Black Rhinos, Back Then – Etosha and Nomtsas

At the waterhole in Okaukuejo

Why the inconvenience is worth it

It was beautiful again on the last safari, sitting at the waterhole in Okaukuejo. And yes – many of our guests still accept the small inconvenience of staying inside the park at Okaukuejo itself. Even though Okaukuejo has become what I like to call a tourist funnel: a bottleneck in which, it sometimes feels, everyone is annoyed with everyone else. Okaukuejo and Sesriem are simply the meeting points of every Namibia trip.

And still we always try to get the best bungalows for our guests, even though working with the semi-state operator of the park accommodation has been hard going for years. In our experience maintenance falls behind, and we have watched standards of cleanliness slip over the past few years. The commission structures, seen from a Namibian operator’s side, are unsatisfying – to put it mildly.

And yet: to sit at the waterhole and suddenly find yourself face to face with a rhino – who is also sitting 🙂 – is simply something special.

Mind you: a black rhino!

A parrot’s beak and a hammer mill

The German name for the black rhino, Spitzmaulnashorn – “pointed-mouth rhino” – makes immediate sense once you have seen the animal up close. A black rhino really does have a parrot’s beak: a pointed, grasping upper lip. English speakers call it the hook-lipped rhino for the same reason. With that lip it pushes branches as thick as your thumb into its mouth, snips them off with its molars and then grinds them up like a hammer mill.

Where the second name, “black” rhino, comes from, the devil alone knows. There are plenty of theories: the dark mud the animals wallow in. Or simply the need to tell it apart from the “white” rhino, whose own name probably goes back to a translation error. Everybody holds their own theory to be the correct one – well.

Back to the story.

Watching these wonderful animals amble down towards the water has filled many a memory card long before they even bend their mouths to drink.

The last encounter, on the August safari, came just before and during sunset. And the rhino had a good long scratch as well. Thick-skinned indeed – or rather, thick-hided 🙂.

Actually, I meant to write about something quite different…

I had meant to write an article about appreciation. And to pass on some information about black rhinos. But an encounter like that always sets something off deep in the background for me: a great sadness.

These days I often don’t even tell the story any more, although my guests really do deserve to hear the old South West stories.

For one thing, because we all know: if rhino poaching carries on the way it is going, coming generations will certainly not see these animals in the wild.

And we all know why rhinos are poached. As a supposed miracle cure in traditional Asian medicine; the legend of the aphrodisiac holds on stubbornly, even though it has little to do with the actual use over there – if you know what I mean 😉. Horn is also popular for dagger handles in the Arab states. And today above all as a “nice to have” deep in the vaults of the super-rich – that is probably one of the main drivers now.

So rhino poaching will probably never stop entirely.

There are fierce arguments about whether the trade in rhino horn should be legalised or not. Some people know my opinion – quite certainly. Others see it differently. What remains is the fact: rhinos are and will remain highly endangered, and if we are not careful our grandchildren will not see any.

But there is another reason, and it is the real one: in moments like that I think back to our farm.

“The south has game too.”

To my father. The great idealist.

“The south has game too,” he used to say. Out of that conviction, at least half of our farm was turned into a nature reserve: a game camp on more than 22,000 hectares, which still exists today and through which we eventually became part of the state rhino reintroduction programme.

To be allowed to take part, a boma had to be built first – a stockade in which each rhino had its own acclimatisation pen, with a second pen beside it so that the neighbouring pen could be cleaned. This fortress for pachyderms was built from heavy beams and steel cable.

It cost a good 60,000 Namibian dollars at the time.

Back then that was an insane amount of money, and honestly rather mad, because tourism alone could never have made the investment pay.

My father built the boma anyway. He doubled the game fence, reinforced every corner and every bend, and provided the protection that was required. That meant an enormous amount of time, fuel, money, patience and effort. And above all: the rhinos had to be found every single day, to make sure they were protected and safe.

And so, in time, the first rhinos came to Nomtsas.

Otjivasandu, Bennie and the Old One

For many years these animals gave us great joy. We drove out daily and came to know the character of every single one of them.

There was the cow Otjivasandu, tame, who let us come very close – ideal for photography, of course. Her calves, on the other hand, were often cheeky little rascals. One of them, hardly bigger than a warthog, would already charge as we brought the vehicle closer. Otjivasandu stood calmly beside it while the little one came at us in mock charges. Man, that was wonderful – and at the same time rather sweet, to see how brave such a small animal could be.

Then there was Bennie. Bennie turned aggressive if you disturbed his midday rest. Often we simply drove across the veld without knowing where the rhinos were lying. They don’t rest in the open; they look for a well-covered spot behind a bush and sleep the day away there – after all, they are mainly active at night. And if Bennie felt disturbed, it went off in an instant. All at once there was crashing and snorting in the bush, and you could be attacked from the side. But how! There is only one thing to do then: floor the accelerator and hope.

I still rode regularly in those days, a gelding called Echo. He seemed to genuinely enjoy galloping alongside a charging rhino. Somehow he had worked out that rhinos don’t see particularly well: they set off with real purpose, but then mostly just follow their nose. So you could actually gallop boldly along beside them until they turned away – or until you chose a safer direction yourself.

And then there was “the Old One”. She did things differently from the other rhinos. She did not chase her older calves away, but let them stay with her even when a new calf had long since arrived. Although black rhinos are basically solitary and you would normally only see a cow with a small calf, with the Old One they were often out as a threesome – and if a bull was along, even a foursome. A cool show.

In front or behind?

With the Old One it was also interesting to watch how the calves behaved when they fled. Often the calf ran behind her. Sometimes, though, it ran in front.

Among rangers a stubborn rule survives: with the white rhino, the square-lipped rhinoceros, the calf runs in front and the mother steers it from behind – with the black rhino, by contrast, the calf follows its mother. Some insist on this rigidly, one way or the other.

From my own experience I can only say: perhaps that is usually the case, but it is definitely not always so. With the Old One it was often quite different, and with other black rhinos too I frequently saw the cow leading. With white rhinos I think it is harder to judge anyway: they are less temperamental, and the “structure” of their flight is rarely easy to observe.

Father State

Over time, “Father State” upset us more and more.

It became clear very quickly that what had initially been held out to us was not going to materialise. Those of us farmers who took part in these reintroduction projects understood at the time – and were told as much – that the offspring, or at least some of them, could later belong to us, and that the investment might therefore also become viable in tourism terms.

Later it was said that this had never been discussed.

The bureaucratic machine…

On top of that we would occasionally receive rather silly documents when other areas were to be supplied with “our” rhinos. They said things like:

“The STATE OWNED rhinos with the names of …”

And this STATE OWNED was written very large and underlined, so that you would properly understand that you could not and should not object to anything.

When rhinos were released into the wild or relocated again, even though we had urgently pointed out beforehand that individual animals were pregnant, or that the weather was not remotely suitable for a translocation, those concerns were ignored.

And indeed, animals afterwards died in their new surroundings. Exactly why, I cannot judge from the outside – but in my view the timing and the circumstances spoke for themselves.

We were extremely upset. But you obviously could not go to the press about it. You could not say anything at all. Because rhinos are so strictly protected, practically everything was handled under the strictest secrecy. Even journalists I knew and approached at the time got cold feet and did not want to touch the subject.

And yet I know of several cases from that period in which rhinos died in bomas.

Then came the day when the police arrested a poacher – before we even knew that poaching had taken place on our land. It was raining very heavily at the time. We could not carry out our patrols because the Fish River, the Usib and the Ami-Aub were flowing, the banks had turned to mud and the riverbeds could not be crossed.

When we then asked for help – a helicopter would have had to come – we were told the state’s budget was already exhausted. And besides, we had signed up to take responsibility for protecting these rhinos.

So a fairly one-sided relationship took shape: we carry the full cost and the full responsibility, and the state does what it likes with the rhinos.

Eventually we no longer had any appetite for that.

The farewell

My father became very ill around that time. Because of his illness he could no longer be out and about constantly, and he put a straight choice to me: either I did my part, stayed on the farm and made sure the rhinos were checked regularly, or we got out of the project.

But I had already started my first safari business and, for personal reasons too, could not be on the farm all the time. Although I had been out with the rhinos very often and had truly taken these animals to heart, I could not carry that responsibility alone. And besides, our own lives were hardly safe with heavily armed idiots roaming through our bush.

One thing has to be said clearly: the project was a complete success. Our calving interval was under two years; for black rhinos two and a half to four is more typical. The animals were thriving on Nomtsas. All in all we handed a good sixteen rhinos back to the state in good condition.

A complete success “was”. That word should really not exist in conservation.

And so came the day when we gave the rhinos back to the state.

During the capture the animals were immobilised, and transmitters were implanted in their horns while they were down. Because you have to be able to locate a rhino if you want to protect it. A collar with a transmitter does not work: a rhino’s neck is so thick and so short that any collar eventually slips off. So the transmitter is drilled into the horn – the horn itself has no feeling, and for the animal the procedure is unproblematic.

The sad part of the story: when the animals were finally collected, numerous bullet holes were found on them. The crude poachers had apparently been taking regular shots at our poor rhinos with AK-47s. Many had survived only because they ran.

The day of the farewell was a sad day. We had to admit that we could not stand up to these criminal machinations, and that we could no longer rely on the state for help.

All we could do was hope that the rhinos would go on to better areas. Where they were taken, we know – but of course I cannot publish that here. They were moved to national parks, and some of them are apparently still living there successfully today.

And today?

After everything I experienced over those years with our rhinos, my trust in the state conservation apparatus is used up. I say that openly now, and I say it in the hope that something will change, not to take a swipe at anybody.

I do not want to speculate about corruption here; I can only judge what I experienced myself. And what I experienced was above all one thing: a lack of diligence. Promises you could not rely on. Warnings nobody wanted to hear. And in the end the poor animals, who paid the price for it.

Because conservation has to be pursued out of conviction.

You become a conservation officer out of idealism – or at least that is how it should be. This country once had great conservationists: Dr Hugh Berry, Peter Bridgeford, Steve Brain, Rod Braby, Mark Paxton and very, very many others. People whose tireless commitment made a major, weighty and positive difference for conservation. People who were not simply doing a job, but fighting for a cause.

I have been missing figures like that in our country for many years now. Or at least people who follow their example, carry that idealism forward and are willing to really stand up for conservation.

Of course there are still individual rangers today who do good work in the field under extremely difficult conditions. My criticism is of a system that lets them – and the animals with them – down.

By now there are a great many successful rhino conservation projects in this country. Most of them, though, involve white rhinos, because black rhinos are still only allowed to belong to the state. And we know that they continue to be poached heavily in the national parks.

And yet

These days we savour every single sighting on every safari.

And to anyone who doesn’t mind if the room is perhaps not quite as luxurious as at some lodge, I can only recommend it: stay inside the national park and wait at the waterhole in Okaukuejo until these magnificent creatures come down to quench their thirst.

Because that moment is probably – no, not probably, quite certainly – one of the rarest and most beautiful moments you can experience on safari.

PS: This article describes my personal experiences and reflects my personal opinion.

Last Updated on 28. August 2026 by Albert Voigts von Schütz