Three animal encounters brought the same message: ‘You are the Earth; you are from the Earth…open your heart and listen…this is where you belong’.
By Lorraine Kearney
Tinolla Rodgers has Namibia under her skin. In her blood, even. She was born here, and it is here that she found her life’s purpose, after spending decades out of the country. “I’ve always known that if you find your purpose, life just happens. There’s this natural flow that guides you. And everything slots in. These little dots start connecting,” she says.
Her’s is a life created around lodges and remote wilderness areas. Her father built lodges in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve in South Africa; her training as a hotelier – and her subsequent career – was in small bush lodges, from Zambia to Sabi Sands to Tanzania and back to Namibia, where she is the owner and managing director of African Monarch Lodges which includes Nambwa Tented Lodge and Kazila Island Lodge and The Sijwa Project, her pride, in Bwabwata National Park.
“I didn’t want to be in big hotels. I wanted to be in the smaller lodges, where guests weren’t just a room number. Where I could build a rapport with them and we could make a difference in their lives.”
The Bush Is Where The Magic Happens
Always in very remote locations, where you’ve got to think on your feet all the time and you have “these surreal, natural settings to create those wild magical moments for our guests. And that’s my passion. You know, it’s all about that guest experience.”
Along the way, she met Dusty Rodgers – Captain Caprivi as he was known in the region. Together they built African Monarch Lodges in the remote and wild Bwabwata National Park. “I realised that we had to be more than what we [were]. Not just these five-star destinations in the heart of KAZA. That is when I discovered my purpose in this life.”
There are several prongs to this purpose: conservation, community and conservancy. It includes nurturing, training and upskilling staff, who are mostly from the local communities; going beyond tourism; and being custodians of this piece of land. It’s a piece of land far from any of the amenities that are standard in cities: no running water, no electricity and no waste management systems.
The Dream
And that’s where the Sijwa Project steps in.
“We decided to create a centre [where] we employ local community members, and we train them as artisans to recycle and upcycle all our waste.”
They sought the blessing of Chief Mayuni, the traditional chief of the Mafwe tribe and Mayuni Conservancy Traditional Authority, and then got to work setting up a dream.
“We needed to prove to the chief and his elders that every promise I had made in front of them all could be delivered. Which we did over and above our initial promise,” Tinolla says.
Promises like: “We will recycle paper; we will take it through a worm farm and create a permaculture centre. We will take tin cans, melt them down and turn them into jewellery pieces and artefacts.”
The recycling workshops were built out of plastic bottles, and the project started with four ladies and two greenhouse men, and sewing shopping bags and Covid masks. This was followed by the glass recycling workshop, “where we crush our glass and melt it down and turn it into these beautiful glass beads”, Tinolla says.
Today, 33 people are employed at the Sijwa Project, and every guest booking includes a sustainability levy that goes directly into the project, of which 12%, plus 12% of all product sales, goes to the local conservancies with whom African Monarch has joint venture partnerships.
It includes an organic permaculture greenhouse, a mushroom farm, a free-range egg scheme, an artisanal skills training centre, a vocational residency, a carpentry workshop, a beehive project to combat the ongoing human-elephant conflict, a box to blaze workshop (where boxes are recycled into ecobricks) and an indigenous tree nursery.
Resilience and Determination
It’s thanks to Tinolla’s tenacity and commitment to seeing her vision through. That vision is multi-faceted: sustainability; environmental awareness; conservation; responsible use of resources; custodianship of the land; hospitality and tourism.
“Everyone should understand that they have the ability to make a real difference in this world,” she says. “Everyone. No matter how small that act is. My start at the Sijwa Project was a tiny act.”
Defining Moments
There have been three, she says.
The first came on a walk with guests around the then virgin Kazile Island. “I was a consultant to African Monarch Lodges, though Dusty and I were dating. And this buffalo charged out of the bush; myself and the guests scattered into the bushes but the buffalo charged after him.
“We all believed that that was the end of him and I remember feeling a sense of loss … Then the next moment through the dust clouds he called out my name and I realised he was alive.
“That was the defining moment. I gave up my own business and joined Dusty full time at African Monarch Lodges.”
The second was just as terrifying: “I was sitting with my back against a tree where Dusty’s ashes are buried. A Mozambican spitting cobra crawled up between the rain tree and my back.”
She pushed her shoulders and head against the tree so it wouldn’t slide between her shoulder blades. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as the tail started disappearing behind her. “It came around after what seemed like forever and crawled underneath my bent knees and into the bush. Once it was gone, I went into shock. I started trembling. But I knew immediately that this was just my connection to this Earth once again.
“Those were profound moments in my life, two encounters with animals, and I think there were only positive elements. They changed my life. I knew then that I had the strength, the protection from this Earth to see the rest of my purpose through in this remote part of Namibia without Dusty.”
If she needed another message, it came in the form of a sting by a Parabuthus granulatus. It put her out of action for some time, allowing her to take stock and plot a way forward, her way forward.
“It’s been a nerve-racking journey,” she says. But ultimately a wonderful one.
What Are You Waiting For
Tinolla’s three words that describe Bwabwata National Park: authentic, raw, wild.
