When it comes to conservation across Africa, Dereck and Beverly Joubert are a couple at the forefront. Alongside their preservation efforts, they have created, designed and operate fourteen unique partner safari properties in Kenya, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, including Mpala Jena Private Villas where we recently stayed. We sat down with Dereck to discuss how their magical life of filming and following wildlife came about, what’s on the cards for 2026, and their charity, Great Plains Foundation.
An interview with Dereck Joubert
Hi, Dereck. Thanks so much for chatting with us. To start with, can you tell us a little about where you and Beverly grew up and how you met?
We met in high school in South Africa. We started dating a year afterwards, due to my going away to the army. I met Beverly the day I came out of the army and asked her out. She had a moment of weakness and accepted, and we never looked back.
I was soon at university, but no more than four years later, we left civilisation for the bush, together. I’m just writing a book on this, and I wish I’d done it as efficiently as here!
How did you discover your passion for wildlife, conservation and the great outdoors?
We both grew up with families that liked the outdoors and wildlife. Beverly driving to the Kruger National Park and Mozambique, and I, in a different way, hiking mountains and visiting wild places in South Africa.
I saw an elephant for the first time when I was four years old and felt much more alive and comfortable in the presence of elephants than with people. I had an older brother by eight years, so I was declared an outsider early on. Elephants just seem nicer! So, I studied them closely, adopted their ways, their pace, their peace and kindness as guidelines for my own life.
Tell us a little about your work with wild animals and the main challenges you face as conservationists in Africa.
We started in the safari industry and then went to study lions in Botswana in our mid-twenties, where, in the Chobe Lion Research Institute offices (a tent!), I found an Arriflex movie camera. I learned how to use it on my own and started filming.
The very first shot I did went into a film that National Geographic eventually bought (they must have been more desperate back then). It felt right for me to be a filmmaker as opposed to being a lion scientist, where I could speak to millions of people through images, unlike the audience I was getting with a scientific paper.
I handed my still cameras to Beverly, and she became one of the first National Geographic female photographers in natural history. Soon, however, we came to understand that not everyone loved wildlife in the same way as we did. Hunters love it, to kill it, poachers kill it to make money, there is industrial-scale logging, killing, slaughtering of that purity of nature we were seeing. So, our work evolved to become a voice for the innocent, via film and photography.
Is there a singular moment from all of your explorations that remains especially close to your heart, and if so, why?
Each moment we are out in the wild, together is special. Working with Legadema, a leopard we followed for four years, was special. We got to know about leopards, she got to know us intimately, and we got to know ourselves through her. We developed the Nat Geo Big Cats Initiative as a result of that. Through the Initiative, we have saved over 4,500 lions and other big cats and that stems from that one leopard and our unique relationship with her.
Through Great Plains Conservation, you offer guests a unique glimpse into wild Africa. What makes your safaris and stays across Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe special for guests?
Well, as explorers, we have been able to understand and hand-pick the most important locations, as we would if we were taking on a new Emmy-award-winning film. So for us it had to have all the same qualities when it came to choosing Great Plains camps: exclusivity, quiet, peace and tranquillity, but also great wildlife, where one can discover new things with wildlife and in nature.
Our camps are hand-designed and built to excite ‘the creative’ in all of us, and to send a message that we care about you personally. Each camp tells a design story, but also a community story and a wildlife story.
Zarafa in Botswana is named after the first giraffe in the mid 1600’s to leave Africa as a gift to France. Kenya’s Mara Plains is designed based on the Fibonacci curve that is critical to understanding composition and form in photography. Mara Toto Tree Camp is set three metres into the tree canopy to be with birds, monkeys and leopards, so the theme and colours match. Each camp is a storybook and a script, one in which our guests are the main characters.
You founded initiatives like the Great Plains Foundation, the Big Cats Initiative, and Rhinos Without Borders to address urgent conservation crises. For a traveller booking a stay with Great Plains, what are some tangible, on-the-ground outcomes their visit is directly supporting right now?
Support from our guests goes directly into these programs, so you know that each day you stay with us, you are supporting conservation and communities. In Tembo Plains in Zimbabwe, right now, we have a research team following Painted Dogs that we introduced, and they are always keen to show or talk about the pack.
In Duba our biodiversity monitors take you to iconic and rare wildlife we introduced and talk passionately about it. Our female rangers are always fun to meet because they are also passionate and can share their challenges.
Each location has a special project, where in some you can visit schools, we have built and support, or bead making and honey making co-ops by our women’s groups. It’s a blend of science and conservation with community engagement in others.
For readers dreaming of an African safari but also conscious of their impact, what practical advice would you give on choosing lodges, planning itineraries and engaging with local communities so that their trip is not just life-changing for them, but genuinely life-supporting for the places they visit?
Choose a company that wears its heart on its sleeve and is genuine. Our guests often talk about how they came to us because the greenwashing elsewhere was obvious. We do it for real and publish it for everyone to interrogate. Ask questions about projects and test integrity.
By the way, don’t feel bad about travelling and having a carbon footprint. We have planted over 50,000 trees and plant at least one for each stay, and invite our guests to plant one as well. We have regenerated forests. We have a team of carbon experts running models for us to progress and improve.
Don’t feel bad about travelling for another reason; tourism generates jobs in conservation, and those jobs convert some community members to conservationists and ambassadors back home. We hire about 1,000 people, which means we feed 8,000 daily through employment benefits, but we also feed about 16,000 children each day and have given away over 8 million meals. Our guests help us do this all the time. Through your travel, we protect 1.5 million acres of conservation land.
When and how did Wildlife Films come into being, and what was the hope for the business when you started?
In the transition from research to making films, from science to art, Beverly and I wanted to be the authors of our stories, even though we were quite young (and arrogant, perhaps), so forming Wildlife Films in 1983 was a way for us to create an entity that was beyond either of us just being a crew member for hire. It was clear to us that we wanted to make our own films. 50 major projects later, nine Emmys, a Peabody, etc., we have managed to do that via that one company.
Soon after starting, though, we realised that we wanted to ‘say’ more than most wildlife films. So, we made a deal with Nat Geo early on that we would produce an award-level film on predators or elephants, but the next one needed to be about conservation and a call to action.
Sometimes, we could combine the iconic species story and a call to action. Our art is often protest art, but also stories of hope.
You recently launched Wild Eye: A Life in Photographs. Congratulations! Tell us a little about the project and what you hope readers will take from it.
It is a visual journey through 40 years of Beverly’s images, and that is enough. But it is also a journey of our own lives, from awe to advocacy and action based on one fundamental that has often placed us in trouble: that when you see something wrong, there is a big difference between doing something (or saying something ) and doing nothing. We must speak out, or we are complicit in a crime. In our case, it is a crime against nature.
Africa is a huge and diverse continent. What are your favourite places to explore?
Duba Plains is our home, so while it is weird to consider home as an exciting place to explore, it really is. Each day is a discovery. Every single day! Lions are swimming and hunting in the waters of the Okavango, or elephants are gently talking in a language I have convinced myself I can understand.
We like going to parallel universes, like the Pantanal, where jaguars (much like leopards) remind us of the prehistoric times when the continents were joined. We were with tigers last month, reminders of the great 3-million-year-old sabre-tooth cats that followed wild horses across the Arabian Strait into Africa, as Smilodons or Homotherians and then lost their stripes to become lions.
We love all places. For me, each day is an exploration.
Are you able to share some hotels that you’ve loved staying at over the years, and why they leave a special memory for you?
I am a big fan of anything Great Plains! Just kidding, but we love the service levels of the Oberoi in India, Château de Courcelles in France, for its authenticity and Domaine Les Crayeres, where we have never quite had a meal to rival.
I love Grootbos in the Cape of South Africa, for its unique understanding of the landscape and activities, Ellerman House in Cape Town, and IL Borro in Tuscany, for its sustainability, gardens and, well, Tuscan experience.
That said, when we are in Washington, we are at the Hay Adams or the Jefferson. New York is a puzzle I have not yet sorted out.
You’re always on the go. What are your best travel tips?
- Don’t drink or eat on planes if you can avoid it.
- Pack a sweater for planes.
- RM Williams boots you can use at a Gala or to trek in after rhinos, (and clean again for next Gala).
- Fight jet lag with exercise: walk, run, go to the gym, sleep.
- Ask to move if the guy behind you is coughing and spluttering, even if he says it’s allergies!
- A scarf, linen, light, one I can use to warm me, dipped in water to cool me, wrapped to keep bugs away, over my nose for dust, and thrown to distract charging buffalo or lions.
Each of these has worked well for me over the years.
And finally, you straddle so many different worlds, from hotels to film-making and conservation. Looking further into 2026 and beyond, what are you most excited about?
We are running in three major directions right now: Media, where we are releasing a film on PBS Nature on what the Maasai Mara is like when the migration leaves (hint: it’s magical, as busy with wildlife, less busy with people!) Our memoir is out next year, and a feature film on our lives is coming out later this year.
Around tourism, we are opening a camp called Shompole, a classic East African camp, as well as going into Uganda with gorilla and chimpanzee experiences. And in conservation, we are moving rhinos in Uganda and cheetahs in Zimbabwe. Should be a fun year!
Discover more about Great Plains Foundation
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