Who Owns the Elephant

The elephant came down the Huab riverbed at about four in the afternoon, moving with the unhurried certainty of an animal that has walked this line for forty years. There is no fence anywhere in sight. There is no park boundary, no gate, no ranger station. The land belongs to the people of Torra Conservancy, roughly 1,200 of them spread across 3,500 square kilometres of Damaraland, and so, in a legal sense that took a constitutional amendment to establish, does the elephant.

That sentence would have been nonsense anywhere in Africa in 1990. Wildlife belonged to the state. A farmer whose crops were flattened by elephants overnight had no claim on the animal, no share in what a tourist paid to photograph it, and no reason on earth not to shoot it. The economics were simple and they pointed one way. Namibia's black rhino population had fallen by more than 90% in two decades. Desert elephants in the northwest were down to a few hundred.

What Namibia did after independence in 1990 was write into its constitution that communities could hold rights over the wildlife on their land, and then, in 1996, pass legislation that let them form conservancies to do it. Nearly thirty years on there are 86 registered communal conservancies covering about 20% of the country, and the elephant walking down the Huab is the most visible result of a policy argument that is still going on.

The bargain

The deal a conservancy makes is straightforward and uncomfortable. The community takes on the cost of living with dangerous animals — the crop damage, the livestock losses, the occasional death — and in exchange it gets the income those animals generate. Tourism concessions, joint-venture lodges, campsite fees, craft sales. And, in some conservancies, a trophy hunting quota.

That last item is where most visitors stop nodding. The idea that shooting a small number of animals is what pays for the survival of the rest sits badly with almost everyone who arrives from Europe or North America, and the discomfort is not stupid — there are real questions about how quotas are set, who profits, and whether the money reaches the households bearing the cost. But the numbers are not ambiguous. In several conservancies, hunting revenue exceeds photographic tourism revenue, and it arrives reliably in the low season when the lodges are empty. It also arrives as meat, distributed to households, which in a subsistence economy is not a footnote.

Torra was the first conservancy to become financially self-sufficient, in 2000, and it did so on a mix of both. Its joint venture with Damaraland Camp gave the community a rising equity share and eventual ownership; its hunting concession covered the game guards and the compensation scheme in the years the tourists did not come. When they stopped coming altogether in 2020, the conservancies that had diversified survived and the ones that had not did not.

What the numbers did

Namibia now holds the largest free-roaming black rhino population in the world, and the only expanding one. The desert-adapted elephant population in the northwest has roughly tripled since the early 1990s. Lions, which had been eliminated from the northwest entirely, walked back in from Etosha in the 2000s and now number well over a hundred across the conservancy landscape.

None of that happened inside a national park. It happened on communal farmland where people run goats and cattle, and where the people running them decided that a lion was worth more alive than dead. That calculation is not sentimental and it is not stable. It has to be re-made every year, by every household, and it fails the moment the income stops.

A conservancy is not a nature reserve with people in it. It is a business decision that a community makes about its own land, renewed annually, and it collapses the year the maths stops working.

The part that does not work

The drought years exposed the weakness. Between 2013 and 2019 Namibia had a sequence of failed rainy seasons, livestock died in numbers, and predators under the same pressure moved onto what was left. Human-wildlife conflict incidents rose sharply. Compensation schemes, funded from conservancy income, were paying out faster than the income came in.

Then the pandemic removed tourism entirely for two seasons. Conservancy income across the country fell by around three-quarters. Game guards went unpaid. Poaching, which had been falling for a decade, ticked up. Emergency funding from government and NGOs kept the system alive, which is not the same thing as the system working.

The honest reading is that Namibia built a mechanism that aligns conservation with rural livelihoods better than almost anything else attempted in Africa, and that the mechanism is thin. It depends on a tourism sector exposed to shocks a village in Kunene cannot influence, and on wildlife populations that recover slowly and can be lost quickly.

What this means if you go

It means the campsite fee is not a formality. Community campsites in Damaraland and Kunene — Aba Huab, Khowarib, Hoada, Puros — are conservancy enterprises, and the money goes into the same account that pays the game guards. Staying in one is a materially different act from staying at a privately owned lodge outside the conservancy system, and it costs less.

It means asking a lodge whether it is a joint venture and what share the conservancy holds. The good ones will tell you immediately and in detail, because it is the thing they are proudest of. The ones that change the subject are answering the question.

And it means that the desert elephant you drive out to find in the Huab or the Hoanib is not a wild animal in a protected area. It is an animal that a specific group of people have decided to tolerate, at cost, on the basis of an economic argument that your presence is part of. That is a stranger and more fragile arrangement than a national park, and it is why it works at all.