In the heart of South Africa’s Greater Kruger area, where the Big Five still roam and old models of conservation die hard, one reserve has been doing things differently. For over two decades, Craig Spencer, warden of Olifants West Nature Reserve (OWNR), has challenged the status quo: from the commodification of wildlife to the militarisation of anti-poaching efforts. What’s emerged is a bold, community-driven alternative that may just hold the key to conservation’s future. “We said we could do it and we could do it better without the need to prostitute wildlife,” says Craig.
We spoke with Craig, Collet Ngobeni, and Vongani Masingi (two long-serving members of the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit) on a video call. Craig joined us from the OWNR research facility in the Kruger, excitedly smoking a pipe as he laid out his vision for a different kind of conservation: one rooted in community, long-term thinking, and the quiet defiance of doing things better. The Black Mambas’ commitment to this mission extends to every foot patrol and classroom visit, and now, thanks to the Jim Green Boots for Rangers initiative, they’re doing it in boots built for the job.
Unlike many private reserves in the region, OWNR rejected trophy hunting as a source of revenue. “The Big Five is not the be-all and end-all,” Craig says. “We manage a mosaic of different land use practices.” This “mosaic” model embraces both Big Five and non–Big Five areas, the latter serving as crucial biodiversity refuges for less celebrated—but no less important—species.
It’s a landscape-wide strategy focused on biodiversity integrity, habitat health, and community engagement, rather than high fences paired with high-powered rifles. And it’s here that one of the most revolutionary conservation experiments in Africa took root: the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit.
Founded in 2013, the Black Mambas are the first all-female, unarmed ranger team in the world. They’re central to OWNR’s mission to de-escalate the conservation arms race and build trust between reserves and rural communities.
Collet, one of the original members, jokes that she’s now one of the unit’s “ancestors.” Her journey began as a teenager in OWNR’s Bush Babies education program, which reaches 2,000 children across 11 primary schools. After finishing matric and facing unemployment, she jumped at the chance to join a pioneering project and has never looked back. Today, she’s a mother of five, a role model in her community, and living proof that education—not militarisation—is the key to long-term conservation.
“Conservation should protect both animals and people,” she says. “I want to go home with stories of rhinos and elephants, not violence…We protect the life of wild animals and the life of human beings by going to the community to empower them, to tell them that conservation is their heritage. It is our heritage. We need to protect it and then again for us because we are women and the primary caregivers. I’m a mother of three beautiful children and two adopted girls so I want to go home to tell my children beautiful stories of what I saw.”
For Vongani, who joined in 2019, the calling came unexpectedly. A woman at her local spaza shop tipped her off that interviews were being held. With no certified documents but a lot of grit, she showed up and earned her spot. After 16 days of gruelling paramilitary-style training, she became part of the fourth Mambas cohort.
Both women now conduct regular foot patrols, monitor a 12 km fence line, report on erosion and invasive species, and educate schoolchildren, all while navigating the very real risks of wild animals and potential ambushes by poachers. “By putting our boots daily on the ground, it marks our presence,” says Vongani. “It helps to deter poachers and makes our reserve a less desirable place for them because they realise there are people patrolling daily.”
Importantly, the goal was never to turn women into soldiers. “Women are caregivers,” Craig explains. “They’re often responsible for children, the elderly, and household needs. If you invest in women, you get multi-generational change.” Arming them, he argues, would simply replicate the failed male-dominated models. “That’s not the point.”
Instead, the Black Mambas embody a nurturing, educational model of conservation that’s been recognised globally, and with good reason. They are living, walking ambassadors for a new kind of stewardship: resilient, unarmed, and deeply embedded in the communities that border the wild.
While headlines often focus on rhinos and poaching, OWNR’s conservation work is anything but one-dimensional. Rangers and staff spend their days tackling alien invasive plants like cacti and prickly pear, monitoring erosion, and overseeing tourism impacts from the reserve’s 14 commercial lodges.
“Alien invasive organisms are the single biggest threat to biodiversity in this country,” Craig notes. “And we’d invested all this into saving rhinos’ lives, but we’d actually reduced their ecological carrying capacity.” The challenge, he says, is not just about protecting rhinos, but building a system where wildlife, ecosystems, and people can all thrive.
OWNR stands in stark contrast to the militarised conservation model that dominates many reserves: think helicopters, night-vision goggles, attack dogs, and fortified fences. Craig acknowledges that in some contexts, those tools are still necessary. But he’s pushing for something else. “You can’t switch militarised conservation off overnight, but we need to start somewhere.”
Instead, OWNR is building something slower, harder, and more sustainable: community goodwill, education, and ecological resilience. “We wanted to be the proof of concept for a passive, community-driven conservation model.”
At the heart of Craig’s philosophy is the belief that poverty, not poaching, is the real enemy. When militarised rangers are laid off or disillusioned, they often take their skills to the other side. But the Mambas? They stay.
“The original Mambas are still with me over a decade later. That’s the difference.”
So what’s next for OWNR?
“We have to adapt,” Craig says. “The scary thing is, our life is about survival, because our model is still heavily dependent on donations. And that’s intentional. We don’t want to go the route of what I call ‘prostitution’ where we say, ‘That animal has to die so we can protect the others.’”
Instead, the reserve is focusing on expanding the protected area network, especially along the Olifants River up to the Blyde River, where plans are already underway to proclaim new conservation land.
Another key focus is growing the Black Mambas Alliance, a global network of partner institutions, particularly zoos that house African wildlife. The idea is to let captive lions and elephants serve as ambassadors for their wild cousins. “More people visit a small zoo in a single weekend than go on safari in a year,” Craig points out. “So how do we make that count?”
Through the Alliance, zoos receive newsletters, ranger updates, and even video calls with the Mambas themselves. How does one join? A R300,000 commitment. “In Dollars or Pounds, that’s nothing,” Craig says. “But it can change everything.”
For Craig and the team at OWNR, conservation isn’t about desperation or damage control. It’s about doing the hard work, quietly, patiently, and sometimes against the odds.
“We’re not burning our furniture to warm our house.”
Instead, they’re building something from the ground up. Something radical. Something considered. Something that just might last.
Cheers,
The Jim Green Team
Through our Boots for Rangers initiative, run in partnership with the Game Rangers Association of Africa, we donate one pair of boots to a ranger for every ten pairs sold from our Ranger range. These boots are now supporting conservation teams at sites across Africa, with over 6,000 pairs already on the ground.
