make it new.

Des and Jen Bartlett

Des and Jen Bartlett exemplify the move from East to Southern Africa and show why Southern Africa became the world’s most important locale for wildlife film from the 1970s on. Des Bartlett, born in Australia, was in many ways the founding figure of African wildlife documentary.

When construction works began on the Hinkley Point C project in December 2016, it had been almost thirty years since the industry had been in a similar situation. To dub a report from the Major Projects Association, the burning question that was then raised was: ‘Was British nuclear industry ready and properly equipped for it?’ Building a new generation of nuclear power plants put the country's industry, that is, logistics, manufacturing services, infrastructure and manpower, and innovation capacity to the test. If incapable to rise to the challenge, these key parameters would not only erode confidence in nuclear energy but also well kill the project in the egg, despite EDF's engineering input and expertise.

This chapter will focus less on policy design than on policy delivery, or the phase when a planned policy project enters the implementation phase. In the present case, building a nuclear power plant turns into a most intricate endeavour due to the imploded nature of the nuclear services network and supply chain. The new nuclear build hence called for a reappraisal of the relations between government and industry, which triggered an upsurge of academic interest in governance literature in the early 2010s. This analysis therefore builds on a broader exploration of the shape and workings of the contemporary British nuclear industry. Until the 1990s, the UK nuclear industry was based on a rather straightforward structure governed by the corporatist model, which can be defined as follows:

The neoliberal privatisation of the sector in the late 1980s disintegrated the pre-existing monolithic, state-protected structure, severing many of the financial and organisational bonds between government and industry. The Department of Trade and Industry saw its purview shrink and several of its original decision-making prerogatives transferred to The Exchequer. In the realm of industrial policy, the UK state was somehow relegated to an auxiliary or adjunct function, a by-stander even for some, in a landscape where major nodal poles seemed to operate in growing isolation.

Introduction

Animals and their relations to humans, whether of differences or similarities, have become a major topic in biology (Bekoff and Pierce 2009; Bekoff 2010; De Waal and de Waal 1996; De Waal and Tyack 2009; De Waal 2016; Safina 2015; Safina 2020) but also in film studies, ethics and philosophy (Brunel 2018; Burt 2002; Derrida 2008; Haraway 2013; Kirksey and Helmreich 2010; Lorimer 2015). Intriguing as they are, most of these discussions draw their conclusions from domestic animals or wild animals in captivity and so have a limited value and validity in understanding and critiquing wildlife films. A brief discussion of anthropomorphism, speciesism and the affective turn will lead to what seem to me more fruitful topics for the films in this study: adoption, re-wilding and touch.

Anthropomorphism

As several earlier comments in this study have shown, the critique of wildlife films or sections of them as anthropomorphic is often based on superficial pejorative analysis – as in Bousé’s critique of Kearton’s penguins or Chris’s comments on Jamie Uys’s warthogs. Given the ways in which recent studies have complicated earlier notions of species differences, what would be the correction of anthropomorphism if not a denial of our links to other mammals or our ability to make sense of their behaviour from our viewpoint as fellow creatures? (Daston and Mitman 2005; Serpell 2003).

One area where wildlife films surely had a very different effect from what most American critics have argued is about accusations of anthropomorphizing and particularly anthropomorphizing about gender roles. Whenever I try to analyse this, I think of the embarrassing episode of my African Jacana interpretation. At Lake Panic near Skukuza in the Kruger National Park, there are usually African Jacanas and often they are nesting. I took photos of a nest with the beautiful eggs and the male in attendance but when I came back a day or two later, the water level seemed to have risen and the nest and eggs were gone. I looked indignantly at the resident hippos but was comforted by the sight of a Jacana male and female mating vigorously. They are not letting those hippos win, I thought.

Introduction

Dereck and Beverly Joubert are undoubtedly the major exponents of the wildlife documentary genre in Southern Africa over the past half-century. They have made more films and won more awards for wildlife films than any other Southern African filmmakers (and probably more than any other wildlife filmmakers) including the Grand Teton award at the Jackson Hole film festival for Eternal Enemies (1992). More people have probably seen their films than any other African cultural product – one dissertation estimated that a billion people had seen Eternal Enemies, perhaps because it was released in 1992 before the fragmentation of channels and markets made it more and more difficult for any one film to dominate the genre. The Jouberts’ own website more modestly claims a quarter of a billion viewers for that film.

Their films have been the most innovative and ambitious wildlife documentaries in the region. The Jouberts have been Explorers in Residence for National Geographic, recognized by the Botswanan government for their contribution to conservation in that country, the force behind the Great Plains Conservation Initiative and published numerous books and scientific articles. Their careers both underline the importance of the enabling factors explored in Chapter 2, but also illustrate what kinds of achievement those factors made possible.

Background

Dereck Joubert was a South African who started guiding at Mala Mala. He met his wife Beverly at high school and their marriage has been one of the great partnerships of wildlife film (Walters 2013). He then entered into a partnership with Rodney Fuhr, an entrepreneur interested in lion conservation and filming lions who founded the Chobe Lion Research Institute. Fuhr and Joubert established a location in the Okavango as they felt this would be the best place for filming lions and this location has been central to most of the Jouberts’ subsequent work (Figure 13.1). In an interview, Joubert says that while working there as a zoologist, he ‘found a film camera in a research cabinet, read the manual and started to learn to shoot documentaries’ (Walters 2013). Joubert then went to London where, as Chapter 8 showed, he attended the London Film School briefly and came under the influence of Michael Rosenberg and also met David Hughes.