Safari guests watching the landscape from a game-drive vehicle at sunset

“Safari has never been a career for me, it’s the life I’ve always known.”

Origins

African born,
bred and based

My father, Hennie, moved to the Okavango Delta from South Africa in 1984 as one of Botswana's first photographic guides. He went on to build the first Wilderness Safaris camp, Xigera, in 1986.

My mother, Angie, arrived from Zimbabwe in 1987 as a volunteer cook on Wilderness Safaris' mobile safaris. They met in Maun that same year, and that's where our family's story began. In 1998, they won the Xigera concession, rebuilt the camp and together made it one of the Okavango's flagship lodges.

That is the world I was raised in.

Jake with his family in the water — Xigera, Okavango Delta, Botswana 2002

The Story

Why I started Actually Africa

My parents were passionate travellers. Before I went to boarding school in South Africa, I'd already been on road trips through Botswana, Namibia, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, many times over, seeing the best each place had to offer. Like most kids, I took it for granted.

Jake as a baby with his father in the bush

A childhood afternoon sleeping outside a safari tent

Boarding school never took me away from home. My parents still live in Maun, in the house I grew up in. In the school holidays I started bringing friends back with me to camp in the Okavango, and we still go as often as we can. Watching those trips fundamentally change them showed me how special my childhood, and the place I grew up, really were.

Jake as a child in a mokoro with his father in the Okavango

One moment stayed with me. We were driving the eleven hours from Maun back to Pretoria, where I was at university. Four or five hours into the Kalahari, nobody had said a word. My friend had been staring out of the window the whole way. Then he said:

“Man, South Africa can't even be classified as Africa after seeing this.”

Of course it can. But I knew exactly what he meant, and that's where the name Actually Africa comes from: the most authentic, genuine parts of this continent.

I went on to study informatics and information systems at the University of Pretoria, and became a software developer. I never felt passionate about it. The wilderness kept drawing me back, so in 2024 I started Actually Africa: to share these places with people seeing them for the first time, and with those who already love them and keep coming back.