In Conversation with Vusa Ncube from Imvelo Safari Lodges

There’s Bomani Tented Lodge, which overlooks the magnificent Ngamo Plains, home to birds and game so numerous you’ll struggle to count. There’s Camelthorn, a remote forest lodge that serves as Imvelo’s crown jewel. There’s Nehimba, which overlooks a watering hole, a place where enormous herds of elephant come to sate their thirst. And there’s Jozibanini, Imvelo’s wilderness camp in Hwange’s remote southern region, a place for the true adventurers and lovers of the wild.

One of the unique things about Imvelo’s philosophy is that many of their camps are built on communal land and the projects look to actively involve the people who live and subsist in the areas of the park where the lodges are situated. In the week that I’m talking to Vusa, a couple of white rhino have been translocated from a different part of the country to a sanctuary on communal land in the park. This is a huge undertaking – another two were translocated a couple of years ago – and its aim is to both introduce these magnificent creatures back into the ecosystem, but also to enable the local community to profit from their presence. 40% of the revenue from the project goes directly back into the community in the form of gate fees, plus it’s a way of creating a system whereby humans and animals can coexist peacefully.

This hasn’t always been the case in Hwange, with game often proving the source of community resentment. Big cats kill cattle – a form of currency in the area – and elephants often trample and destroy vital crops. Imvelo has introduced community vegetable gardens that aim to alleviate this problem, allowing locals to grow crops to sell directly at market – and even to the lodges themselves. It’s about diversifying the crops, so that if a single crop is destroyed, there are others to replace it.

There’s no one who better embodies Imvelo’s dedication to the local community than Vusa, an overwhelmingly positive presence on my Zoom screen and whose rise up the company ranks is a fabulous story. ‘I grew up in a small village in the south eastern corner of the park, a village of subsistence farming with one school and where people work the fields,’ he says. Working the fields, though, is hard, on account of the dry Kalahari soil. ‘It’s a tough place to farm and raise cattle, so I did my primary education there before moving 60 kilometres away for secondary education, before another move to a city where I realised I wanted to get involved in tourism.’

That’s where Vusa’s story gets a little…serendipitous. In 2011, he was driving through his village when he stopped and chanced upon one of Imvelo’s Directors, Butch. Vusa told Butch that he was ‘planning the next stage of my life,’ at which point he was told that there may be a job for him. ‘Being young and stupid, I never followed up.’ Butch was not to be denied, though, and a couple of months later he sent another message telling Vusa to come to the camp – literally when Vusa was around the fire having dinner – so he packed up his things, made the journey, ‘and that’s how it all started.’ From there, Vusa worked everywhere, from the rooms to the kitchens to the laundry, soaking up every aspect of hospitality as he did so.

‘I always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to be a guide,’ which, by the way, requires up to a decade of training in Zimbabwe, ‘and, one day, Butch gave me a book on birds. This was my opportunity, so I seized it and, a while later, Butch said he wanted me to be a guide.’ Vusa’s training and licences were paid for and, much studying later, he gained his guiding proficiency licence in 2023. Now, he runs a team of fellow guides, although ‘managing people can be trickier than managing wildlife,’ he chuckles. ‘But we’re a well-oiled machine, I know everyone’s strengths and weaknesses, I’m Head Guide but I’m not hierarchical, and I think you can see that at all of our lodges.’