Podcast: Beks Ndlovu from African Bush Camps

Beks Ndlovu: The Man Who Built African Bush Camps on Passion, Purpose and People

There are people in the African safari industry who have built successful businesses, and there are people who have built movements. Beks Ndlovu, founder and CEO of African Bush Camps, is firmly in the second category. Shaun Stanley has known Beks for close to fifteen years, first as a client visiting African Bush Camps properties, then as head of their sales and marketing, and now as a long-standing friend and trade partner. When the two sat down for the Stanley Safaris podcast, what followed was not a corporate interview. It was a campfire conversation between two people who share a deep and very personal love of Africa — and who both believe that how you travel here matters enormously.

In 2026, African Bush Camps turns twenty years old. Seventeen camps. Eight hundred staff. Three countries. And a foundation that has been running community and conservation programmes since the very first day the business opened. This is the story of how that all began, and where it is going next.

The Boy Who Followed the Elephants

Beks grew up in Hwange, Zimbabwe, a small coal-mining town sitting alongside one of Southern Africa’s great national parks. Like most children from that community, he grew up watching safari vehicles drive past, wondering what on earth the people inside them were doing. The wildlife was there, just beyond the fence. But the connection between what tourists came to see and what it meant for the people who lived there was, in his words, almost entirely absent. That gap, between the spectacle of safari and the reality of the communities surrounding it, would go on to define everything he built. He was nine or ten years old when a herd of elephants raided his family’s crops overnight, devastating the harvest his mother had tended for an entire year. While the family grieved the loss, Beks followed the herd’s tracks into the bush for an entire morning, curiosity overriding everything else. He came closer than he should have. It nearly cost him his life.

He tells that story now not as a cautionary tale but as the origin of something. The boy who tracked elephants barefoot became the guide who understood the bush from the inside out. At seventeen, he got his first glimpse of the safari industry through a school holiday internship. By eighteen, he had multiple job offers. By his mid-twenties, he was leading curated multi-country itineraries for private clients across Africa, and beginning to see clearly the injustices he wanted to do something about. In 2006, he planted his first seed: a tented camp called Somalisa in Hwange National Park, built in the area where he grew up, with a team drawn almost entirely from the surrounding community.

Building Something That Lasts

The early years were harder than anyone who visits an African Bush Camps property today might imagine. Zimbabwe in 2006 was a country under enormous strain, land invasions, political turbulence, a collapsing economy — and the birds, the bees and the butterflies Beks had hoped would come to his carefully planted garden were slow to arrive. His salvation came from Botswana. A concession he had been negotiating there produced a second camp in 2007, and the demand was immediate. The Botswana revenue quietly kept Somalisa alive through its difficult early years. It is one of those founding stories that deserves to be told, because Somalisa today is one of the company’s flagship camps, one of Shaun’s own favourites in Africa, and it exists in part because Beks refused to let it go.

Twenty years later, African Bush Camps operates seventeen properties across Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia, with a team of eight hundred people. Beks is deliberate about the direction from here: not wider, but deeper. The company has begun phasing out some of its more expedition-style camps in favour of concentrating on its Signature and Icon properties, places where the investment in guiding, hosting, conservation and community can be felt at every touchpoint. The word he keeps returning to is stewardship. Not growth for its own sake, but making sure that what already exists is as good as it can possibly be.

Conservation as a Theory of Change

The African Bush Camps Foundation launched on the same day as the business itself — not as an afterthought or a marketing appendage, but as the whole point. Beks frames the Foundation’s work around a concept he calls a theory of change: connected landscapes and thriving communities. The idea is that Africa’s wild areas, once continuous and deeply functional, have been fragmented by human population growth, fences, degradation and what he describes simply as bad decisions. His camps operate in areas where those landscapes can still be reconnected, and where the communities living within them can be brought along as active participants rather than bystanders. The human wildlife coexistence work is where you see this most clearly. One of the Foundation’s most successful projects is a mobile boma system, a portable livestock enclosure made from canvas rather than cut timber, deployed in Hwange, Kariba and the Chobe enclave in Botswana. Families using the system have not lost a single animal to predators in over twelve years. The same enclosure, moved around a field during the dry season, aerates the soil and enriches it with manure. Crop yields for participating families are up to ten times higher than for those who are not. A conservation solution turned agricultural intervention, quietly transforming the way communities relate to the wildlife living alongside them.

In Zambia, a project around Thorntree River Lodge is working to transform an entire village, from health and education through to farm-to-table food systems and irrigation schemes, while simultaneously addressing deforestation. The communities cutting trees to make charcoal are not doing so carelessly. They are doing so because they need income. The Foundation’s approach is to understand that first, and then offer a reason and an alternative. Tourism as an economy only works if the landscapes it depends on remain intact. Once communities understand and feel that connection — not because someone told them to, but because their own livelihoods prove it, the conservation work starts to take care of itself.

Guided by the Best

Beks began his career as a guide and, he is quick to correct anyone who uses the past tense, he still is one. When he visits camps, he takes guests out. His children once asked a guest who their guide had been. The guest said it was their dad. The children replied: no, who was your real guide? The story gets a laugh, but the point underneath it is serious. African Bush Camps has built its entire guest experience around the idea that the guide is the difference between a good safari and an exceptional one. The company now has over eighty guides across three countries, representing more than five hundred years of combined experience. Beks oversees the training programmes personally.

The Junior Ranger programme brings children from local communities into the camps, on game drives, into the bush, into conversations with guides, at an age when what they experience can genuinely shape what they go on to become. The female guide programme is opening a career that was previously almost entirely closed to women, addressing not just economic inequality but the deeper cultural assumptions that kept it in place. None of these initiatives produce immediate results. But as Beks puts it: the best time to start was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today.

The Next Twenty Years

When Shaun asked Beks where he sees the safari industry in twenty years, his answer was characteristically clear-eyed. He wants to see integrated landscapes where wildlife has genuine economic value for the people living alongside it. He wants to see degraded land — mined out, deforested, scarred, restored. He wants the conversations about why Africa matters to happen before people board a plane, so that by the time they arrive, they are already part of the story rather than simply observing it. He is also watching closely what wellness can do for the safari experience. His view is that the industry has been working guests hard, early mornings, long drives, rich dinners, little stillness — when the bush itself is one of the most powerful environments on earth for genuine rest and recovery. New wellness offerings at Thorntree in Zambia are the beginning of that thinking in practice.

Asked at the end of the conversation to name his favourite camp, his favourite child, as Shaun put it, Beks sidestepped the question with the grace of someone who has answered it many times. He does not have a favourite camp. He has a favourite area. The Lower Zambezi. The floodplains of Mana Pools. The call of a fish eagle, the grunt of a hippo further downstream, winter thorns filtering low light across an open river. For a man who built an entire company on the belief that Africa has more to give than most people ever get to see, it is exactly the kind of answer you would expect.

Listen to the Full Conversation

This blog captures the shape of the conversation, but a great deal more was said. Beks speaks about Zimbabwe with the kind of intimacy that can only come from someone who has lived it — the complexity, the beauty, the frustration, the ongoing possibility. He speaks about his team with the kind of pride that is unmistakably genuine. And he and Shaun speak about Africa the way two people do when they are not trying to sell it to anyone, but simply love it.

The full episode is available now on the Stanley Safaris podcast. If you are considering an African Bush Camps property as part of your safari, or simply want to understand more about why where you stay and who you book with makes a genuine difference — this is a good place to start.

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Final Thoughts from Shaun

Sitting down with Beks to record this podcast reminded me of why I spent six years of my career at African Bush Camps, and why I continue to send guests there today. There are not many people in this industry who have built something so genuinely purposeful from so little — and who have kept the original intention completely intact across twenty years of growth, setbacks and reinvention. What Beks has created is not just a collection of beautiful camps. It is proof that safari tourism, done with real intention, can be one of the most powerful tools for conservation and community development that exists on this continent.

I have been fortunate enough to be guided at Somalisa more times than I can count, and I still came away learning something new each time. That is the measure of a great camp — and of a great guiding culture. If you have been thinking about Zimbabwe, Botswana or Zambia, and you want to stay somewhere that will give you not only an extraordinary safari but a clear sense of why it matters, I would not hesitate. Reach out to us, and let us start planning.