Award-winning filmmakers and conservationists Beverly and Dereck Joubert have watched life and death play out on the open plains of Africa since the 1980s, highlighting predators and their plight. In 2006, they also launched an iconic collection of safari properties across Botswana, Kenya and Zimbabwe that are among our experts’ favourites in all of Africa. Read on to discover more about their love affair with the African outback in an exclusive interview by Stephanie Drax.
How did you meet and become filmmaking partners & conservation activists?
Beverly: We met aged 16 and realised we were soul mates, both wanting to live a life exploring and living in the wilderness.
Dereck: We’re conservationists at heart. As soon as we finished university, we went off into the bush and fell in love with each other and the continent we live in. To understand Africa, you need to understand the wild. To understand the wild, you need to understand the top predators. We quickly fell into bad company and started studying lions, leopards and cheetahs.
B: We weren’t expert photographers, but we had passion. We filmed for two solid years in Botswana, through a major drought. We lived what the animals were living, all of us desperate for water. It was extreme, but we were capturing interactions between animals that would never normally interact - footage so unique it got our focus. We called this first documentary Stolen River and National Geographic bought it. We’ve now made 35 films for them.
Which of your films has been the most challenging or rewarding to shoot?
B: We were nocturnal for our next film, Eternal Enemies, which was seven years in the making. We saw nightly battles for territories between lions and hyenas, capturing moments never seen before. Two predators were at war with each other, and we showed it was, in fact, an evenly matched fight. It was both adrenaline-fuelled and exhausting; by the end we’d picked up parasites and couldn’t even remember our birthdays!
D: We did become obsessive, but we decided early on that if we were going to do this together, we would make sacrifices like, for example, not having a family. In 1990, Eternal Enemies changed our lives, and people say it changed natural history filmmaking forever. Up until that point everybody believed that lions would make a kill and hyenas would eat the scraps, and that lions and hyenas only competed against their own species, but we discovered a different story; this amazing cross-species interaction. Other filmmakers work more quickly (the modern equivalent would be a six-week shoot) but you some-times need the luxury of time to understand the animals’ language.
Eternal Enemies won an Emmy, one of nine that you’ve amassed. How do you feel about your raft of accolades?
D: We won the Explorer’s Club medal recently, one of the most relevant that we’ve received, but for some time I was anti awards. For most of our lives, we lived in a one-bedroom tent in the middle of the Okavango Delta with a kitchen tent nearby, and that’s it. When we got to six Emmys, I bundled them up in a corner and tried to weld them together to make a new statue, not realising they’re made of tin. All the wings fell off these poor flying women, and I ruined them all! Our biggest awards have been when there’s success in conservation. The former President of Botswana banned lion and leopard hunting after seeing our films. When you’re trying to guide a country to better environmental methods and you see success, that is a truly great award.
You’ve had a few self-confessed ‘NDEs’ (Near Death Experiences). What happened?
D: Five years ago, we were walking at night together in Kenya when a wounded and disorientated buffalo came at us. It hit me with his shoulder, and I flew backwards, and as I was down, he impaled Beverly and ran off with her.
B: The horn went in underneath my armpit, through my chest, smashed my collarbone, went through my neck – lacerating my throat – and then came out of my cheek (where I now have 41 screws and five plates). I broke 27 bones, but I was fortunate it missed my spine.
D: I did a flying karate kick to his side with both feet, and that opened up a wound he had, so he flicked Beverly off. She died twice at the camp, but thankfully I managed to revive her, then she flatlined in the plane to Johannesburg and again in the hospital.
B: The first thing we did after the accident was ask Africa to invite us back. What we went through was phenomenal, and so we embrace life even more. We’ve been more determined to be effective and we understand mortality better because it’s now very personal.
D: In many ways it was a metaphor for where the planet is: it’s bashed up, and we’ve got to treat it like a patient in intensive care.
How has Africa changed through your lens over the years?
B: When we started working, Africa’s wildlife didn’t have the same pressure on it. The nefarious acts of laying snares and the bush meat trade have escalated at an alarming rate, especially since lockdown.
D: Project Ranger was our emergency intervention when the pandemic started because rangers – and their eyes and boots on the ground – were no longer in the field. Through our charity Great Plains Foundation, we raised $1.6 million to distribute among 250 rangers in nine countries to make sure they were financially topped up and their families were fed. When the furloughed rangers came back, they were immediately able to stop elephant poaching. They are our front-line conservationists.
B: More people are using Africa for economic gain, like oil drilling at the source of the Okavango River, deforesting areas, killing animals to pay for terrorism and the market for pangolin scales or rhino horn. These last remaining wildernesses and their migrations are under in-tense threat.
What hope is there?
D: There is tremendous hope, as we know what the three main issues are. Ignorance – because if people don’t know it’s wrong, they’ll continue to do it. Necessity – we all have to lift people up around us, to distribute wealth and make sure there are fewer poor people. Greed – if you don’t need to, and yet you still go out and kill a rhino or Cecil the lion, social media and world watchdogs will name and shame you. We know the issues, so the solutions are not that difficult.
How did you make the leap from filmmaking to hospitality?
D: We have used film to talk about conservation and then 15 years ago we started the ‘Big Cats Initiative’ to save big cats. We’ve saved 4,500 lions so far, with projects across 29 countries. We realised we needed to save the landscape the cats live in, so we bought up leases and to pay for them we asked friends to stay. As explorers, we’ve had the opportunity to visit extraordinary places, and that’s where we’ve put our 13 safari camps. The philosophy is to make the money to manage our 1.5 million acres, entice good people to stay, and encourage people to copy us. We believe in the ‘copy left’ philosophy as opposed to copyright. There are 44 million acres of land in Africa for potential conservation tourism and we can’t get to it all, so we’re happy to share our business model and show people how to make money from it. We personally plough everything back into three areas – conservation, communities and growing that footprint.
B: We’ve never taken a dividend. Great Plains was created to protect pristine areas, stop hunting and work side by side with communities, offering education, a profession or a stakeholder position. The whole premise of our conservation tourism is about making life better for communities and assisting them in protecting wild lands.
What do you think about community-focused tourism?
D: I don’t think you improve communities by turning them into Disneyland characters and popping in and having them dance for you. If you want to improve the lives of communities, you bring them in on a shareholding or stakeholding basis. The reason we buy land and don’t lease it is because when you buy land you end the conversation, when you lease it, your destinies are tied.
What does the future hold for the wildlife of Africa?
D: We’ve just embarked on a project that will move the needle in Zimbabwe. A big conservancy wanted to get rid of an overpopulation of animals - overpopulated due to drought – so our Rewild Zambezi project is relocating 3,000 animals into our private Sapi Reserve, part of a 1.6-million-acre biosphere.
B: It’s like a Noah’s Ark venture that includes 400 elephants, as well as lions, buffalo, impala, and more. Animals are keeping wildernesses alive for us, and the more we can do – through Great Plains or our films – to help change government policies and protect wildlife, the better. If this works, we’ll have the science on how to do it, and the story will have a ripple effect across the world.
All images by Great Plains Conservation