The woman who broke up a Congo tribal fight
Livia Simoka, the documentary-maker at the centre of a violent jungle clash, tells Guy Kelly about stepping out from behind the camera – and into danger
So, I ask Livia Simoka, is there anything you’re scared of? She falls silent, her eyes drifting across the rooftop of the private members’ club in east London, where we have met. It’s mid-afternoon, but heaving: clearly she doesn’t mind hipster freelancers. I also know – having watched all three episodes of her documentary series Extreme Tribe: The Last Pygmies, the last of which airs on Channel 4 next week – that she’s fine with spiders, rats, monkeys, crocodiles, awkward conversations, camping in the jungle for months on end, and having parasitic worms lay eggs in her toes.
“Um…” More silence. Heights? Ghosts? Michael Gove? There must be
something. “I don’t think so. I’m sure the health and safety officers would rather I was more cautious, but no, nothing really,” she shrugs.
Viewers of Simoka’s series, which saw her living with the Mbendjele tribe in the northern jungles of the Republic of Congo for five months, will know all about her fearlessness. In Monday’s episode, Simoka was seen stepping in when a violent dispute emerged between two men of different tribes – one, Mondonga, from the Mbendjele, the other, named Prince, from the nearby, more powerful Bantu people.
Prince dragged Mondonga into the jungle and punched him in the face, leaving the man in fear for his life. The pair were briefly split up, before Prince set off for more. At that point, Simoka stopped him in his tracks and told him to “f------ chill out for a minute”. Prince heeded her advice; the situation defused.
“I felt quite comfortable with them, and I knew – well, I hoped – they wouldn’t turn on me,” she says. Simoka, who’s unshakably laidback in person, was praised by viewers for her bravery. Next week, they will see her in the middle of an even hairier scrap, this time involving somebody being thrown on to a fire. In that case, she stayed out of it, but did stop children from running into the mêlée.
“I never once felt in danger myself out there, but it’s really hard – you’re there as a filmmaker observing what’s going on, but you’re a human being, too, so it’s hard not to get involved.” The closest she came to crossing the line, she says, was when the representative of a construction company arrived in the jungle to consult on a road it intends to build through tribal territory. “I took him to task, but by that point the people [in the tribe] were my mates, so if I felt like they were being taken advantage of, it made me feel uncomfortable.”
Simoka, 37, is such an engaging presence on screen that it’s difficult to believe Extreme Tribe marks the first time she’s fronted her own show, after years behind the camera. She made the groundbreaking immersive series The Tribe (in which a Hamar family in Ethiopia were filmed using tiny hidden cameras) for Channel 4 in 2015, and has worked on dozens of other adventure programmes, including directing Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild.
“Presenting wasn’t something I’d really thought about, but one of the bugbears I’ve had is that the whole anthropology and adventure genre is male-dominated,” she says. “They’re all white, middle-aged, middleclass ex-army guys. It seemed like there was a certain breed that have this checklist of what you need to have to be a presenter. And over the years I’d pitched a few women fronting things, but they hadn’t worked out.”
One of those white, middle-aged, middle-class ex-army guys is Bruce Parry, famed for his BBC series Tribe. He’s Simoka’s hero, so when a Channel 4 executive asked if she’d ever consider appearing on the other side of the camera, she thought: “I want to re-do that from a female point of view, because I feel we’ve missed a trick over the years. It’s always the macho hunting stuff and male initiations, but they never show the emotional side of it – the family feuds, the heartache, the loss, the love.”
At every stage, Simoka seemed to choose the toughest option. She didn’t need to embed herself in the village for five months (split into a few trips, the longest lasting eight weeks), but did. She didn’t need to stay in a family’s home away from the eight-strong crew, but wanted to. Nor did she need to eat whatever the tribe were having – at home she’s a healthy vegetarian – but, of course, she did.
It’s very noble, but you could have had a rucksack full of Monster Munch and a secret shower, I tell her.
“What, like, do a Bear Grylls?” she laughs of the explorer who has previously admitted to staying in a hotel once the cameras stopped. “I was always going to do it properly, and I’m pretty proud of that. It would have been easy to cut corners, but all I had was a toothbrush, toothpaste, face wipes and sunscreen.”
The result is a fascinating look at Mbendjele life. Rarely do we see others exploring the particular tensions in a marriage, having heart-to-hearts with mothers who’ve lost children, or telling men to keep it in their trousers. “I was amazed at how similar we all are in those emotional moments,” she said.
During every trip, Simoka shut herself off from friends and family, aside from using a satellite phone to call her 88-year-old grandmother in a nursing home in Leeds twice a week, “just to let her know I’m alive”.
The daughter of a nurse and a business owner, Simoka was born in Switzerland, “with a bit of Hungarian, Austrian and German in there”, and enjoyed an outdoorsy upbringing of hiking and skiing until she moved to the UK aged 12, when her parents split up and her mother married a British man. She and her brother went to school in Cheshire (the accent’s very much still there), before she moved to London for a media degree, specialising in documentaries. Now, after a 15-year apprenticeship, she finds herself the fresh new face among a very staid, homogenous pack.
It’s a type of filmmaking fraught with another sort of danger, as Stacey Dooley discovered when she posted a photo on Instagram showing her holding a baby in Uganda, during a Comic Relief-organised trip. She was accused of reinforcing the stereotype of the “white saviour”.
“You want to do shows like ours as ethically as possible, but are always going to have an effect as an outsider, so questions like ‘how do we pay people?’ have to be asked,” says Simoka. “If you pay nothing, you exploit them; too much upsets the balance in the village.” In the end, she asked what the tribe wanted, so brought suitcases full of second-hand clothes donated by her friends, footballs and fishing nets.
Those pals at home (she lives with a friend, nicknamed “the wife”, near the River Thames) aren’t generally the types to go trekking in the Congo, and Simoka’s Instagram looks like that of any other millennial – holidays in Ibiza, gym classes, nights out. Can she readjust easily?
“Food waste is the thing I hate most now, and that got worse after the jungle,” she admits. “It drives me insane. I go out for dinner and want to ask other tables why they aren’t eating it all or taking it home…”
Before we leave, I notice a nasty scratch on her arm. Stray machete?
“Ah, I just did it on a night out” she laughs. “My mates were like, ‘Oh, you can survive the Congo, but you can’t get around the urban jungle, eh?’”
‘I want to show the emotional side – the family feuds, the loss, the love’