Khama Rhino Sanctuary

Boss, Basedi and the last seven white rhino in Botswana

On 17 September 1992 an aerial survey found seven white rhino in the whole of Botswana. Allowing for animals the plane missed, the surveyors thought there might be as many as twelve. By the following February four of the seven counted were known to have gone to poachers, two more were poached that same month, and the answer was to take whatever could be caught out of Chobe altogether. A capture team from the Natal Parks Board caught four animals, and they were moved south to a cattle post outside Serowe that would not have a fence for another two years.

A conservation newsletter from 1995 gives them names. Basedi, a full-grown cow, came first with Baba, her calf of nine months. Two days later came a three-year-old bull called Lerumo and an old one, about thirty, known as Boss. All four had been dehorned so they would not injure themselves on the journey. Lerumo arrived with poachers’ bullets already through his chest and belly and was dead within a month. The newsletter has Basedi and Baba spending their days in a paddock behind the boma.

More than 70 white rhino had been brought into Botswana in the 1970s, to a north where the species had been gone since about 1890, and as late as 1990 people were still quoting a national herd of 100 to 150. Three years on, what Serowe had to show for all of it was a cow, a calf and an elderly bull in holding pens.

Built on a raffle and three boreholes

The place was homemade. The land was a ranch on tribal ground that the Serowe Brigades, the town’s vocational training movement, held on a 50-year lease. A 1994 update in the Okavango Wildlife Society newsletter reads like a farm diary: money from a raffle, three boreholes that struck water, five bomas and three paddocks finished and two more going up. Raymond Watson, a businessman with interests in the area, is credited in the government’s Kutlwano magazine as one of the people who pushed it through.

In May 1994 the wildlife department caught one more rhino in Chobe and brought it down, the first capture in Botswana done entirely by its own staff with its own kit. Another of the founders died that October. Five more white rhino came from South Africa in 1995 and three from Pilanesberg in 1999, and by early 2003 eleven calves had been born. The original 4,300 hectares or so was later doubled, which is why older write-ups give half the area we do.

Since then the traffic has run the other way. The six sanctuary-bred rhino darted and crated here in June 2016 went to the Okavango Delta, back to the north their kind had been evacuated from 23 years earlier.

Chinga, and Noddy who liked cars

The black rhino story is odder. The 1992 census had not found a single black rhino in Botswana. Ten years later a young cow turned up in the Chobe area. The chief warden then, Bathusi Letlhare, guessed she had either crossed from South Africa or come out of the national park. She was moved to the sanctuary in September 2002 and named Chinga, after the place she was found. A reporter who met her in the boma a few months later watched her dip her head as if to charge the gate, then think better of it.

At that point she was the only legal black rhino in the country. Her mate, when he came, was Noddy, a bull hand-raised in Zimbabwe and donated at 16 or 17 (2006 by one account, 2007 by another). In March 2008 Chinga calved, a bull. Her second calf was recorded on 16 November 2010, and there was a third later.

Noddy never unlearned people. He hung about the restaurant, the Mokongwa campsite, the rangers’ quarters and the education centre, he fought his own reflection in the restaurant windows, and he liked to rub himself against vehicles. He died on 5 November 2017, aged 27, and the post-mortem put it down to kidney failure. If you read anywhere that a black rhino bull turns up at the restaurant in the afternoons, the animal that fits is Noddy.

How likely are you to see one?

Very, but not certain, and the stories people tell cut both ways. A school group on an evening drive in June 2023 were warned by their guide that the cold would keep the rhino in the bush, then counted 14 white and one black. Next morning they saw two. A biker who came through in August 2019 saw none at all and decided the place was not worth the hype.

Where several accounts agree is on the hour: go early or go late, and the late drives get the better write-ups. Malema’s Pan is the first big stop on a guided drive. It is named after a man who lived there and was moved off when the reserve was made, not after the Babirwa leader Mmirwa Malema, as a guide had to explain to visiting Radio Botswana staff in 2014. Black rhino are another matter. One government magazine count has five of them to 56 white, and they are browsers that keep to thick bush.

The sand, and the soldiers

The thing to know beforehand is the sand. A poster on the 4x4 Community forum in November 2013 wrote of sections of very thick sand and said he would not have got through without four-wheel drive and low range. The 2019 biker put it at about 5 km of heavy going from the gate to the camp, and reported the two-wheel-drive car in his party stuck several times and pulled out. The trust says its tracks are maintained for ordinary bakkies. I would believe the people who got stuck.

The other surprise is the army. One tour passenger describes two vehicles of soldiers patrolling the tracks by day and by night, not company most people expect on a game drive.