Kenyan wildlife conservationist, filmmaker, TV presenter and anthropologist, Saba Douglas-Hamilton is touring the country with her show, ‘In The Footsteps Of Elephants’ this autumn. She is due to appear at The Regent in Christchurch on Tuesday, 4 October at 7.30pm.

The show promises to be an inspiring and heart-warming look at how ‘Save the Elephants’ helped raise millions of dollars to protect elephant populations across Africa. Saba tells anecdotes of how they sought the support of Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista and lured other super models to their camp in Kenya, persuading them, and the high-end jewellers Tiffany & Co, to join their campaign.

Saba Douglas-Hamilton grew up in Kenya and lives there with her husband Frank and three daughters. Saba’s father Ian Douglas-Hamilton started Save The Elephants – a charity that has cared for the African elephant since 1993. In 2016, Saba helped to launch the #knotonmyplanet campaign – a campaign supported by celebrities and has helped to raise $11.4 million.

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What kind of childhood did you have?

I’m Kenyan, with a lot of mix in my bloodlines. I grew up in East Africa, living mostly in Kenya, but also in Tanzania and Uganda. My father had spent part of his boyhood in Africa and always wanted to return: he’s a zoologist, and when I was born, he was researching elephants in Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania. It was the first-ever study of the social behaviour of wild African elephants, and his big discovery was that elephant herds are led by matriarchs and not by bulls, as had previously been thought.

My father’s work means I’ve always felt intimately connected to elephants, and to their fate. Because they were never anonymous creatures for me: all the ones I’ve ever known have had names. I’m thinking for example of Boadicea, a ferocious matriarch who would often charge us, thrashing her way through the bush, upending small trees and screaming at a full volume. She’d screech to a halt, metres from the car in a swirl of dust, as we were left cowering in the footwell.  My father’s response was always to turn the engine off and we would just sit there quietly until she’d calm down or whisk her family away.

I was raised from an early age to understand that when animals like elephants, and rhino, and buffalo, charge at you, it’s a kind of false bravado on their part. The fact is, they’re reacting that way because they’ve been compromised by a human that’s crossed a line and that’s meant the animals no longer feel safe. They can either run away or they can attack, and sometimes this leads to a charge. So, it’s important to always remember that you’re dealing with an animal who feels upset, and the best thing to do is to try to neutralise the situation.

The 1970s, when I was a child, was a terrible period in Africa where elephants were concerned: the ivory trade was spiraling out of control, elephants populations were disappearing, and my father – as a relatively unknown field scientist – was trying to raise the alarm. But nobody believed him. So, my parents carried out the first pan-African elephant census, with a team of scientists, counting the living and the dead to get hard data on the table.

But there was a lot of money involved in the ivory trade and a lot of corruption, and that meant plenty of resistance to changing the status quo. My father’s work showed that in some areas up to 90 per cent of the elephant population had been lost, and eventually it was the data that shifted the balance leading in 1989 to an international ban on ivory trade.

My sister and I went to a day school in Nairobi, but during the holidays we’d go to Uganda, where our parents were working at the time, in what was basically a war zone.

Idi Amin had just been deposed, so it was a very turbulent period: I remember drunk soldiers roaming the streets of Kampala, the strict 6pm curfew, and in Murchison Falls (Kabalega) National Park – where we lived – we could often hear gunfire across the Nile.

People were on the brink of starvation, and most buildings pock-marked with bullet holes. We lived in a tiny house beside the river: it was called the Mummy Queen House, because the Queen Mother once stayed there. It had no doors or windows – all looted – so we had to barricade ourselves in at night with camp chairs blocking the gaps to stop the hyenas getting in to steal our food.

What did your childhood teach you?

The biggest lesson from my childhood was the importance of gentleness around wild creatures, and the fundamental issue of mutual respect. Children have a natural affection for animals, but within that they can be cruel, either deliberately or by mistake. I think they need to be guided by a kind hand: if you see an ant, don’t kill it – watch it instead, it might surprise you with something interesting. If you see a scorpion, look at its behaviour rather than the sting on its tail. Try to understand how vulnerable it feels, and why it’s feeling defensive. It’s because it’s frightened; the questions is, how do you make it feel more comfortable?

My mother, who was born and brought up in Kenya, came from a family that hunted, as most people did in those day: the relationship with the natural world was to go out and kill big game or keep “pests” like rhino and zebra out of one’s crops. My father, coming from a different generation and ethic, brought a new approach, of a scientific observer, and together my parents forged a new path.They were interested in the natural behaviour of relaxed creatures in their own environment, and the social interactions that took place between individuals – calling out the macho man vs animal idea for the nonsense it was. Now I’ve got three children of my own, I try as much as I can to teach them this approach, too.

How did you get into the work you do now, as a conservationist and a conservation filmmaker?

When I was 13, I was sent to Britain to an all-girls boarding school – a massive culture shock and very unhappy time – but, luckily, at sixth form I was accepted to a wonderful school, called Atlantic College, in Wales, where the whole ethos is about inspiring young people to be changemakers by harnessing their idealism. I came to believe, and I still believe very strongly, that the power to change the world lies in our hands as individuals. All it takes is the passion, and the political will: during the pandemic, we all saw how quickly it’s possible for our world to change, overnight.

At university I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew I wasn’t going to be living in a city and working in a bank. I wanted to do something adventurous and meaningful. For a while I went to work in Namibia with the Save the Rhino Trust: during my time there, I learnt that conservation is a really tough calling. It’s a constant battle and you’re fighting every step of the way. You’re trying to slow down the exploitation and damage, trying to stop the haemorrhaging of the natural world. It’s like being a first responder: you’re thrown in at the deep end, and you have to keep on believing that what you’re doing can make a difference.

Then when I was in my late twenties, a great friend of mine was shot in a violent robbery in Kenya.  That triggered a big change in me: I realised that anything could happen at any time, and I could be dead tomorrow. So, I felt the need to push myself hard to explore my limits and find out who I was. I climbed lots of mountains and danced at full moon raves in the California desert, but in between spent my time in the bush working with Save The Elephants; and then someone from the BBC reached out to me and asked if she could see what I was like on camera, and that led to my work as a TV presenter.

I enjoy the creativity of film-making and telling stories, so it was a wonderful medium to bring together everything I most cared about. And I love the teamwork; you have to work very closely with the other people in the crew, the sound people, the camera people, the producer. There’s a wonderful synergy, a great sense of purpose. And you simply couldn’t do it without everyone’s input.

How important is film making as a tool for conservation?

One of the frustrations back then was that there was a lot of resistance within the industry to films about conservation or environmental issues. The executive producers thought that people didn’t want to be “lectured” about wild animals and their plight: I remember being told, when people come home at the end of the day, they want to turn on the telly and switch off.  They don’t want to hear about the difficult stuff. Then, the climate issue hit the front pages; and that led to change, because it was more than apparent that we couldn’t hide from the facts any longer. The natural world is in a crisis, and loss of biodiversity is intricately linked to climate chaos and our future. So now I feel there’s a very profound change going on, with people all around the world waking up to the environmental crisis and changing their behaviour. In Britain, the many superb series about pristine nature, shown over decades, have certainly softened everyone up by making them fall in love with the wild world. So, now, when conservation issues are finally brought to light on screen, it has a big impact.

What’s been your biggest moment as a wildlife filmmaker?

A few years ago, I was working on a BBC shoot in the Namibian desert, and decided to spend the week sleeping out under the stars, and dragged my mattress out into the middle of a dry riverbed.  The film crew weren’t so keen, so they stayed in tents about 100m away. During the night I could hear elephants in the distance but that didn’t phase me at all, I thought, how lovely they’re around; but then suddenly I woke up, 100 per cent alert, and saw a huge bull elephant up on the riverbank. He looked like he would walk on by but suddenly peered in my direction and came walking straight out towards me. There were no trees to climb to get away from him, and the sand was too deep to run in. I realised my only option was to lie absolutely still, and to play dead.

I remember rolling over onto my back, at ground level, watching him come towards me. My heart was pounding, thinking: this is it! This is the end! He’s going to get my scent then crush me under his knees or tusk me and there’s nothing I can do. He came so close that he loomed above me, his massive frame blocking out the moon… then stopped. He reached out his trunk and smelled every bit of me, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. Then he stood there, still as a statue, processing the information: human, female, sleeping. And then he turned, and very slowly he walked away. I thought my heart was going to explode with relief, the elation of being alive, and knowing that by his grace he had let me live: it was an utterly humbling experience.  One of the most profound moments of my life.

What role do you see for yourself now?

My work now involves linking my abilities as a storyteller with hands-on conservation.  I see myself as a recruiter; linking people to the conservation cause by inspiring them with the beauty and complexity of the wild world, the evidence of how one can succeed in conservation, then hoping they’ll sign up to the cause and join hands with us, doing their bit, realising the power we all have as individuals working together to change our world. Of course, there is no one solution, the problems are very complex, but we all know the system is broken, and the only way forward is to do things better.

What’s next for your work with elephants?

Right now, we’re in a moment of success with elephant conservation, because a global coalition has defeated the ivory trade – at least for now – and elephant populations across most of their range in Africa are increasing. The big issue now is co-existence: because the human population is growing as well, and human beings leave a heavy footprint, especially as Africa develops.  We have to make sure we leapfrog over the mistakes that have been made elsewhere in the world: we have to do better than was done before, by previous generations. We have to create long-term sustainability, where wild ecosystems remain linked and can thrive, and making that happen is very much my mission.

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Tickets to Saba Douglas-Hamilton – In The Footsteps Of Elephants can be booked online at www.regentcentre.co.uk or call the box office on 01202 499199. For more dates elsewhere in the country visit www.sabadouglashamilton.com.