Wildlife reserves in Africa that offer safaris to incoming visitors are not mere tourism concessions. They are, without exception in my experience, ultimately about conservation and about saving the great charismatic wildlife of Africa from extinction.
The Eastern Cape province in South Africa used to be one of the richest wildlife zones in Africa in terms of diversity, according to Joe Cloete, CEO of Shamwari Private Game Reserve in Eastern Cape, South Africa.
“Then man arrived in 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s,” he said. “There was agricultural expansion and, sadly, the result was that a lot of wildlife destroyed.”
One hundred and fifty years ago, farmers drove off the prime predators in order to use the land for farming and logging. Lions and leopards, not to mention elephants and rhinos, created problems for raising livestock. So, the settlers cleared the indigenous vegetation that was the food supply of the antelope and shot the predators.
Birth of a Vision
Sometime in the 1980s, Adrian Gardner, a South African entrepreneur in the swimming pool and crane businesses, discovered a book from 300 years ago called Occurrences of Mammals the Eastern Cape by C.J. Skeed. He was amazed to discover that the lush vegetation of the Eastern Cape had been able to sustain even greater diversity of wildlife than the legendary savanna of Kenya. Gardiner began to nurse a vision to bring back the diversity of wildlife to at least some of the Eastern Cape. At that time, the land was barren.
He bought up 14 individual farms and consolidated them into one game reserve, turning some of the individual manor homes into guest lodges. The reserve is now 35,000 hectares, about 135 square miles in area. He set out to restore the indigenous vegetation to the area and then to bring back the wildlife. That was the birth of Shamwari.
Gardiner met Joe Cloete in the early 1990s and shared his vision with him. Cloete had a degree in economics and marketing, and worked for a big beverage company in South Africa, selling beer. Cloete appreciated Gardiner’s vision and accepted his invitation to come on board.
Cloete became the reserve’s first guide. Then he took on the job of marketing the lodges around the world. Today, he is still head of the operation.
“Our mission over the last 30 years has been to bring back all the different animal species that occurred here 30 years ago,” he said. “We’ve largely accomplished that.
“If we can increase our land size, this can bring back one or two more species, like the spotted hyena and the wild dog, used to be called the Cape hunting dog because they used to run around freely here in the olden days.”
A Brave New World
Now human civilization has reached a point where the land may be more valuable for conservation than for farming. Priorities have changed. The world is in danger of losing some of the world’s most spectacular and precious wildlife. Shamwari is a giant reserve, a conservation project driven financially by income from tourism.
As a tourism product, a safari at Shamwari is a luxury vacation with high-end accommodations and service and not a low price point, around $1,100 per day last I checked. But the value for money is incomparable. It’s hard to put a price on such a rare experience.
“Shamwari is a luxury game reserve,” said Cloete. “We operate in that sector of the market. It’s primarily geared to luxury travel, family travel, and romantic holidays. We have an explorer camp where you can do walking tours, under the protection and guidance of experienced rangers.”
As a tourism product, it’s extraordinary, near the top of the list of exotic vacations delivering huge bragging rights. Guests can also have the pleasure of knowing they are contributing directly to efforts to save the endangered species from becoming extinct.
“It’s a massive conservation project, a sustainable project,” said Cloete. “The funds that we generate here go straight back into the project.
“It’s a holistic approach to conservation that we apply at Shamwari. It’s not just about building fancy lodges and having people enjoy the lodges and going out and see the wildlife. It offers a lot of job opportunities for local communities. Projects like Shamwari offer socioeconomic benefits to local communities, such as skills, training and job creation.”
But nothing is easy. The COVID years were devastating to the operation. Shamwari went from 85 percent occupancy to nothing in two weeks. It stayed that way for two years.
Poaching Wars
One of the ways that the world has evolved in this period is in the bizarre market dynamics that are inadvertently leading to the extinction of the rhino. When the rhino horn sells for tens of thousands of dollars, it’s hard for a poor man to turn down the opportunity to take down a rhino.
“The fundamental problem,” said Cloete, “is that the rhino horn brings about $85,000 per kilogram in these markets, mainly China and Vietnam. So, unfortunately, the animal for these people is worth more dead than alive. There is no scientific evidence that there is any medicinal value in a rhino horn. It’s like your nail or your hair. There’s a massive educational program that needs to happen in those countries. Unfortunately, South Africa can’t control that; it has to happen in those countries. All we can do is protect the species we have.”
In the 1960s there were 65,000 black rhino in East and Southern Africa. Today there are fewer than 4,000 left. In the 1960s there were fewer than 250 southern white rhinos left in South Africa. Then Ian Player set up a project to protect them. The population built up to about 25,000. In 2007 to 2008 the scourge of poaching started again. Their numbers declined dramatically over the last 15 years, and now there may be about 17-18,000 left. But they are under attack.
When the butchery is supported by a market that is voracious for rhino horn, because many in China and Vietnam consider it an aphrodisiac, then the world is losing something precious and irreplaceable for something ephemeral—someone’s profit over someone else’s orgasm.
The game reserves are providing some of the only protection these animals have from people who are desperate to get a rhino horn that will give them freedom from their economic worries.
Shamwari is one of many reserves that take very serious measures to protect the rhinos and the elephants, which are still killed for ivory. It becomes very much like real warfare between poachers, who are bounty hunters desperate for a kill, and reserve operators who have tried many ways of curtailing poaching. It’s a never-ending battle, always escalating in terms of the means of warfare.
From what I have observed of the way Beijing runs its command economy, the government could stop the rhino horn trade in a minute if it wanted to. China, as a very centralized authoritarian state, could crack down on that market in China easily and wipe it out.
I don’t know why that hasn’t happened. For now it remains war in sub-saharan Africa, land of arguably the world’s most spectacular wildlife, and sometimes under threat for the most ridiculous reasons.
Until something can be done to outlaw those markets, it is up to the lodge operators, the reserves, to protect the animals from being massacred.
Escalating Means of Warfare
“We’re taking on new measures,” said Cloete. “We have to protect our boundaries. We’ve had to spend a lot of money on anti-poaching activities. We have a very strong anti-poaching team in place, very dedicated individuals. When we go to bed at night, they are out there patrolling the grounds. They have to. We have dogs. We use drones. We’ve had to become a lot more tech-savvy, to use AI to develop systems that are more pro-active as opposed to reactive.”
One of the innovations is a rhino bracelet that is put around the rhino’s ankle. It has a solar panel to charge it. It will detect unusual movement, and will then send an alert with GPS coordinates.
“We dispatch drones to area,” said Cloete. “We get thermal imaging, so can see what’s happening at night. Then dispatch people on the ground to see what’s happening.”
As the new methods go into effect, the poachers also up their efforts in a continually escalating war, fueled by profits from something people imagine to be an aphrodisiac.
“We have to develop these practices to protect these species in South Africa,” said Cloete, “because we’re lucky enough to have a few of these animals around.”
For more information, see www.shamwari.com.
David Cogswell is a freelance writer working remotely, from wherever he is at the moment. Born at the dead center of the United States during the last century, he has been incessantly moving and exploring for decades. His articles have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Fox News, Luxury Travel Magazine, Travel Weekly, Travel Market Report, Travel Agent Magazine, TravelPulse.com, Quirkycruise.com, and other publications. He is the author of four books and a contributor to several others. He was last seen somewhere in the Northeast US.
