Podcast: Colin Bell From Natural Selection

Fifty Years of African Safari: Colin Bell of Natural Selection on Conservation, Community, and the Future of the Wild

In 1977, a young man arrived in Maun with a Series Three Land Rover, eight clients, a trailer, and a twenty-five litre container of red wine strapped to the roof. The wine boiled every day and froze every night, and every morning everybody woke up with a headache and wondered why. There were no fridges. They cooled their beers by hanging wet socks over the wing mirrors. It was, as Colin Bell put it to Shaun in the latest Stanley Safaris Podcast, incredibly rough and ready. And it was the beginning of one of the most significant careers in African safari.

Colin Bell is a co-founder of Wilderness Safaris, a co-founder of Great Plains Conservation, and the driving force behind Natural Selection, a portfolio of thirty lodges and camps spread across Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa. Over nearly fifty years, he has helped transform the way the world thinks about African safari, and in this conversation with Shaun, he explained how it was done, why community has always been at the heart of it, and where he believes the industry needs to go next.

From Wits to Maun: How a Failed Economics Degree Built an Industry

Colin graduated from Wits with an economics degree. He knew from lecture one that economics was boring, and from lecture two that law was worse. What he did know was that he wanted Africa. He and a group of friends got hold of a Volkswagen Kombi with German elliptical plates on one side and Johannesburg plates on the other, and they drove. Everywhere. When he finally left university, his first job was with a safari company and he was sent straight to Maun. No training. Sink or swim.

In 1978, he met Chris McIntyre in Botswana, another young man chasing the same thing. By 1982, the two of them were ready to go on their own. They went to their bosses and said things needed to change. All the money from Botswana’s tourism was sitting in South Africa. Local people were being paid next to nothing. It was wrong, and they knew it, long before anyone was using the language of responsible tourism. Their boss told them Botswana’s best days were over and refused to act. So they resigned.

Colin had saved two and a half thousand rand. Chris had the same. That was about eight thousand eight hundred dollars each. Between them they had one old Land Rover. Their boss predicted they would never make it. They hit what Colin called the sweet spot, and built one of the most influential safari companies on the continent.

Building the Destination, Then Filling the Camps

In the late seventies, East Africa was the safari world. Botswana was nowhere. Before they could fill a camp, they had to create a destination. Colin and his team persuaded National Geographic to run an entire edition on Botswana. They brought in top ornithologists and ecologists as expert guides, people like Ken Newman and Bob Scholes, combining local knowledge with profiles that travellers recognised and trusted. Their first birding safari, priced at nine hundred and ninety rand all-inclusive from Johannesburg, sold out immediately. They quickly learned that the experience was everything: the space, the privacy, the expertise, the sense of a wild Africa that had not yet been marketed to death.

The community model that Wilderness Safaris became famous for did not begin as a philosophy. It began as a necessity. With almost no money, the only way Colin and Chris could access good land was to go to the people who owned it and share. They learned fast that sharing got them into private areas, opened doors that competition would have closed, and built trust that lasted decades. When they expanded into Namibia, they found communities sitting on extraordinary wilderness with no revenue and no reason to protect the wildlife living on it. Rhinos were being poached. The old South African Defence Force had been in there doing the same. Colin sat down with those communities and asked two questions: what do you have? What do we have? Then they worked out how to put it together.

“The risk is transferred away from the communities to the private sector, where it should be. You can’t go to a landlord and say, I want to rent your apartment for a year, but I’ll only pay for the days I’m there.”

The model they landed on was guaranteed cash up front, paid whether there were tourists or not, plus a percentage of turnover when things went well. That principle has not changed in nearly fifty years. During Covid, when camps were empty, Natural Selection still paid its community fees. It gave out roughly a million food parcels across its areas. Poaching levels across its concessions were almost zero. When communities know the wildlife is a guaranteed income, they protect it.

Natural Selection: A Portfolio of Family Businesses

Natural Selection began about eight years ago, almost by accident. Colin had lunch with an old colleague, Dave Van Dyke. Both of them had one lodge they could not properly market on its own. They put the two together, word got out that they were working again, and extraordinary properties started coming their way. They now run thirty lodges across Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, controlling roughly a million hectares of land.

The model is deliberate and unusual. Natural Selection is not a cookie-cutter hospitality company. It is a portfolio of family-run businesses, each with its original founder still in charge of the things they are best at. The clearest example Colin gave was Ralph Barfield of Uncharted Africa. Ralph is one of the finest guides in the business, exceptional at training, exceptional with guests. He is also, by his own admission, the world’s worst marketer. Natural Selection bought a portion of his business, took over the marketing, finance, and procurement, and left Ralph to do what he loves. For the first time in thirty-three years of operating, Ralph’s business paid a dividend.

“The more good you do, the more good comes back to you. Our shareholders haven’t had a return yet. But the value of the company is growing exponentially.”

Over eight years, Natural Selection has directed six million dollars into conservation through its foundation, funded entirely from the business itself, not from guest donations. Every lodge contributes a percentage of turnover to the foundation, seventy percent of which goes back into the immediate area around that lodge, with the remaining thirty percent available for larger regional projects. The foundation is governed independently to ensure objectivity.

Saving the Okavango: The Angola Project

Colin made a point in the podcast that stops you in your tracks. The greatest saviour of the Okavango Delta, for the past several decades, was the Angolan civil war. While Savimbi controlled the headwaters in south-east Angola, there were no loggers, no miners, no large-scale farmers. The highlands stayed intact. The rains fell, the waters flowed south, and the Delta was fed year after year. Now that there is peace, every one of those interests is moving in. The Okavango is under enormous threat from its own source.

Natural Selection’s response is a project two years in the making: a quarter of a million hectare big-five game reserve in southern Angola, developed in partnership with Stefan van Dijk, a man who has lived in Angola for thirty years and recently introduced the first sixteen elephants into the area, trucked in from Namibia. Those elephants arrived from harsh, dry conditions into unlimited food and water. They have not moved. Colin described them as the happiest elephants on the planet.

“We have to show the Angolan government that their next oil field is actually nature-based tourism.”

The vision is to reopen the ancient migration corridors between Botswana, northern Namibia, and southern Angola, connecting the wildlife-rich ecosystems of the south with the food-abundant but animal-empty landscapes of the north. Natural Selection already runs helicopter and kayak expeditions that follow the water all the way from the source lakes in the Angolan highlands to where the Okavango finally dissipates into the Kalahari sand. Colin calls it from the source to the sands. It is, as he put it to Shaun, the most pioneering country he has visited since arriving in Botswana in 1977.

Going on Safari Is the Most Important Thing You Can Do

Colin made an argument in this podcast that we think every traveller should hear. Africa’s wild places, its savannas, its wetlands, its ancient soils, are among the largest carbon stores on the planet. The moment those areas are converted to farming or development, that carbon goes back into the atmosphere. The only way to keep them intact is to make sure they are properly managed. The only way to pay for proper management is tourism. When you go on safari with the right company, you are not just having a holiday. You are funding the infrastructure that keeps Africa wild.

One person employed in a rural lodge supports anywhere from eight to twenty family members. One hundred staff supporting one thousand to one thousand five hundred people. The knock-on effect into communities, into schools, into local economies, is enormous and almost entirely invisible to guests who arrive, enjoy three extraordinary days, and fly home. Colin is not frustrated by that invisibility. He simply wants more people to understand that the choice of where they go, and who they book with, matters enormously.

His advice for anyone planning a safari was direct: avoid the overcrowded parks in peak season. The Masai Mara in August, the Ngorongoro Crater, Chobe at its busiest, these are not bad places, but they are not the experience most people are actually looking for when they picture Africa. Go to private conservancies. Go out of season. Tailor-make your itinerary, which, he pointed out, costs no more than buying a package off the shelf and gives you something infinitely more personal. And make sure the company you book with has genuine ethics, not just the language of them.

“Go on safari. You will become the greatest conservationist on this planet. Even though you don’t know you’re contributing, you are.”

The First Check

The episode ends with a story that stays with you. Natural Selection has a lodge at Kwekwe, on the Wild Coast of South Africa, inside the first provincial game reserve in the country to be entirely community-owned. The community had been waiting since 2002 for a promise Colin made them to be fulfilled. When the lodge opened and completed its first nine months of trading, he arrived at a community meeting with a large printed cheque under his arm and asked the group what they thought it might be worth. The highest guess was fifty thousand rand.

It was four hundred and seventy-seven thousand. There were tears. Colin rolled the cheque back up, put it under his arm, and told them to sleep on it and meet again the next morning with a plan for how they would spend it. No Mercedes. They met the next morning. They had nine primary schools in their district. They were dividing the money between all nine, for stationery, blackboards, and supplies. Colin handed over the cheque.

That is what nearly fifty years of African safari, done properly, looks like. It is not a transaction. It is a partnership, built slowly, through shared risk and shared reward, into something that outlasts any individual camp or company or season. Colin Bell has spent his career proving that conservation and community and a brilliant safari experience are not competing priorities. They are the same priority, pursued together.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Safari That Gives Back

Colin Bell has spent nearly fifty years proving that the best safari and the most responsible safari are the same safari. The camps that share revenue with communities, that pay guaranteed fees whether guests arrive or not, that reinvest profits into the land rather than extracting them, are also the ones that offer the most authentic, unhurried, and genuinely wild experiences. That is not a coincidence. It is the model working exactly as it should. When you travel with people who are doing this right, you are not choosing between a great holiday and doing good. You are doing both at once, and the Africa you came to see is better for it.