By Dick Houston and Conrad Froehlich

Martin and Osa Johnson. The FIRST motion picture explorers in history. In this photo, Martin and Osa film the Samburu warriors in northern Kenya, 1920s.

Martin and Osa Johnson were a swashbuckling husband-and-wife filmmaker team who “invented” the first non-hunting wildlife movie documentaries in history — long before Animal Planet.

PART ONE:

In a previous Elefence Blog post, we presented a video about Martin and Osa Johnson called “Wings Over Tanzania.”

One of the most unique museums in the world preserves the lost wildlife and tribal worlds of the Johnsons: the MARTIN AND OSA JOHNSON SAFARI MUSEUM.

The Museum is based in Chanute, Kansas — OSA’s hometown.

The Museum’s Director, Conrad Froehlich, is an Honorary Trustee of Elefence International.

Note: parts two, three, and four will follow in subsequent posts.

The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum is the epicenter of the motion picture history of pioneering African safaris, Borneo, and South Sea Island adventures in the early 1900s.

In the 1920s and 30s, Martin and Osa Johnson were household names as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Amelia Earhart.

The Johnsons pioneered flights over Africa — some 60,000 miles over the Dark Continent of unexplored jungles. They used two Sikorsky amphibious planes, necessary to land on rivers and lakes since there were still few wilderness airstrips in Africa in the early 1930s.

They barely survived some harrowing near-death-defying experiences in flight. At that time, there was no radar, no airfield radio communication in remote Africa locales — flying blindly into horrific rain storms with ZERO visibility. One can only imagine the terror — and the guts it took to do that. As a result, they preserved aerial images of once pristine landscapes that no longer exist.

No wonder their motion pictures were always box office hits on Broadway — and at hometown theaters across America and around the world. The Johnsons also pioneered the first all-talking sound motion pictures in Africa.

Please stay tuned for Parts two, three, and four in succeeding posts. We’ll tell the fascinating story of the Johnsons in a little more detail. And how their historic photographic record is preserved — including their one-of-a-kind original artifacts of exotic travels — at the award-winning Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum.

And learn how the facility is a living museum today for research — and creates awareness for preservation of endangered elephants and Africa’s shrinking wild places.