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The Untamed Chronicles

Shenton Safaris

By Lorraine Kearney

You could say it was gold fever that started it all, the Shenton family’s fingerprint on southern Africa.

Derek Shenton can’t switch on his laptop camera. He is in Kaingo and the internet signal is weak, so we do things the old-fashioned way: talking on the phone, me looking at a suburban street in Cape Town, Derek watching nature doing nature. 

Quick recap: Grandfather John Lindsay Shenton (Shen) was brought as a baby from the UK to Johannesburg’s Witwatersrand Reef in 1894. He went on to join the Parks Board and moved the family to Hluhluwe Game Reserve, in South Africa in 1936. 

It was the start of three generations – and counting – of Shentons in the wild, from Zululand to the Luangwa Valley, in Zambia. “I was really lucky enough to be born into that family,” Derek says. 

He built Kaingo, the first Shenton Safaris camp in South Luangwa National Park, in 1992 with his parents – his father, Barry, is another titan of conservation. It’s probably his favourite place in the world.

It’s the remoteness and the wildness of it, that is really appealing, he says. It’s a feeling of freedom, of being at ease. “It’s almost a balance that you get from the bush, whether it’s midday and you hear a green spotted dove calling, or in the morning you have that beautiful light, and all the things in the evening – the birds coming back or the hippos coming out.

“It’s just that natural rhythm. For me, I go a little bit stir-crazy when I’m in town for too long.”

Get The Balance Right

Our conversation is wide-ranging, but always comes back to this fundamental understanding: being in the bush is the only place to really be.

Will it be like this forever, I ask? Tourism is picking up, Zambia’s star is rising, more camps and lodges are being built, more planes are touching down in Lusaka and Livingstone. It’s a very delicate tightrope to walk: communities and conservation need funds, which come from tourists, but too many tourists put too much pressure on the parks and wildlife.

“It is getting busier,” Derek says. “I think it is a good thing.” But there is a caveat: “The authorities have got to remember to not rush development and put up camps everywhere, too close together. You do want to keep that remoteness around a particular camp, because that’s the draw. Once it becomes too busy, then of course it loses its flavour. They need to spread it out.”

He brings up Venice and Spain, with their issues of over-tourism. “I think we’re going to come to that point if we’re not careful in these safari areas. Zambia might still have a bit to go, but certain areas are very popular.”

The Perennial Problem of Poaching

Kaingo is in a sweet spot: “We are quite remote … We’re amazingly situated right in the middle of the vast South Luangwa National Park. So we’ve got huge areas to explore. Because we have been here so long, we collaborate with the parks authorities and on grading tracks and fire breaks for them. We also do a lot of anti-poaching work.”

There is still much meat poaching in South Luangwa – “it is all for the pot, but it’s on a big scale. It has a toll on the numbers of game, particularly on the periphery”.

But anti-poaching measures do work, and the numbers of general game have increased in their area, Derek points out. “Over the years, our numbers of game, of local game, have increased. Elephants are pretty steady. There’s certainly enough around. There’s a very good lion and buffalo population, plenty of small game and giraffe, and we have an exceptional leopard population.”

The Luangwa River is believed to have the highest density of hippos in Africa, with nearly 50 hippos per kilometre of river. The park also has among the highest number of leopards. There are also Crawshaw’s zebra, Cookson’s wildebeest and Thornicroft giraffe, which are found nowhere else.

A Bush Life

We go back to the beginning. In the early 1970s, the Shentons could be found on the family farm in Mazabuka, south of Lusaka. “In August, we’d camp in Luangwa or maybe Kafue. So the bush was always in us. After school, we’d all come to stay a few months with Norman Carr, the legend of the valley, down at Kapani – me, my brother and my cousin.

“I went to university in South Africa, to study agriculture, hoping to go back to the farm. But I had my own transport, and I worked at a campground, took tourists out for day trips. It was a good lifestyle and I just lived very simply in a grass hut on the riverbank. A lovely life. I’d trained with Norman Carr, got my guide’s licence and worked at a few camps and then freelanced a bit.

“In 1991, the government was privatising camping sites, and my parents and I decided to have a go and tendered for the lease. So that’s how it all started.”

In Zambia, private operators such as Shenton Safaris can tender for renewable leases from the government for five hectares where they can build and run a camp in a national park.

“I love running the camps. It was a natural thing for me. I probably didn’t intend to do this as a career, but it’s been fantastic for me,” Derek says.

The Hides

Of course, Shenton Safaris is known for its hides, which have drawn photographers and filmmakers from around the world.

It comes from Derek’s parents, who were avid photographers. They taught their children to find a good spot, to sit and wait and watch. Kaingo has an astonishing number of hippos. And so, they built a hippo hide.

“That was relatively easy because they don’t move in the day. It’s just a little grass hide and that was popular with guests to start with. There’s a point on the river where elephants always cross to get salt and access different foliage in the Nsefu sector of the park, so I built an elevated hide just at the crossing so you’re safe and that’s been so good for observing elephant behaviour.

“We developed a lot of hides over the years. We have a carmine bee-eater hide. They colonise the riverbanks in August, September and October in their thousands. I thought the natural way would be to put a hide on a boat and put the boat just in front of their nests. Get them used to you and then take the guests to the boat. And that’s what we did. It’s very popular.”

The hides come down at the end of the season – there’s no rock, no cement, they’re all just grass structures with a bit of wood. Back to nature.

A Final Word

“For me personally, I think pushing poaching back, getting people to become involved in tourism. Nature in the park should be left to do its thing, you know, with the least possible human interference. That makes me happy and I hope for my children and their children that it will stay like that … at least some of these great parks of Africa will remain as they always were.

“And I think a lot of people are making huge efforts to keep it that way. So, it will come. There is quite a lot of hope.”

Top Tips For Visitors To South Luangwa

1. Don’t go to too many camps for too short a time. If you’ve got eight days, then do four and four, or stay as long as you can, 10 days, because then you really get a feel for it.

2. Take binoculars. People have stopped doing that these days; they have cameras and phone cameras, but binocs are still amazing things to have. Not everything is close.

3. Bring the kids so that they get a feeling for nature. They will put their phones down and get absorbed in this amazing real life. At the end of the day, we all do what we can, but we need someone to pass the baton to.