Remy Scalza for The New York Times
The population of black rhinos has increased in recent years in Namibia.
Uamunikaije Tjivinda squatted in the sand and threw a few strips of dried giraffe meat into a pot of boiling water. Like many Himba women in the arid, northwestern part of Namibia called Kaokoland, she wore sandals, a goatskin skirt and little else. Her skin and long, plaited hair were a striking rust-red, rubbed with ocher dug from the earth.
From nearby hills, other women with young children converged, standing quietly around Ms. Tjivinda's domed hut, their eyes downcast. Out of the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser, my wife and I unpacked gifts brought on the advice of our guide — cornmeal, tea, sugar and other supplies hard to find here.
Though no longer a novelty for these women, these sorts of encounters with tourists are still new enough to be awkward. Only when the food came out did they smile and start to talk.
"The conservancy has been good for us," Ms. Tjivinda said in the local Otjihimba dialect, which our guide translated. "Wildlife are cared for like our own livestock, and money from tourism goes into our conservancy bank account." Goats wandered by as the women sat down to braid hair. Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw a small Himba girl, her hand wrist-deep in the sugar bag we brought. She raised a fistful to her mouth and swallowed.
For nearly two decades, Namibia, a country twice the size of California but with just 2.1 million residents, has been part of an ambitious experiment in both community tourism and wildlife conservation, known as communal conservancies. "The idea was to fight poaching by restoring control over wildlife to the local people," said John Kasaona, the director of Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation, the primary N.G.O. behind the initiative.
In 1996, groundwork laid by the organization paved the way for new laws giving tribal communities — who previously had limited rights to resources on communal lands — the ability to form conservancies and self-manage their wildlife. "We wanted to show them that they could benefit financially from keeping these animals alive, in particular from wildlife tourism," said Mr. Kasaona, who would spend years canvassing the countryside, explaining the model village by village. "Try convincing people who were made these same promises years ago by a colonial regime and then robbed of their land," he said. "At first, no one trusted us."
In the years since, the plan has been a resounding — and rare — success story for African wildlife. Seventy-nine conservancies now cover a full 20 percent of Namibia. Populations of desert lions, desert elephants and black rhinos, all threatened with extinction in the early '90s, have increased several times over, while poaching has plummeted. (One rhino was poached in Namibia last year, compared with 668 in neighboring South Africa.) Meanwhile, conservancies throughout the country have teamed up with international tourism operators, giving ordinary travelers like me unprecedented access to both animals and local culture.
But an increase in wildlife — and tourists — has brought a new and unexpected set of challenges. "We're having some problems with our own success," said Mr. Kasaona, who grew up herding goats in Kaokoland and whose family members still live a pastoral life there. "As we say, lions and cattle aren't always best friends."
Nearly half of all Namibia's conservancies, and many of the country's most ambitious community tourism projects, are in the northern Kunene region (which includes Kaokoland), an expanse of dry mountains and valleys the size of Greece but with fewer than 90,000 inhabitants. As we drove north in a rented four-wheel drive, gravel roads gave way to "Kunene highways," rutted tracks that thread through desert, cross dry river beds and sometimes disappear altogether. Against this harsh backdrop, conservancies have logged one of their greatest successes, the return of the endangered black rhino.
"These animals were almost completely wiped out by poachers 25 years ago," said Aloysius Waterboer, a guide at Desert Rhino Camp, a tent lodge located in Damaraland, traditional home of the Damara people. We were bumping along in an open safari car, hoping to spot one of the roughly 30 rhinos that now live in this area. Mr. Waterboer slowed the vehicle and studied the riot of zebra, oryx and elephant footprints in the sand, looking for rhino tracks.
The camp, a cluster of eight tent chalets, sits alone on 1,700 square miles of rocky hills and desert scrub leased from area conservancies, who are also 40 percent shareholders in the project. Nearly 90 percent of employees, including Mr. Waterboer, are drawn from local communities. Many of the expert rhino trackers on staff are former poachers themselves. "If you're a poacher, all you really want is to feed your family," Mr. Waterboer explained. "So it made sense to put them on the payroll."
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