“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.