Growing Up in the African Wild : Beyond ‘Savage Kingdom’ (Part 1) | Nat Geo Live

(Dramatic orchestral music) - Imagine you're out in Africa. It's night-time, you're sleeping in the back of an open vehicle, and it's so hot that you have no clothes on and you're still sweating. All you can hear is the distant call of a hyena and an impala snorting close by, and you're half asleep. But then your car just begins to wobble. You're not quite sure what's going on. You tilt your head up and look down towards your feet, and all you can make out is your clothes bag, sort of on the box next to where your feet are, and just all of a sudden it disappears. So, quite startled, you sit up, grab a torch, and shine out into the darkness. All you can see is a young male lion running off into the bush, carrying all your clothes. (Audience laughs)

I grew up in the bush, and now as a wildlife filmmaker, I can continue to spend most of my time out in the wild. We choose not to have a camp. We like to move with animals, and it keeps us close to where they are. We sleep where they are. It keeps us in touch with what is going on, and the filming vehicles that we've got are modified for filming. We like to be able to see and smell and hear everything around us. We want to be as unencumbered as possible, so we cut off the cab, take the doors off, and fold the windscreen down, and the vehicles are just completely open.

This little bag incident that happened last year to us while I was in Savute filming Savage Kingdom, it was the young male lion from the Marsh Pride that thought it would be quite funny to sneak in there, grab my clothes bag and run off with it. It was quite a busy night, you know. As you do, you jump into the driver's seat, and you start chasing after the guy, and of course, you're completely naked because now all your clothes are gone. We chased him around for about 20 minutes before we managed to get all my clothes back. I've actually, I've still got my bag. I still take it to the bush. I still use it. Quite like this bag, despite the sort of holes that he left in it.

I come from a long line of Botswana bush people. My Great Grandfather was one of the first up there. He was knocking around all over the place. He was a hunter. He got mauled by a lion at one point and was involved in quite a few other misadventures, I believe. My Grandfather, who is that man up there, followed my Great Grandfather into Botswana and was given the Okavango as a hunting concession to shoot crocodiles specifically. He was quite an intrepid guy; a bit of an adventurer. He spent a lot of time on his own, and he used to take little tin boats and carve his way into the Delta, basically shooting as many crocs as he could find.

He would go up there with groups of guys that would do all the skinning and prepare the skins, salt them, and get them ready to be taken back to South Africa to be exported off to Europe. But he lived a wild life and really explored a vast part of the Delta in the mid-50s and early 60s. He was responsible for killing probably about 20 thousand crocs during his time as a hunter before he himself was killed by a Black Mamba. On one of his hunting trips, he got bitten and died.

And now, of course, it's completely safe to swim in the Okavango, which is not altogether true, but what it did is give way to another generation of bush people. My parents then moved up into the Okavango. They took over one of his old hunting camps and kind of broke the mold a little bit. Instead of hunting, they decided to build the first photographic tourism camp in the Delta, and that was in 1967. A few years later, my sister and I were born, and we were born literally into the bush and into the wild.

The story goes that my mother had me in Maun, a small village quite close to, well, at the base of the Okavango, and she figured that it would be safer to take me out into the bush than to leave me in the village. So, at four days old, she picked me up and did this long boat journey up to the camp where we were living, and as she arrived at the lodge, or at the campsite, she was getting out of the boat and onto the land. She didn't want to pass me on to somebody else. This is her baby; protect it. And, climbing out, she slipped and dropped me straight into the river. So I was baptized into the Delta at a very young age.

The life, the next four or five years, we grew up. My sister and I grew up on this island out in the middle of the Delta. My folks used to go into town maybe once a month at most to go and get a few supplies, get a bit of fuel, and they, we lived a sort of rural life. We lived in small reed huts. You know, we slept on the floor under mosquito nets, and bath time was in the river, because there were no crocs at the time, and in a tin bath next to the fire. It was very rudimentary and a great existence.

My folks used to go out and catch fish, and try and subsist to a large degree. My mother had a little vegetable garden that she used to be at constant war with the wildlife. You know, fight off the porcupines that were trying to eat her tomatoes, or whatever she was trying to grow. But essentially, we sort of lived off the land. My dad got a POT licence that he used to have that he could go and shoot a few animals, that he could then feed his staff or have food in the camp with. But that really wasn't my dad's style. He didn't really like the hunting side of things, and instead he used to take this little yellow land rover that we had, and we'd go out, track the lions, and find the lions.

Then we'd sit on them and follow them for hours, and eventually they would kill something. A buffalo, or an impala, or a kudu or something, and then he'd use that little land rover to push all the lions off the kill, help out and cut the leg off or a shoulder or a piece of meat, and then he would take that home. That's really how we got most of our food and our meat. You could imagine as a little toddler how exciting that was. That was a grand adventure.

Looking back at how I grew up, it really sort of looks a little bit like the Mowgli and the sort of Jungle Book story. It was a wild life. We grew up surrounded by predators. We had lions, hyenas, leopards always around us, and a lot of other animals that can kill you. Elephants, hippos, crocs, and even snakes like the ones that killed my Grandfather. Growing up wild like that sort of gives you a sense of vulnerability; you're not top dog. You're living in a world full of predators, and it makes you very aware and very vigilant, and you're always very focused on what is going on around you and very perceptive towards the bush.

I think that's where my love for the wildlife and my sort of passion, and my understanding of the predator world really started, began, where it all stemmed from. Very soon after, I left school. I joined two great people, which most of you probably know. Dereck and Beverly Joubert, they're explorers-in-residence for National Geographic, and they lived in the bush and they lived where I wanted to be, and I started an apprenticeship with them.

Up until this point, the bush and the wild animals were really just my life. It was normal, I was very familiar with it. I sort of just moved through life, you know, not really appreciating the upbringing I'd had. Dereck and Beverly kind of shifted that direction and made me, they sort of contextualized the value of my upbringing and the sort of understanding that I'd naturally accumulated by being out there. They allowed me to look at nature in a very different way and in a much more philosophical way and really delve deeper into appreciating these animals in the natural world.

I was working with them for about 10, 12 years. It was at the end of that time I met my wife, who was at the time having her own sort of mid-life crisis. She was giving up her life as a lawyer in the big city and decided to move out into the middle of the bush with me. So, the two of us had a new direction and a new purpose, and we were determined that we were going to live and stay out in the bush.

As it happens, not long after we did that, we had some children, and we weren't going to let that stop us. So we moved everybody out into the bush, and we decided to live out there. We both really believe that it's a gift to grow up wild, grow up in the bush, and we wanted to, we had an opportunity to give that to our children. So, we're hell-bent on staying out there. We could slowly teach them about tracking, about the signs of the wild. We could teach them about how the bigger animals, the scarier animals, are often the more gentle animals.

We wanted them to grow up strong and have this intrinsic sense of nature and animals sort of embed into them at a very, very young age. Let them develop their own intrinsic understanding and compassion towards the wildlife. And luckily, those tin baths didn't evolve much in 25 years though. Very useful. It's amazing how we so often follow the path of our parents.

This picture was taken in 1979; that's my sister and myself getting a few lessons in life right out in the middle of the Okavango, and this picture was taken just over a year ago. Andy took the picture. We're out there with our family, living the wild life. Being out there in the bush, just in a totally different location.