Poaching in Africa: rhino conservation in Namibia It's Brell's job to prevent that happening - he works for the Save the Rhino Trust (SRT), which monitors and protects the last free-ranging population of black rhino in the world - and it's the self-appointed task of the man occupying the co-pilot's seat, the aforementioned Charlie, to help underwrite that challenge through guaranteed year-on-year funding. Mayhew outside the camel team's field office Charlie is Charles Mayhew MBE, an impeccably English gent with a modest manner that belies his steeliness and vision - not to mention a rather racy backstory. In 1990 he set up the charitable Tusk Trust and now, at the age of 51, he is a big beast in the field of conservation fundraising. In the course of six days in Namibia I got to know the man and his work as we visited two non-profit organisations, the SRT and the AfriCat Foundation, that are partially funded by Tusk money. The annual amounts involved are not huge - a fraction of what a top Premiership footballer earns in a day - but they go a long way in Africa and, crucially, Tusk is in it for the long haul. These initiatives also harness tourism to the protection of wildlife - they are safari camps as well as research and conservation centres and if you book nights there you know you're directly aiding the conservation fight. That fight has never been tougher. "Tusk was set up at the height of the ivory trade," said Mayhew. Then there was a period of relative peace. But sadly in the last few years there's been this tsunami of poaching. You need clout to stand up against the increasingly sophisticated international crime syndicates behind the killing and mutilating of big game. Tusk boasts the heaviest of heavy lifters, Prince William, as its royal patron ("We got a phone call out of the blue. Would we be interested in being the beneficiary of a polo match he was doing?") and counts among its supporters a host of actors, aristocrats and celebrities - as well as readers of this newspaper, which selected Tusk as one of its Christmas charities in 2003. Mayhew with Prince William at Port Lympne Wild Animal Park last year (Getty Images) Currently Tusk supports more than 50 projects, spread across 17 African countries, dedicated to conserving endangered species and supporting and educating local communities. Yet the man behind all this good work does not even have a Wikipedia entry. This is our loss as Mayhew's life has been pretty jam-packed. As a financial consultant he used to tell Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones what to do with his cash and if you push him, over a sundowner or two, he will admit to having been, variously, a disc jockey, a racing driver ("I was a complete petrolhead") and the only English-speaking deckhand on a Norwegian tanker as he worked his passage from Liverpool to Australia. But it was sub-Saharan Africa that got under his skin, changed his life. After an initial working visit, in 1984 he organised an ambitious trans-Africa expedition of 33 people that set out in convoy from the Motor Show. In Kenya they got involved in conservation work and their efforts were recorded in a Channel 4 documentary that he described as "a bit like a cross between Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here!." The Mayhew/Tusk story gets more complicated - he subsequently produced a feature film, Lost in Africa, about the trade in elephant tusks - but essentially he fell in love with Africa, and the consummation of that passion is the Tusk Trust. Much of his time is now spent in boardrooms or at charity fundraisers on both sides of the Atlantic, wearing suits, shaking hands and smiling. To be stripped down to polo shirt, shorts and deck shoes - to be flying at 9,000ft over surreal Namibian desertscapes - felt to him like bunking off. Which accounted for his grin as we touched down on an airstrip of grit and sand and unfolded our limbs from the cockpit (Tammy stayed on board). We had arrived at Desert Rhino Camp, the field headquarters of the SRT, set amid flat-topped and conical mountains. Surrounding it is a concession of nearly 10,000 square miles of desert wilderness - bigger than that cliché of comparative measurement, Wales - patrolled by teams of SRT trackers, including one unit that uses camels. It's not a place you'd wish to get lost in - a tourist on a driving holiday recently did just that and was found dead 13 days later - but it is a haven for the desert-adapted black rhino, diceros bicornis bicornis, a subspecies found almost exclusively in Namibia. One of the tracking teams looking for black rhino When discussing populations of threatened species it's not a good idea to mention specific numbers - which are potentially useful to those of hostile intent - but in the 1970s and 1980s we can say that 95 per cent of Africa's rhino population was wiped out by poachers. In this corner of Namibia there were thought to be few black rhino left but numbers have quadrupled over 30 years. A success story, then - but the SRT is not complacent. In October 2011 the first incidence of rhino poaching in this area for 17 years was recorded when a calf was caught in a snare, its horn removed and body cut up. "The trap was put up in a rhino path," said Simson Uri-Khob, who supervises the SRT's tracking teams. We found him maybe a month later. Over four or five days, reckoned Simson, the baby rhino weakened and finally died of pain and starvation. His mother, meanwhile, stood by, helpless. The cow came back and back. You could see she'd been wandering around there. This story momentarily silenced conversation over a dinner of oryx steaks followed by cheesecake, softly illuminated by gas lamps. The next morning we were up with the sun to join other guests on patrol with one of the tracking teams. For two hours we bumped through boulder fields and plains dotted with euphorbia damarana bushes, crossed dry ravines and followed cliffs that looked like crumbling palaces. Finally we drove up a bluff overlooking a green riverbed. A rhino - the SRT has named him Ben - was browsing among the foliage below. I handed Charlie my binoculars. He stared down and one of the most beleaguered species on earth stared back, favouring his English benefactor with an incurious, primeval gaze. When Tusk started, said Charlie, conservation thinking was dominated by a "fortress mentality" - it was all about fencing Ben in and protecting him at all costs. But as I got to understand the problems more, I got to understand the intrinsic link between human development and conservation. Now conservationists operate more "holistically," involving and benefiting local communities in economies of high unemployment and pitifully low wages. The SRT employs local people, pays communities to use their land as a wildlife reserve and relies on "eyes and ears" on the ground to inform it of poaching threats. At the AfriCat Foundation, 90 minutes east by light aircraft from Desert Rhino Camp, the challenge is how to enable humans and big cats to live peaceably alongside each other - an especially vexatious question in a country with a quarter of the world's cheetah population, of which 90 per cent live on farmland and are automatically perceived as a threat to cattle. AfriCat, and the safari business that supports it, Okonjima, are run by the charismatic Hanssen family - a sort of khaki Swiss Family Robinson, bursting with good looks and conviction. Over 20 years they have sought to persuade farmers into a major thought-shift on large carnivores - don't just shoot, build better fences and kraals - while rescuing more than 1,000 cats from farmers" traps, bait and bullets. Many cats have been returned to the wild while others, unable to fend for themselves, are cared for in enclosures. These - currently including four cheetahs cut from the stomach of their mother, who was shot dead by a farmer - are all ambassadors for the Hanssens" work. "Every single donor [to the AfriCat Foundation] started as a tourist," Donna Hanssen told us. Cheetah and leopard, observed in the wild, are indeed persuasively beautiful and mysterious. In the 50,000-acre reserve at Okonjima, Charlie and I watched as three cheetah hunted a baby zebra - the slow start, the silent momentum, the blur and dust, the squeal of the prey. And the inner pang of guilty relief (from this bunnyhugger at least) when I realised the zebra had been nicked but escaped, its parents having fended off the cheetah. This was bush footage, played out in real place and time. But it was no more thrilling a sight than the expressions of wonder on the rows of faces behind us. For we were sharing our open vehicle with a group of local schoolchildren, who represented the other strand of AfriCat's work. Each month some 40 children pass through on environmental education programmes. Most of the children we met hadn't seen cheetah before. Some had - but only as vermin, shot dead and slung in the back of a pick-up. Now they were learning to understand and respect them. "Investing in the youth of Africa has got to be part of the answer," Charlie Mayhew had told me when we were discussing what the future might hold, and he was as captivated by the children at AfriCat as they were by the ritual of life and death they witnessed with us. Mayhew describes himself as an optimist - "a glass three-quarters- full type of person" - and visiting projects such as SRT and AfriCat, it is easy to feel momentarily uplifted. But the truth is that the forces of enlightened conservation in Africa face unprecedented levels of corruption, greed and ruthless savagery. "If you look at the trends and extrapolate the figures, it's not a very encouraging picture," Charlie admitted as we ate a breakfast of "bushman's omelette" (a three-egg affair, with everything in it) following the cheetah hunt. What keeps me sane is that project by project I can see real advances and success. So sane did he feel, at that moment, that he ordered himself another bushman's omelette. Essentials The Tusk trail Desert Rhino Camp, home of Save the Rhino Trust, and Okonjima, home of the AfriCat Foundation, are both bookable through the Ultimate Travel Company (020 3582 1289, www.theultimatetravelcompany.co.uk). More information www.savetherhinotrust.org, www.africat.org, www.okonjima.com, www.tusk.org