Saba Douglas-Hamilton

For other uses, see Saba (disambiguation).
Saba Douglas-Hamilton
Saba among Samburu elephants
Douglas-Hamilton among Samburu elephants
Born Kenya
Nationality Kenyan
Alma mater University of St Andrews
Occupation Broadcaster / Naturalist
Spouse(s) Frank Pope
Children Selkie, Luna, Mayian

Saba Iassa Douglas-Hamilton is a Kenyan wildlife conservationist and television presenter. She has worked for a variety of conservation charities, and has appeared in wildlife documentaries produced by the BBC and other broadcasters. She is currently a director of Elephant Watch Camp in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve [1]

Early life

Born in Nairobi Hospital, Nairobi, Kenya, she is the daughter of zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton and Oria Douglas-Hamilton née Rocco. Saba means "seven" in Swahili. She was named by Maasai women because she was born on 7 June at 7 o'clock in the evening, and was also the 7th grandchild. Her first language was Swahili and she grew up playing with the local Kenyan children. Her father came to Africa as a young man to study and conserve elephant populations. Her white African ancestry comes from her mother who is the daughter of Italians who settled in Kenya in the 1920s. Her mother still farms at Lake Naivasha in the Great Rift Valley.[2]

She is a great-granddaughter of Alfred Douglas-Hamilton, the 13th Duke of Hamilton. Her sister Mara Moon Douglas-Hamilton, known as "Dudu" (which means 'insect'), is a film producer.

Education

Douglas-Hamilton did not start school in Kenya until she was seven, then went to Britain to an all-girls boarding school for three years which she later described as 'like a prison'. She went on to attend the United World College of the Atlantic in South Wales to study for the International Baccalaureate. She gained a place at St Andrews University in Scotland and was awarded a master's degree in Social Anthropology with a thesis on 'Concepts of Love and Sexuality amongst the Bajuni People of Kiwaiyu Island, Kenya'.

Snake bite

When she was 18, Douglas-Hamilton was on a camel safari when she was bitten on her leg by a venomous snake. Though sometimes misreported as an asp, this was identified as a carpet viper. Friends made a pressure bandage and gave her electric shocks to denature the enzymes in the poison until the flying doctors arrived 18 hours later.[3]

Marriage and Children

On 4 February 2006, Douglas-Hamilton married conservationist and journalist Frank Pope in a traditional Kenyan ceremony.[4] They live in a rustic house outside Nairobi that borders the famous Rothschild's Giraffe Sanctuary. In March 2009, their first daughter Selkie was born. She is named after the selkies of Scottish legends of the Orkney and Shetland islands which are half seal and half human and said to be able to change into beautiful women. The baby was born outdoors in a birthing pool in a friend's garden in Cape Town, South Africa.[2]

On 2 June 2011 Douglas-Hamilton gave birth naturally to twin daughters - Luna Giselle and Mayian Soleil - in hospital in Cape Town.

Charity work

When she returned to Africa from her studies in the UK she worked for the Save the Rhino Trust in Namibia, mentored by conservationist Blythe Loutit.[5] Saba has served as a trustee of Save the Elephants, a charity founded by her father. Based in Samburu National Reserve in the Great Rift Valley, Kenya, Save the Elephants carries out detailed long-term monitoring of the local elephant population, and deploys sophisticated elephant tracking techniques there and across the continent [8]. Through the charity she has worked to support, protect and increase awareness of issues which threaten to erode African elephant populations and their habitats.[6]

In 2008 Douglas-Hamilton supported Merlin (Medical Emergency Relief International), the UK medical aid agency, to raise money for emergency health services following post-election violence when some 500 people were killed and more than 300,000 Kenyans were left without homes or clean water.[7]

Furthermore, Douglas-Hamilton is the chair of the International Selection Committee of the Future For Nature Foundation, a foundation that supports young, talented and ambitious conservationists committed to protecting species of wild animals and plants.[8]

Television career

Since 2000, Douglas-Hamilton has appeared in wildlife documentaries produced by the BBC and others. Many of these have been set in Africa and have featured elephants – an animal with which she became very familiar during her childhood. Since 2002, she has co-presented the Big Cat Diary series with Jonathan Scott and Simon King. She has also appeared in wildlife programmes set in other countries and regions, such as India, Lapland and in the Arctic, where she filmed polar bears. Since 2004, Douglas-Hamilton has presented short pieces on holiday destinations in the BBC Holiday series. In 2006, she appeared alongside Nigel Marven in an episode of Prehistoric Park in which she travelled back 10,000 years to study sabre-toothed cats. She produced and narrated a documentary, Heart of a Lioness, about a wild lioness called Kamunyak, "the blessed one," which acted as a maternal guardian for the lion's natural prey: an antelope. In 2008 she produced and presented "Rhino Nights" for Animal Planet, using night-time cinematography to capture black rhino behaviour. In March 2008 she presented a three part BBC documentary, Unknown Africa,[9] on the state of wildlife in Comoros, Central African Republic and Angola. In 2009 Douglas-Hamilton presented a three part BBC documentary series, The Secret Life of Elephants, with her father Iain. It explored the lives of elephants in Kenya's Samburu reserve and the work of the 'Save the Elephants' research team.[10][11] In 2014 the BBC Natural History Unit filmed a 10-part series, This Wild Life, (with 2 extra episodes for international markets) on Douglas-Hamilton’s work – and family life - at Elephant Watch Camp in Samburu. This was first broadcast in the UK in September 2015.

Nissan advertisements

Douglas-Hamilton presented the Nissan Adventure advertisements shown in 2005 and 2006, where she drove a Nissan x-Trail and blew up a mine in Africa. As an avowed environmentalist, her decision to be involved in the promotion of high carbon-emitting vehicles provoked criticism, and she is now on record as saying that she would not do it again.

References

External links

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