10 / 10
Africa is the BBC natural history television series narrated by David Attenborough.
The BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol produced the series with James Honeyborne as the series producer, and it originally aired on BBC One between January and February 2013. The six-episode series provides thorough documentation of African continental wildlife, ecosystems, and the organisms that inhabit them. Each episode runs approximately sixty minutes (longer than the standard fifty-minute Attenborough episode format). The six episodes are: “Kalahari,” “Savannah,” “Congo,” “Cape,” “Sahara,” and “The Future.”
The series covers approximately one hundred species across the African continent. Will Gregory and Sarah Class composed the score.
Of everything Attenborough has narrated, this is the series I’d hand to somebody who’s never watched a nature documentary. It’s beautiful and patient, and it’s willing to show the continent in trouble as well as in glory. The only thing I’d change is the length, because six episodes left me wanting more.
The BBC Natural History Unit produced the series over four years, and it represented the first major Attenborough production focused on a single continent.
Africa is consistently cited among the major natural history productions of the early 2010s. The series’s specific focus allowed thorough treatment of African environments at depth that geographically broader series couldn’t provide. The Congo rainforest material, the Kalahari desert documentation, and the closing episode’s environmental and conservation material all represent heavy individual contributions.
The series’s specific approach to African wildlife documentation also engaged with the complicated legacy of European natural history programming about Africa. It had often presented the continent through colonial structures that later decades have reassessed.
The Continental Focus
Thorough documentation of a single continent was the series’s structural commitment. Previous Attenborough series had typically organized content around evolutionary, habitat, or taxonomic structures. Africa applied the geographic structure directly. Each episode covered one African region (Kalahari, Savannah, Congo, Cape, Sahara) and documented the ecosystems within each region. The audience experiences the continent through its distinct major environments.
The structure allows depth that a global series can’t. African wildlife has been filmed many times, usually as one stop in a larger world tour, and here it finally gets room. The Cape episode covers African penguin colonies and the plant communities of the Cape Floral Kingdom more fully than any earlier Attenborough production had. That’s my favorite of the six, because it spends real time on places the big-cat footage usually crowds out.
Continental focus is one valid scope. Other valid scopes include global, regional, and habitat-specific. Each scope produces different work.
For Writers
Suitable scope decisions deliver content that broader or narrower scopes can’t include. Africa’s continental focus allowed depth on African ecosystems that global productions couldn’t provide. The lesson applies to nonfiction at any scale. Match the scope to the depth you want to achieve. Broader scope produces wider context. Narrower scope produces depth. Both are valid. Pick deliberately instead of defaulting to the standard scope your subject area typically uses.
The Camera Trap Innovation
The series deployed remote camera trap systems on a scale never tried for natural history programming. Scientific researchers had used camera traps for decades, but major broadcast natural history hadn’t deployed them extensively. The Africa production used motion-triggered remote cameras to document wildlife behavior in locations where human presence would have prevented natural behavior or where direct filming was impractical.
The camera traps caught things direct filming couldn’t.
The Congo episode has forest elephants, bongo antelopes and other species too shy to show themselves to a crew. The Sahara episode catches nocturnal desert predators at work. I find this footage thrilling in a way polished crew footage rarely is, because these animals have no idea anybody’s watching.
The camera trap material has become standard in later BBC natural history production. Africa’s deployment of the technique established the production-quality expectations that later series have continued to develop.
For Writers
New methodological approaches can address documentary access limitations that previous methods couldn’t overcome. Africa’s camera trap deployment documented species that human-crewed cinematography rarely captures. The lesson applies to nonfiction work generally. Some subjects evade direct observation. The writer’s presence changes what happens. New approaches (electronic monitoring, archival research, distributed observation networks) can document subjects that direct observation can’t effectively access. Identify the access barriers. Develop the methods that work around them.
The Drought Material
Episode three (“Congo”) includes extensive coverage of the 2012 East African drought that occurred during production. The drought affected real portions of the production’s filming areas. The series adapted to document the drought’s specific impacts on wildlife instead of attempting to maintain a planned production schedule that the drought had made impossible.
The drought material extends across multiple sequences. The Savannah episode documents specific elephant family responses to water scarcity. The Cape episode covers fynbos plant community responses to fire and drought cycles. The closing episode (“The Future”) explicitly addresses the wider pattern of African environmental change.
Documentary work can adapt to actual conditions instead of maintaining rigid commitment to planned content. The drought was the actual situation during production. The series documented the actual situation. The result is more honest than a drought-free production would have been.
I respect the series most for this. Filming the hard conditions instead of filming around them gives you the continent as it was during those years, and I’d take that over a prettier, emptier version every time.
For Writers
Documentary work can adapt to actual conditions instead of maintaining rigid commitment to planned content. Africa documented the 2012 East African drought when the drought made the original production plan impractical. The lesson is that the actual situation is often more meaningful than the planned situation. When circumstances change, the writing can change with them. The version that emerges from responding to actual conditions often contains material that the planned version would have missed. Stay flexible. The unexpected material is sometimes the most important material.
Craft Note
The black rhino courtship sequence in episode one (“Kalahari”) shows the series’s specific approach to species whose behavior had been minimally documented. The footage shows black rhinos at a desert water hole during night hours, when the species is most active. The camera trap and infrared cinematography document specific courtship and territorial behaviors that human-crewed daytime cinematography couldn’t have captured. The sequence runs approximately five minutes. The audience experiences black rhino social behavior at the time of day when it occurs.
The species’s specific endangered status (the black rhino population had declined approximately ninety-six percent between 1960 and 1995) gives the documentation specific conservation significance. Each individual rhino documented is a significant fraction of the remaining global population. Documentary work can contribute conservation value through the documentation itself. The black rhino sequence is among the most-cited individual passages on contemporary African endangered species in natural history television.
Is Africa as good as people say?
10/10. The continental focus, the camera traps, the drought material and that night-time black rhino sequence each justify the score on their own, and Will Gregory and Sarah Class’s music ties it together. If I have a complaint, it’s that I wanted more of it. This is the continent-focused series that proved the format could support a major production. Watch all six episodes in order.
