Olimba Camp, the ‘home’ of BBC’s Kingdom

If you are interested in African safari travel, you would undoubtedly have come across BBC’s Kingdom series that has recently hit the screens at the end of 2025, on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.

A lot of people are using this as marketing leverage, but no safari operator is able to boast the strength of relevance and involvement in the production that Remote Africa Safaris can.

BBC Earth’s blurb reads, “in the heart of Zambia, leopards, hyenas, wild dogs and lions compete to claim a home, in a paradise known as Nsefu sector. A story of power and survival filmed across 5 years in a single spectacular location, where the fates of 4 rival families are inextricably linked. As the dramatic rise of wild dog queen Storm sends ripples of chaos through the Kingdom, the jostle for dominance between Rita’s lion pride and Tenta’s hyena clan contrasts with their gentleness as mothers; while solitary leopard Olimba attempts to bring up her cubs in the midst of the turmoil. Who can rule this precious Kingdom?”

In BBC’s landmark production, something the Natural History Unit has dubbed their “most ambitious production”, film crews followed four character families over a series of five years. Every one of our guides at Remote Africa Safaris played a role in the field at some point, working with the production teams, driving vehicles, managing rainy season shoots or helping call in locations of characters who hadn’t been seen for days at a time.

Remote Africa Safaris, in partnership with film fixing company Reel Nature, constructed a custom camp for the exclusive use of the BBC Kingdom film crews. This camp features in their online media releases BBC One - Kingdom - A camp full of creatures and BBC One - Kingdom - Extremes of South Luangwa. Being in a prime wildlife area, we can proudly say that we hosted more nights than any other operator.

Kingdom - Everything you need to know about the new wildlife series narrated by Sir David Attenborough covers the series and its’ background in good detail. They also talk about the low-impact camp that we put together for them. “The team’s base camp ran on power generated entirely by solar panels, including a solar water pump. It included two repurposed shipping containers used as an office and a kit storage space, one of which had solar powered air conditioning to keep the equipment cool in 40+ degree dry-season heat!

Over the course of five years during filming, the crew had various close encounters with the local wildlife. Some of these included a bathroom being shared with an elephant, a black-necked spitting cobra being removed from a tent and the crew discovering a crocodile sunbathing on one of their tent porches. “One producer was even chased by a baboon brandishing a toilet brush! (No crew or animals were harmed!).”

In an article on BBC One - Kingdom - Making Kingdom, series producer Felicity Lanchester discusses how the BBC NHU chose this kingdom. “Believe me, it was very tempting to do an around Africa recce, but the very specific circumstances we needed clearly pointed to one place - Nsefu sector, and once we’d been there, there was no need to keep looking.”

Our teams also went all out and managed two wet season film shoots from Tafika Camp (link to webpage). The first was a targeted wet season helicopter shoot on Storm and her wild dog pack: BBC One - Kingdom - Wet and wild (dogs). The second was a first-of-its-kind month-long boat-based film shoot which can be seen here: Behind the Scenes: Challenges of Wildlife Filming Across Dry and Wet Seasons | Kingdom | BBC Earth.

The series is a result of impressive and tireless effort from the BBC NHU crews, DNPW, ZCP, CSL and Reel Nature. It was great privilege for Remote Africa Safaris to be such a major part of this production behind the scenes and in the field.

Now that the crews have come and gone, and the series is out there – what does it all mean? It means that at Remote Africa Safaris, we are confident that our guides and properties can give travellers a safari with the closest link to Kingdom. Our guides have known the iconic leopardess characters, Olimba and Mutima, since they were born. Storms’ wild dog pack, Tenta’s hyena clan and Rita’s lion prides all regularly crossed paths with our guests, and even all visited our camps at various points throughout the series filming.

What has happened to the camp that we constructed for the BBC Kingdom Team? We have taken down the camp that hosted these crews and are busy constructing a unique 8-bed tourism camp, called Olimba Camp. This camp sits on the Northern border of the Nsefu sector, on Remote Africa Safaris’ private land which is shared with Tafika Camp – our flagship camp and our home. We look forward to sharing this beautiful part of Zambia with safari-goers in the coming season (1 May – 10 Nov).