said "It's kind of a combination of really nice, observational designs and then just [...] things that are deliberately wrong. To anger people who care about things being real." Mark Kirkland, who had visited Africa before, served as the director for "Simpson Safari". When he was sixteen years old, Kirkland spent six weeks in Kenya with a film crew that was making a documentary film called A Visit to a Chief's Son. When he first read the script, he found that the episode was "all over the place" geographically. "It would be like in the United States, saying: 'I walked out of Grand Central Station and then I turned left and was standing on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.' The locations are just all over the place" he said in the episode's DVD commentary. Still, Kirkland strove to make the episode look as realistic as possible by drawing influence from his experience in Kenya. For example, the steering column on Kitenge's Land Rover is placed on the right side of the car. At one point in the episode, the Simpsons visit the Maasai people, a Nilotic ethnic group of semi-nomadic people located in Kenya and northern Tanzania. The way that some of the Maasai people in the episode are dancing is also true to a traditional dance performed by Maasai people in real life, and although the drinking of cow blood is faithful to the Maasai people's culture, the use of lip plates and neck rings are not. "That was kind of fun for me to try to make this stuff [...] as crazy as the story is, [to] make it realistic", Kirkland commented on directing the episode. In a scene in the episode, the Simpsons are floating down a river on a shield. At one point, the family is seen by two Africans, who speak in Kiswahili. Additionally, the song that Kitenge sings when driving the Simpsons ("Wé-Wé" by Angélique Kidjo) was a popular song in Africa. In order to make it sound accurate, Hank Azaria, who portrays Kitenge in the episode, was taught to sing the song phonetically by a professor in Swahili in the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Joan Bushwell, the "Jane Goodall-type" character in the episode, was portrayed by American voice actress Tress MacNeille, who also voices Lindsey Naegle among other characters in the series. All animals' noises (except for Santa's Little