According to South African filmmaker and National Geographic explorer Noel Kok, the moment you see your first rhino will stay with you forever. In his case, the rhino was a bumper sticker on the back of a white woman's car that read "Save the rhino."
Kok grew up in the late 1970s during Apartheid and noticed that only white people had this bumper sticker. "In my mind, I thought, 'this is not our animal, it's a white person's animal,'" he remembers in an interview with OkayAfrica.
Once Black South Africans were allowed, Kok took a trip to Kruger National Park and finally saw a rhino in real life. "I was the only Black African on holiday. Everyone who looked like me was working," he says. "[I saw] the same story that had been showing on television for 20 years: Black people were rangers, pirates, poachers, or the people singing for you when you jump off your safari vehicle."
Photo by Anthony Ochieng Onyango/ National Geographic
"There's this new style of conservation where they're fencing off everything away from the communities, creating paramilitary-style ranges. And so the communities are far removed, even though we always used to live in harmony with nature. Now we're no longer allowed to; it almost looks as if they were created for tourists and international tourists, and the communities are completely excluded." - Noel Kok
Fast forward to 2012, Kok had become a filmmaker and saw a rhino statue at an airport, which was supposed to raise awareness of the return of rhino poaching. "I thought: the people who live next to these animals don't fly," he says. "This message is misguided because if they are the last line of defense for those animals, those are the people to whom we need to get the message across."
With his wife, fellow filmmaker, and National Geographic explorer Pragna Parsotam-Kok, he created a television series in Zulu aimed at the communities that live in and around the nature reserves. Producing this series, which needed access to wildlife, Black scientists, and people who spoke the native languages, bankrupted them.
Film and television are booming across Africa, except for the wildlife and conservation genre. "There's this notion that conservation and the protection of natural habitats is not high on the priority list for Africans," says Kok. "That could not be further from the truth. We have always looked after our species and natural habitats as a continent. So, how do we change this story? We change the storyteller."
Photo by Anthony Ochieng Onyango/ National Geographic
"We've noticed that the inclusion of people has become a strong element of storytelling across the continent," says Partosam-Kok. "You're not seeing the standard model of pure blue-chip wildlife." "There is a spiritual connection to all the stories," says Kok. "We are spiritually tied to the land as Africans."
Instead of giving up after their bankruptcy, the couple responded to this need for African wildlife filmmaking and co-founded Nature, Environment, and Wildlife Filmmakers (NEWF). This community offers African filmmakers and storytellers professional development, capacity building, mentorship, and networking opportunities.
Starting as an annual congress, NEWF provided small grants for film pitches. "We were a congress because if we were a film festival, we would have only shown international films, which would have defeated the purpose of changing the storyteller," says Parsotam-Kok.
They noticed more and more gaps in the industry that required capacity enhancement in diving, cinematography, music composition, and science communication. By applying for funding from local film bodies, they organized labs that specifically addressed those needs.
After years of work, they got the National Geographic Society on board, "supercharging NEWF," to break down the barriers to entry for African filmmakers. "The world used so much of Africa's nature and wildlife, but we were not on those crews. If we were lucky, we were the drivers or the fixer," says Kok.
They pitched theAfrica Refocused program, targeting one of the five African regions yearly to bring filmmakers, conservationists, and scientists into the NEWF labs. In three years, NEWF grew into a community of over 320 fellows from 32 African countries.
Photo by Anthony Ochieng Onyango/ National Geographic
"It's a privilege for us to be exposed to the fellows' work and to play a part in their journeys somehow. What we've learned is that Africa is a continent, not a country." - Noel Kok
In 2025, the focus is on North Africa. "There's this idea that North Africa belongs to the Middle East and does not see itself as Africa. From our interactions, it's far from the truth," says Kok.
"After the friendships, the second best thing about NEWF is that North African filmmakers feel included in their opportunities," says Tunisian scientist and filmmaker Inès Arsi tells OkayAfrica. "Many grants for Africans don't include us. As storytellers, it's sad to be pushed away from the African industry."
Arsi's first NEWF lab was an all-female cinematography lab. "Working with other African women was like heaven for me," she says. "It's very rare for us as female filmmakers to touch the camera without being told that you can break it, it's too expensive to be touched, etc."
Photo by Nature, Environment and Wildlife Filmmakers
"I want to transform the Sahara from a political to a common wildlife ground. As North Africans, we usually come together for football, but not for serious matters." - Inés Arsi
Egyptian scientist and wildlife cinematographer Shorouk Elkobrosi joined the same lab. "The tagline 'if you want to change the story, change the storyteller' hit me in the gut. This field is heavy, sweaty, with unpredictable hours, yet these women are setting up long lenses and filming rhinos," she tells OkayAfrica. "It felt like being part of the Avengers."
Having worked in London, Elkobrosi has long been aware of how stories lose their Africanness and authenticity when a non-African gets the final cut. "For me, Africa Refocused is about authorship and taking the camera back," she says.
Photo by Jahawi Bertolli/National Geographic
"When we document change, we're also driving it." - Shorouk Elkobrosi
Tunisian scientist and filmmaker Nada Abdelkader joined NEWF to expand the stories Africans tell each other. "We don't only have the savannah and the tropical forest," she says. "The North African desert and archipelagos are also Africa."
Rehab Eldalil, an Egyptian photographer and NEWF mentor, helps African photographers tell stories of their communities. "It's not a [strictly] technical program," she tells OkayAfrica. "The purpose is to strengthen their narrative and understand the spirit of their visual language."
On the surface, the fellows explore different topics, such as deforestation, migration, or space, but Eldalil notices that, at their core, they all defy visual tropes that have been put on African landscapes and communities. "We want to break the white gaze on our insider perspective," she says. "There's a love-hate relationship with wildlife that stems from years of colonization. A local fellow can give context of that contradicting relationship and humanized perspectives of our coexistence."
Photo by Nature, Environment and Wildlife Filmmakers
"The NEWF community is similar to our family structures, which is very comforting and gives a huge boost of morale." - Rehab Eldalil
Climate change is a central theme in the North African stories, from Bedouins who are losing their water resources in Tunisia's vanishing ecosystems to the Mediterranean as Europe's environmental, postcolonial cemetery, or a fishing village that will be demolished in Egypt.
Working closely with the sea, Elkobrosi is exploring NEWF's diving lab, which the co-founders launched upon realizing there was no African underwater filmmaker in 2018. "Looking for an indigenous filmmaker for one of our panels, we came across hundreds and hundreds of marine biologists at master's level, who could not swim, let alone dive," says Kok. "We needed to provide certification for African storytellers, filmmakers, and conservationists so that we can start telling stories of our oceans and reclaim that natural heritage."
For those who are not based in Egypt, like Elkobrosi, it is cheaper to be flown to South Africa by NEWF than to get certified in their own country. "The markets are all geared towards international tourists, not local people," says Kok.
Photo by Nature, Environment and Wildlife Filmmakers
"I switched from climate science communication and journalism to wildlife cinematography because I wanted to stop telling people that the world was burning and show them what's worth saving." - Shorouk Elkobrosi
Despite these challenges, everyone at NEWF is optimistic about the impact they can have in their respective regions and as a continent. "At the end of the day, saying that you're African erases all other differences," says Arsi.
"Our lands are connected, our birds migrate freely across our borders, and our ecosystems share water. We're already collaborating without our knowing," agrees Elkobrosi. "When NEWF said, 'we see you, and you matter, that was a huge impact. It paves the way for global south-to-south collaboration, starting on our continent."