The air tingles with nervous excitement as Alex Oelofse, owner of Okonjati Game Reserve in Namibia, lifts off in a helicopter. Hanging out the side, dart gun at the ready, is vet Hans Reuter, whose sights are set firmly on the elephants below. As the chopper approaches, the animals tense then flee, kicking up a cloud of dust in the golden morning light.
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It’s August 2024 and the elephants are destined for a new life north of the border. Okonjati’s elephant population has grown to double what the land can sustain, a situation exacerbated by six years of drought, and several family groups need to be relocated. Finding a new home for the herd has proved difficult. In much of the species’ range, space for elephants has been squeezed to the limit, and burgeoning human and elephant populations increasingly come into conflict.
“Culling isn’t really an option, we’d really rather move them,” says Alex. “But at some point, you need to make a decision – how are you going to manage the herd before they destroy everything?”
Just as time and options were running out, Alex heard that Cuatir Conservation Area, a private conservation project in south-east Angola, was looking for elephants. Made up of 20,000ha of pristine wilderness nestled in the crook of the Cubango River – a tributary of the Okavango that feeds into the Okavango Delta – Cuatir had ideal elephant habitat but with no elephants. It was the perfect solution.
The challenge would be actually getting the elephants there. Cuatir is only 800km from Okonjati but, with the condition of the roads on the Angolan side of the border, not to mention the river crossings, translocation would be very difficult, to say the least.
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Luckily, there can be few people more capable of such a difficult endeavour than Alex, a conservationist, helicopter pilot and mechanical engineer. He also happens to be the son of Jan Oelofse, who revolutionised game-capture methods in the 1960s. Back then, if animals needed moving, rangers on horseback would go out and catch them with nets. It was a difficult method with high mortality rates and couldn’t be carried out at scale. Jan pioneered a method using a capture funnel made of woven plastic sheet walls leading to a boma, into which animals could be herded using a helicopter.
The Oelofse Method
In the 1960s, many of the south African national parks where Jan was working were becoming overpopulated. With his new approach, still known as the Oelofse Method, Jan increased his team’s catching capability from 600 animals a year to 6,000. This meant that, rather than animals having to be culled, they could now be translocated in large numbers to repopulate conservation areas elsewhere in southern Africa.
Alex deftly manoeuvres the chopper through the sky. This is the second of the four trips as part of this translocation to Angola and he knows what he is doing. He circles the herd and picks out the chosen family group. The radio in the land cruiser below crackles into life: two elephants have been darted and will be going down in the next 10 minutes. The ground crews speed through the bush towards the elephants – it’s vital to reach them quickly to ensure they can breathe in the positions they have fallen.
The crews operate with practised precision. On reaching the first elephant, key measurements and blood samples are taken by the veterinary team, while the capture team sets up a crane and attaches straps around the enormous feet. Suddenly, there’s a warning shout. Another elephant has circled back to investigate what has happened to its fallen friend. The team retreats to the relative safety of the truck while a land cruiser diverts the interloper.
Thankfully, the inquisitive elephant turns and retreats, allowing the team to continue its work, hoisting the unconscious elephant skywards by its feet. Using an ingenious system of adapted shipping containers and chain pulleys, the process is repeated until seven elephants have been loaded on to two waiting trucks. They are woken up and, after a few indignant trumpets, the precious cargo is ready for the long journey ahead.
Reaching the border
The first 400km glide by and four hours later the team reaches the Angolan border. The crossing is a stark illustration of the contrasting situations between the two nations as the smooth road gives way to a potholed track. The next 200km take 12 bone-jarring hours, with the teams trying to make the passage as comfortable as they can for the elephants.
At first light, the two container trucks plough into the crystal-clear waters of the Okavango River, each pulled from the front by a six-wheel-drive vehicle. It’s a tense moment – if the trucks were to get stuck here, rescuing the elephants would be a monumental effort.
But it’s after fording the river that things get really tough. The final 40km follow a deep sandy track that winds through miombo woodland. On Alex’s previous translocation, even with extra six-wheel-drive vehicles helping to pull the lorries, this final stretch took more than 24 hours to complete.
Learning from that experience, Alex has custom-built tank-like tracks for his trucks out of rubber and steel. The convoy pauses, and some of the team bolt the tracks on while others tend to the elephants, cutting vegetation from the riverbank and offering up buckets of water. For the residents of the small village by the riverbank, it’s a sight to behold and one they are unlikely to forget in a hurry. Young and old alike look on in wonder as the tip of a trunk emerges from the container, searching for more food.
Even with the new tracks, those 40km take a gruelling 16 hours. Hidden tree roots slash seven tyres over the course of the journey. Each time, the crew springs into action like a well-oiled machine, digging out beneath the truck, removing the tracks and then changing the mammoth tyres. They are driven by a deep care for the elephants on board, working tirelessly as day passes into night, overcoming each obstacle thrown at them with quiet determination.
A lethal legacy
“Angola once had one of the largest elephant populations in Africa,” says Mike Chase, founder of Elephants Without Borders, a Botswanan-based NGO. “And then during the civil war, which started in the mid-1970s, populations were decimated, mainly by the rebels, who sold their ivory to fund the war.”
By one estimate, as many as 100,000 elephants were killed during Angola’s 27-year conflict. When Chase arrived in south-east Angola to survey elephants for his PhD in 2004, two years after the end of the war, he found only 300 elephants in a region that once would have been home to tens of thousands. But unlike many places in the elephants’ former range where humans have taken up the available space, there are still thousands of square kilometres of wilderness in Angola that elephants haven’t yet returned to but potentially could – including at Cuatir.
One of the main reasons that the space is still available is that the sandy soils that underpin the miombo woodlands in Angola’s south-eastern province, Cuando Cubango, make both access and agriculture extremely difficult. Outside of the province’s few urban areas, sandy tracks are the only way to cross a region that measures 200,000km2. The result is a population density of under three people per km2, roughly 100 times lower than in the UK.
In neighbouring Botswana and Zambia, growing human and elephant populations are often competing for the same space, and human-wildlife conflict is becoming an increasingly prominent political issue. In April 2024, following a row over trophy hunting, Botswanan president Mokgweetsi Masisi threatened to send 20,000 elephants to Germany so that the German people could experience what it was like to live with such large and powerful creatures.
Elephants once moved freely across southern Africa including between Botswana, Zambia, Namibia and Angola. Some of the overcrowding in Botswana is a result of Angolan elephants fleeing during the war and never returning. The idea of elephants returning en masse to Angola to reclaim their ancient lands and thus relieve the escalating issues of human-wildlife conflict in neighbouring countries is, understandably, highly appealing to conservationists such as Chase. It also has real appeal for Angolan leaders peering across the border at the ecotourism dollars flooding into Botswana’s Okavango Delta.
The return of elephants
The optimistic vision of elephants returning to Angola has struggled to become a reality though, with elephant numbers first rising and then falling again over the past 20 years due to ivory poachers. The challenges that keep human population numbers low also make it incredibly hard for Angolan park rangers to patrol and protect the region. The lack of access and legacy of landmines also make the region a tough sell for tourists, who represent an important revenue stream for anti-poaching activities in other southern African countries.
A day-and-a-half after its journey began, the container lorry backs up to a purpose-built ramp in a cloud of Angolan dust. The doors creak open and a quiet hush descends as the team waits in anticipation for the elephants to emerge. In the first container, a mother and calf carefully approach the now-open doors, tentatively sniffing at the new smells drifting towards them on the evening breeze. The female stays at the door for some 40 minutes, flicking her trunk, unsure what to make of her new surroundings before ponderously descending on to the floodplain and ambling off into her new life at Cuatir.
Over the course of four translocations in August, the Oelofse team brought a total of 26 elephants to Cuatir, which are now thriving in their new environment. Their numbers are but a drop in the ocean compared to their predecessors that walked the land before them, but their presence is deeply symbolic.
This translocation was only possible with the permission of the Angolan government, reflecting what Chase believes is a newly invigorated, positive attitude towards conservation. It was also only possible because safe space had been made available for elephants – something Chase’s research is showing may also be improving in other areas of south-eastern Angola.
After years of doubt, the vision of Angola as one of the most important global areas for elephant conservation may soon be more than just a dream.
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