Background :: Blythe Loutit
A tribute
Namibia’s desert-adapted rhino and Blythe Loutit - the one is not conceivable without the other. Just as she fought for the rhinos with spirit, courage and humour, Blythe fought cancer before passing away peacefully on 14 June 2005.
The allure of the desert
Blythe Loutit came to conservation and rhino advocacy through the circuitous route of avocation and marriage. Born in South Africa in 1940, she spent her early years on her parents’ farm in Natal. Blythe eventually began to study botanical art at the Botanical Institute in South Africa. Thus she developed a skill which gave her professional direction later when she and her husband Rudi decided to settle in South-West Africa. In 1974 the Loutits settled in Windhoek, then the administrative capital of South-West Africa, where Blythe worked as a freelance illustrator for the Windhoek State Herbarium. Rudi joined the Directorate of Nature Conseravtion and they moved to Etosha National Park. Two years later, in 1978, they were transferred to the Skeleton Coast, and the first inklings of Blythe’s later all-consuming involvement with black rhino conservation were aroused.
Problems on the Skeleton Coast
The Kaokoveld, comprised of Kaokoland and Damaraland and wedged between the Skeleton Coast and Etosha National Park, was deproclaimed as a game reserve in 1970 as a result of the Odendaal Report, which aimed at creating South Africa-style homelands in that area. But in addition to making room for homelands, the deproclamation also opened up the area for hunting and poaching and thus to massive devastation of native wildlife, including elephant and rhino.
When the Loutits came to the Skeleton Coast, there was general awareness of the slaughter of rhinos and elephants in the area, and conservation tempers were rising. But it appears to have taken Blythe Loutit and kindred spirits to do something about it and to bring the flexible energy of the private advocate to the endangered rhino’s cause. Initially her most enraged kindred spirits were her husband, Rudi, the government’s nature conservator in the area, and the late Ina Britz, wife of geologist Colin Britz, who worked for Consolidated Diamond Mines which is still a powerful economic presence in Namibia today.
Together they enlisted the help and goodwill of others and founded the Namibia Wildlife Trust in order to help stop the wanton poaching. It was very much a collaborative effort among governmental and non-governmental sources, the media, and geological personnel. It also was very much an ad hoc effort. Ina lobbied the local government authorities, and Blythe went to Cape Town and, with the help of newspaper editor Tony Heard and journalist Margaret Jacobsohn, presented a formal complaint to the South African Parliament regarding the slaughter of elephants and rhino. With her husband’s support, Blythe also began extensive fieldwork and research into the feeding habits of the desert-dwelling black rhinos and later co-published the results in a professional journal.
SRT’s secrets of success
In 1984 SRT, under the auspices of the Wildlife Society, began the awesome job of raising funds and soliciting support. “Support came slowly but from every conceivable area. In the beginning our biggest fund-raisers were the schoolchildren. We distributed thousands of ’rhino friend’ patches to schools, and the children then sold them for R2 apiece. I travelled all over southern Africa, and it was interesting to see that the most dedicated support came from poor schoolchildren. It was almost as if they could identify with the rhino. We raised 160,000, and the money for our first sturdy vehicles was raised by schoolchildren in Natal.”