Nature Lover

Luke Bailes, the conservation giant behind Singita, has a 100year plan to save Africa’s wildlife. Joel Lovell takes a few bumpy f lights around the continent to find out what it looks like.

- Joel Lovell

On the western edge of the Serengeti, two dozen employees of the luxury-safari company Singita gathered in a circle beneath a giant fig tree. As corporate meeting spots go, this one, on the 350,000- acre Singita Grumeti reserve in northern Tanzania, wasn’t bad. About a hundred yards from where we sat, four giraffes and a small herd of zebras grazed in the midday heat. Less than a quarter mile up the red-dirt path we’d bounced along to get here, two lions slept in the shade of a rocky outcropping, a partially devoured wildebeest splayed between them. Monkeys chattered in the trees; small, impossibly kaleidoscopic birds—lilac-breasted rollers—flitted through the air.

Luke Bailes, the company’s founder and CEO, stood up to address his staff. There were lodge managers and chefs and conservationists and guides, most of them black Africans, many from local villages, who had been trained by Singita and had risen through the company. Bailes is tall and handsome in a patrician, head-on-a-coin kind of way. Anyone who knows anything about Africa will tell you how influential he is. In sub-Saharan Africa, tourism accounts for nearly a tenth of the GDP, and government ministers recognize that this is where a significant part of their economic future lies. African leaders call Bailes directly to explore whether he might open lodges in their countries. The previous day, on our flight from Zimbabwe to Tanzania, he described a recent meeting with Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, who lent him a helicopter to survey land for a possible lodge—to be opened in 2019—near Volcanoes National Park.