Walking With Rhinos in Zimbabwe: ‘Everyone Benefits'

New York Times

31-01-2025

Daybreak filtered through spindly stands of Terminalia trees, and the windshield glowed. It was September in northwest Zimbabwe, and the morning carried the lingering chill of an African winter. I rode at the head of a convoy that had been rumbling through the night. Campfires flickered eerily from the forest, where truckers ferrying copper out of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo had stopped to rest.
A towering man with slate-colored eyes yawned at the wheel. Mark Butcher, a Zimbabwean in his 60s, had led the convoy for more than 14 hours from the grassy Lowveld of southeast Zimbabwe toward the fringes of Hwange National Park in the northwest.
Hwange is a wildlife lover's dream, and Mr. Butcher — who was once a ranger there, and now manages Imvelo, a small safari company that helps villages near the park benefit from tourism and conservation — knows it well. Leopards, lions, Cape buffalo and more than 50,000 elephants are among the animals that roam the 5,660-square-mile expanse. But there is one animal among the Big Five that has long been absent: the rhinoceros.
Mr. Butcher was in the process of changing that.
Tucked in the middle of the convoy was a six-wheel-drive truck carrying two wild, drugged white rhinoceroses that had been donated from a private reserve 280 miles south of Harare, Zimbabwe's capital. There, a philanthropic American hedge fund manager has spent more than 25 years creating one of the world's most successful rhino repopulation programs, expanding the herd to several hundred from a few dozen.
For decades, only a few of these extraordinary mammals could be found in the country at all. By 2002, Africa's rhinos had been poached to the brink of extinction for their horns and the myth that they hold curative powers.
Now, thanks to Mr. Butcher, countless locals, and a team of ecologists, biologists and veterinarians, these two white rhinos were on their way to a new home in their historical habitat on the opposite end of the country.
The rhinos would not live in Hwange proper, but on adjacent community-owned land, where locals had been trained and hired to care for them. By encouraging visitors to venture out of the park to see the rhinos — and giving locals a stake in the animals' well-being — the project is supposed to bring jobs, services and life-changing benefits to villages long relegated to the economic periphery.
I spent a week checking out this ambitious community tourism project that Mr. Butcher has worked on for more than a decade. The fate of that project, the Community Rhino Conservation Initiative, hinged on the two drugged rhinos trundling with us through the night.
A new home
The full brunt of the sun filled the truck as our convoy approached Mlevu, a community at the edge of the park. Ahead of us, clusters of tidy mud huts sprouted from neatly raked yards of sand. Scores of schoolchildren had gathered alongside the dirt road, each one wearing a vivid blue uniform and waving a white flag that read 'Welcome Rhinos!'
Here, sandwiched between Hwange and this village of about 80 families, the newly created, 2,500-acre Mlevu Rhino Sanctuary would be the rhinos' home. To ease their transition, the animals would be released into an enclosed area within the sanctuary where they would spend several months, watched over by armed guards. If all went well, within a year, the rhinos would be fully acclimated to their surroundings and, thanks to the guards' constant presence, used to humans. Then visitors would be able to enter the sanctuary for a fee and walk with the rhinos as they grazed.
Mr. Butcher zipped away from the other vehicles in the convoy, parked under a thorn tree, and climbed out of the truck. 'Uyathanda umkhombo?' he bellowed to the students in Ndebele, a Bantu language. 'Do you like rhinos?' The children burst with glee.
The convoy rumbled ahead of us toward the sanctuary, giving everyone a glimpse of the rhino crates. The kids went silent, as they'd been taught, so as not to disturb the animals.
A short while later, Mr. Butcher and I headed to the Mlevu sanctuary, where the rhinos' cages were being carefully unloaded. By late morning, village dignitaries and travelers on safari had made their way to the holding pen, or 'boma.' We all watched in amazement as the rhinos cautiously emerged from their cages.
Among the observers was Vusa Ncube, a guide who grew up on the fringes of the park. He was clearly moved. 'You can talk about cheetahs, you can talk about lions but, man, rhinos are special,' he said.
'We are very happy you are here.'
That night I settled into my tent at Bomani, one of Imvelo's four properties in the area. This one had canvas-wall tents built next to a watering hole frequented by hippos and elephants. I curled up in my bed and fell asleep to distant, unknown creatures calling and screaming in the dark.
The next day, I hopped into Mr. Butcher's truck with other Bomani guests. We were headed to the village of Ngamo, another community that abuts the park. It was only about eight miles away, but felt like a world apart from Mlevu. It was in Ngamo that the community rhino initiative began and where the nascent tourism endeavor now flourishes.
Our Land Cruiser bounced down ruts of Kalahari sand and brittle grass. Mr. Butcher honked and students came running out of the woodlands.
'Gada, gada, gada!' Mr. Butcher shouted. 'Jump in!' Kids sprinted to the truck and climbed into the back. Within moments they were singing call-and-response songs about love and cowardice.
'You're lazy! You're lazy!' they shouted through peals of laughter to schoolmates too far away to hitch a ride. 'Driver, shift gears!' they said, cackling. 'Go faster!'
Thatched-roof homes with mud walls were scattered around the scrublands. We stopped outside Ngamo primary school, a yellow concrete building with a red metal roof. In the courtyard, the kids sang a song about their 'beautiful school' and recited the Lord's Prayer.
The headmaster, Progress Sibanda, led me to a classroom painted in bright, cheery colors, with desks, chalkboards and shelves of textbooks from Oxford University Press. Mr. Ncube, the guide, had attended this school only a few years ago, when it had four walls but no roof.
'We are very happy you are here,' Mr. Sibanda said to our group.
In 2022, Mr. Butcher teamed up with Ngamo's leaders for a pilot project that introduced a different pair of white rhinos into a sanctuary that was much smaller than Mlevu's: the 420-acre Ngamo Rhino Sanctuary. The goal was to prove that villagers could protect the animals and engage with travelers.
A few years later, the project has accomplished both, with more than 2,500 foreign visitors arriving in total, each of whom paid up to $180 to see and hike with the rhinos. So far, those fees have pumped about $100,000 into a community fund, an enormous amount for a village that once relied only on subsistence farming and had virtually no money in circulation.
Now Ngamo has a medical clinic serving 90 homesteads. An outdoor market sells local handicrafts: tapestries, baskets and ornaments carved from nuts with rhinos etched on their sides. The school now has a roof, and the Ngamo Lions youth soccer club plays on a field nearby. Mlevu, on the other hand, has none of this — other than a school in deep need of repairs. It may soon, though, thanks to the new rhinos.
'Everyone wants to see the Big Five and with the rhinos, that creates the opportunity for them to venture into the villages,' Mazayi Moyo, a headman and carpenter in Ngamo, told me as we talked in his kitchen. His wife, Siphiwe, sat next to him below earthen shelves holding neat rows of yellow plates and blue cups. 'Everyone benefits,' Mr. Moyo said.
Running with the Cobras
Over the next few days, I did some traditional safari activities from my base near Bomani, and a few untraditional ones, too.
Two Midwesterners on a tour through southern Africa invited me to join them on their game-viewing drive in and around Hwange, where we paused to watch kaleidoscopic birds like lilac-breasted rollers and swallow-tailed bee-eaters flitter among the thorn trees. A 'journey' of giraffes ambled off into the distance. A lioness emerged from a bluebush with two fuzzy cubs near the tracks for the Elephant Express, an open-air train, which rumbled past on one of the few working sections of the unfinished 19th-century Cape-to-Cairo railway. Elsewhere in the park, you can pedal a mountain bike along trails to search for lions (with armed guards), and there are bunkers at watering holes for spying on thirsty fauna.
Toward the end of my stay, I spent a few hours with Daniel Terblanche, a soldier who now lives near Hwange and trains and manages a community wildlife protection unit, the Cobras, staffed with local young men who spend 24 hours a day, seven days a week, guarding the rhinos with automatic rifles from only a few feet away. 'The idea is guard them so heavily that it becomes a suicide mission for any poacher,' Mr. Terblanche said.
Visiting with the Cobras is enlightening. You can go on morning runs with them, and tour the headquarters to see how the operation works. You can even go on exercises with the Cobras and bound through the bush carrying a small-caliber assault rifle, firing at paper targets hidden among the trees. I was horrible at it, but it drove home a point.
'The danger these guys face is very real,' Mr. Terblanche said. Many of the Cobras were once poachers themselves, he added.
Walking with the rhinos
That afternoon, I finally got my chance to walk with the rhinos in Ngamo. (The two males brought to Mlevu were adjusting well, but it would be months before they would be habituated to humans.) Along with some guests from Bomani, I climbed into Mr. Butcher's rig for the drive to the Ngamo sanctuary. There, the two pilot project rhinos, Thuza and Kusasa, were sleeping by the gate. When we arrived, they slowly got up and ambled off into the plains. I watched them spar, like teenage boys jockeying for pizza, before they started hoovering up the grass. Two Cobras followed close behind.
For 20 minutes I walked with Thuza, then Kusasa. At times, they were no more than 20 feet away, close enough to see their leathery skin flicker under the flies and to hear their snorts. I've had close encounters with grizzly bears and gray whales, magical yet terrifying experiences both, but even those could not compare.
There are communities all along Hwange now clamoring for rhinos, each hoping to jump-start its own tourism offerings. Mr. Butcher and local leaders have already set in motion plans for at least two more sanctuaries to open over the next four years. Mr. Butcher hopes that one day this corner of Zimbabwe could have 1,000 rhinos roaming free as a sustainable, breeding population.
'That's the holy grail,' he said.
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