Westgate Community Conservancy
- CK
- May 21, 2023
- 11 min read
Updated: Feb 8
Of all wildlife attacks on humans globally, what proportion actually happen in Africa? And when such attacks are recorded on the continent, where do they most often occur?
The data says Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
Between 1950 and 2019, there were 1,696 reported predatory attacks on humans. Only about 14 percent of these — roughly 237 incidents over nearly seventy years — were attributed to animals in Africa. That works out to nearly three to four attacks per year across the four countries mentioned above. Or, in other words, less than one attack per year in Kenya.
Where attacks do occur, they are overwhelmingly felid-related. Only a handful involve hyensas, so that's rare. In Africa, the lion's share, quite literally, are attributed to lions, with leopards a close second. Jaguars barely register any.
To burst any bubbling anticipation, I was not attacked while camping in the Westgate Community Conservancy, in part, perhaps, because I spent a night camping with one of the conservancy's rangers, a Samburu ex-moran, asking questions about general wilderness survival and how he managed himself amongst the wild of Samburu.
He carried a gun, presumably loaded, which inevitably tilted the conditions of my observations. But still, if you're camping out with a pastoralist ranger, especially in big cat country — which is to say almost anywhere in Kenya — don't miss the opportunity to learn something.
I won't part with all I learned from Peter. Having been a moran, his path from youth to soon-to-be elder involved many years living in manyattas without the protection of perimeter 'fencing' — the thorn-brush barriers, or enkangs, typically used to keep out predators and human thieves alike. Among young morans, bravery is a given, and fencing doesn't align with notions of valor.
Westgate requires campers to be accompanied by armed conservancy rangers, arranged through the conservancy’s headquarters (contact details below). I traveled there from Samburu National Reserve and the route was straightforward enough: follow the river and stick to the road. You’ll pass through a couple villages beyond the Samburu reserve boundary and someone will be around to point you in the right direction of needed.
There are a few campsites in Westgate. Belinda's is one of them, on the banks of the Ewaso Nyiro River. It’s basic as basic gets, with lush meadow clearings and space on the river bank for a few tents. Another option includes the Lorian campsite, a sandy flat off the river. Lots of trees and rocks around.
The Westgate Conservancy was established in 2004. It's home to zebra, elephants, lesser and greater kudus, gazelles and water bucks, among others. Its landscape is acacia-dominated, broken by rocky outcroppings with a dense riparian corridor tracing the Ewaso Nyiro. Westgate is part of the broader network of community conservancies established under the umbrella of the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT).
Unless you arrived to Africa yesterday or have been in a nearby cave for some time, you’ve seen a G3 firearm, pictured here. They’re ubiquitous. Hardly anyone's favorite firearm — heavy and awkward — they nonetheless turn up everywhere: with pastoralists, police, wildlife rangers, and in several places like this one, poachers.
Originally German-made for front-line infantry units, they started showing up in large numbers in East Africa in the 1970s after earlier deployments in southern African and Central and South American conflicts in the 1950s and 60s. Sudan, in particular, became a dumping ground in the 1980s during its second civil war, and some of those weapons later moved into the hands of LRA fighters in northern Uganda.
Today, they’re everywhere: Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan, you name it. Most are what are referred to as ‘legacy’ firearms: rifles that have been circulating from one conflict to the next, or one police armory to another, for decades. More recently, newer variants have appeared including a Saudi-made G3A4s, brought back by Darfuri RSF fighters sent to Yemen to fight Houthis. Similar to AK types, they’re durable and shoot straight enough, but chambered with a slightly larger round providing a much longer reach. So, while they’re not an ideal hunting rifle by any measure, they are commonly used to poach, including in the Rift Valley.
In some countries, including South Africa and its Kruger National Park, poaching parties will use G3s and AKs to provide a defensive perimeter around a primary shooter who's equipped with a hunting rifle like a .375 or .458 caliber. In Kenya, the ordnance manufacturing facility in Eldoret produces G3 ammo that can be found in nearly every police post throughout the North Rift, and has been found at poaching kill-sites. Any bullet casing with a ‘KOFC' stamp is from this location.
But back to camping. With business settled at the conservancy headquarters, Peter and I drove thirty minutes to the campsite. The conservancy doesn’t provide provisions for its rangers, so I gave Peter an extra one-man tent I had and he seemed content with beans and fried eggs. For Peter's time, it was KES 1000 a night and another 2000 bob for the camp spot. That seemed steep, but the conservancy didn’t appear to be booming with visitors, at least not low-budget self-driving ones.
Armed, these rangers aren't around to shoot anything, of course, but fire off a round or two skyward to get threatening animals scrambling in the opposite direction. This is rare, but people do stupid things, and if an animal attacks, bad fortune may dictate that it will die by a G3 round. It's just bad business when tourists get eaten, and most likely why you never hear much about it when it does happen (and why the reported numbers of predatory attacks in Africa might be on the lower end than what is actually the case.)
Rangers are helpful, of course, in guiding you to your campsite, and, once set up, guiding you out by foot for a frolic in the bush. We spotted a large bull elephant at a 20-yard distance, a greater Kudu, and some
other four-leggers. There were a lot of large cat prints, too.
Spending hours talking to Peter was illuminating. I’ve spent a lot of time with pastoralists, mostly groups in Uganda’s Karamoja region – the Jie, Dodoth, and Matheniko – and the Turkana in Kenya and Toposa in Eastern Equatoria, South Sudan. But seldom are those groups making a livelihood from rangering inside wildlife conservancies or reserves.
In Peter’s case, he had his hands full. His job sits at the uneasy intersection of keeping the peace between herders looking for grass — of which the conservancy has plenty — and maintaining a fragile ecosystem on which both wildlife and people depend. He spoke candidly about periods of tension: flare-ups between herders, community elders, and conservancy rangers, often triggered by grazing restrictions, access to water, or the simple fact of being told 'no' in. landscape where mobility has always been survival.
Listening to him, I was reminded of a few of the various articles and books I've read offering structural critiques of post-colonial conservation, and that seem to fit with what's going on in the Westgate Conservancy and the ultra luxury Sasaab tented resort. Northern Kenya conservancies, in large part, function as a modern day post-colonial enclosure: pastoral land is reclassified as conservation space, grazing is regulated through by-laws, and mobility reframed as a management problem rather than a livelihood and centuries-old survival strategy. Control, as many have argued, often shifts upward to conservancy boards, NGOs, donors and tourism operators, while communities are left to negotiate within rules they did not create and that govern their land!! Westgate seems to me to fit within this dynamic.
Some of the tension Peter described sits beneath the gravitational pull of the Sasaab luxury spas and cool swimming pools, which sponsor the conservancy and, by virtue of Sasaab's capital and leaseholds, inevitably looms large in local decision-making.
Across northern Kenya, conservancies tied to high-end tourism have been praised for revenue generation and wildlife recovery, while simultaneously criticised for concentrating authority, reshaping land use, and narrowing the space for pastoral negotiation and access — luxury 'eco-tourism' can often provide a benevolent face to mask deep inequalities in wealth, labor and power.
Sasaab is one of several properties operated by The Safari Collection, a company selling hyper luxury. Rates for a family suite (of 4 ppl) starts north of 800,000 KES a night — that's over $6,000 USD... per night in the high season. Perhaps Peter's village is producing the engraved up-cycled glass bottles with etched elephants that sell at the lodge for USD 100 apiece. If so, everyone’s winning, right? The contrast is stark and hard to reconcile with the language of 'community benefit.'
Conservation NGOs, private investors, and state actors — so it's been often reported —increasingly operate in alliance: stabilising land control, attracting donor funding, and depoliticising conflicts over land and livelihoods. In Samburu, this alliance structure is rather visible in that conservancies become buffers between both wildlife and people, but also between global capital and local livelihood. Rangers like Peter are left to manage that friction.
Unsurprisingly, guests paying top dollar don’t want wandering cattle or herds of goats ambling down to drink from the river below. They want what they imagine: a giraffe eating acacia leaves silhouetted by a blood-red sunset, and that image is absent people, unless they're wearing beaded headbands and holding a spear. So it falls to rangers to enforce grazing by-laws to keep the cows where the cows are meant to be, and let the tourists go where they expect to be. In practice, this places rangers, drawn from the same communities as the herders, squarely in the middle of disputes they did not create, but are tasked to help avoid or resolve. That place where the cows belong is on the other side of the river, and, again, hidden from view so guests aren't distracted while yoga-ing on their blissed-out zen perch above the muddy river.
At around 5 p.m., the lodge’s for-hire helicopter arrived unannounced and hovered low overhead. It didn’t circle once and leave. It lingered. The rotor wash flattened the grass, whipped branches into a frenzy, and sent dust spiralling across the riverbank and through our campsite. This was the same helicopter marketed as part of Sasaab’s luxury experience — designed for scenic flyovers and aerial romance — now hanging over a basic bush camp, a mechanised reminder of who's watching and who needs to be watched.
I stood on the dirt bank, half-blinded, half-amused, imagining how I must have looked through the helicopter’s binoculars: a disheveled camper standing exactly where he was permitted to be, but netheless somehow out of place — less a guest of the conservancy than an anomaly. The absurdity of it was hard to miss. So was, I hope, my response... my middle finger raised clearly through the downdraft sending the only message that felt appropriate: fuck off.
After all that — the by-laws, the helicopter, the choreography of who belongs where — I returned to the simple things. What I was most interested to talk to Peter about was the art of living among wild animals, and more directly, to learn something to help avoid solo-camping misfortune.
Human-wildlife conflict takes many forms, of course, and as a camper I accept an amount of (managed) risk. But here, in Kenya and across much of the continent, something deeper has settled over millennia into the shared social DNA of people and animals alike. This isn't wilderness as an empty canvas, but as a negotiated landscape, shared by proximity, habit and memory. This is what I wanted to learn more about, and why I was here.
The most biodiverse areas of Africa have always been places where people and non-domesticated carnivores occupy the same space. So what's Peter's method for keeping himself intact, and the wildlife uninterested in taking a chuck out of his leg?
It’s simple, really.
Lions, maintain eye contact, stand up, and slowly back up when it seems the lion's interest may be waning. If its interest isn’t waning, ask yourself how you managed to mess the situation up so badly.
Elephants: grab a handful of sand/dirt and stand your ground. If its eyes come within throwing distance, throw that handful of grit.
Rhinos: they can’t jump, so climb a tree or hide behind one.
Hyenas: do the threatening thing here, and make noise.
A standard rule applies to all, and that goes for anywhere – if there are cubs, calves, or whatever the offspring in question are called, take a moment to consider why you got out of your car in the first place.
In the end, a lot of it comes down to something also quite simple. When you've lived somewhere since childhood, you develop an intimate knowledge of the landscape and the animals that move through it. Knowledge is calibrated by seasons, weather, and repetition. None of it is particularly mysterious if you've been paying attention. But unless you're from this place, this place in this case, you don't know those rhythms. that's why you ask a local questions and follow their lead.
Some things, though — instincts, rules, whatever you want to call them — are more universal: common sense, awareness, knowing when to make noise and when not to (anyone curious should read up on “sleeping in a tent with a lion sniffing outside”), and not roasting meat over an open grill unless you’re actively looking for a confrontation. Follow these basic principles and, 99.9 percent of the time, you’ll be fine.
A New Yorker friend once told me a story about snorkelling off the coast of West Africa. When a barracuda appeared, his city sidewalk instincts kicked in: avoid all eye contact. Sensible enough — except that what works on barracudas and leopards doesn’t necessarily work on lions.
Before I came to Africa some 24 years ago, I thought camping out here was completely unhinged. I’d camped with coyotes and bears plenty of times, but that felt like a different category altogether. This? Forget it. Lions attacking everyone, hyenas carrying off small children, scavengers rolling in at night to gouge out my glazed-over eyeballs.
Of course, things can get out of hand from time to time. But most, and I mean most, of it is manageable — within reason, of course. Maybe that’s naivety talking, as my Kenyan wife might say, but the risks drop dramatically if you keep your wits in tact. For some people, those wits point them straight to Sasaab, where mimosas and terrycloth bathrobes do the heavy lifting. For others, they lead to a crackling fire after dark, a torch flashed now and then, and not wandering too far off to pee. Simple enough. You don’t need a G3 to survive the wild.
That’s how Peter and I spent the night: a big fire burning for hours, the stars overhead, and time to talk about more important things—like why Kikuyu women are bad news, what state education does and doesn’t do for pastoralism, and why Nairobi’s political elites rarely show genuine appreciation for the pastoralists they’re so happy to deploy as poster tribes for tourists abroad.
Still, no matter how comfortable I’ve become camping in Kenya, I’ll never convince my Luhya wife to join me. Her idea of wildlife is a road-runner chicken destined for a pot, and she’s convinced survival out here requires medieval chainmail and a phalanx of archers. As Peter put it, “the lions won’t eat you when they come around… but if it’s a crazy lion, it might.” So there you go. There may be only one way to find out whether a lion’s crazy or not.
Back at the campsite, I packed up and drove Peter back to the conservancy headquarters, greeted a few fellows I’d met the day before after helping them restart a stalled conservancy Land Cruiser, and then pressed north, deeper into the conservancy toward Wamba and Namunyak.
About forty-five minutes later, it was my engine that began misbehaving. I pulled over beneath an acacia, popped the bonnet, sorted the issue, and took a look around. It was a glorious spot: the Lenkiyio and Karisia ranges rising around me, Mount Kenya faint on the southern horizon, and the dry North Rift savannah rolling out in all directions.
I set up a chair, unfolded a camp table, and made coffee. An hour later I was in the hammock. Thirty minutes after that, asleep in the shade. By nightfall the tent was up again. I rummaged through my now Peter-enhanced survival box of ideas, stoked the fire, queued up a 1977 Grateful Dead show, cracked open a Tusker, and settled into an evening of uncomplicated bliss.
When I left the next morning, I Mpesa'd another KES 2,000 to Westgate Conservancy and drove on.
***
The contact to help arrange camping in the WCC is Chris @ 0726 549 109.
Bush camping in Westgate Community Conservancy Samburu Kenya
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