Meeting Nthabie: A Female Guide at Great Plains Conservation's Zarafa Camp

Every so often on safari, you meet someone who quietly steals your heart with their joy for what they do. For me, that person was Nthabie, our guide at Great Plains Conservation’s Zarafa Camp in Botswana. 

It is still rare to have a female guide, although Botswana has come on leaps and bounds. Great Plains has been hugely supportive and actively champions women in conservation. However, as Nthabie explained, many women still prefer to become rangers rather than guides. The women she has spoken to each had different reasons – from a reluctance to be out front leading guests to the feeling that guiding has always been a male role. For her, it was different. She felt it was her path and knew she had to be brave. “We need to be bold and show we can do it,” she told me. And she has done exactly that. 

Nthabie has been with Great Plains for more than seven years, working across almost all their camps in Botswana (apart from Sitatunga). She is currently mentoring five young women who hope to follow in her footsteps. 

Her love of the bush runs deep. As a little girl, she spent her days exploring the hills near her village, returning home to her father with her ‘finds’ – old bird’s nests, pieces of bark, animal droppings – and he would explain what each was, along with the stories behind them. That sense of curiosity has never left her. You see it in the way she studies her surroundings through binoculars, quietly anticipating what might unfold next. 

After studying business at university and beginning a very different career path, a friend of a friend offered her the chance to volunteer with a mobile safari company. She loved this time, especially being out on game drives, and discovered she had a natural eye for spotting wildlife, even if she did not yet know every name. Before long, she packed up, moved to Maun and enrolled on a six-month guiding course. She was the only woman in a class of 34. From there, she joined Great Plains and began her training. It takes around two years to qualify, depending on the level, but she persevered. Today, while Great Plains has several exceptional female guides, she is currently the only one guiding for them in Botswana.  

During my time at Zarafa, she gave us some of the most memorable sightings of the trip, and her love for what she does was evident throughout. We watched a pride of eight lions at play, a lioness with two tiny cubs suckling and three young males – not brothers but bonded for life – sparring in the rain. Then, just when we thought the day could not improve, she returned to a jackal den we had visited the day before without success. This time, we were rewarded with four tiny pups darting in and out, playing in the open. None of this would have happened without her determination and the calm, intuitive way she reads the bush. 

Ask her favourite animal and she will tell you it is the baboon, her totem. She could spend hours watching them, fascinated by their intelligence and the way they solve problems. 

What struck me most was the pride with which she spoke about Great Plains’ conservation and community work. From rewilding land once used for farming and returning it to wildlife, to building schools and supporting education programmes in remote areas, the organisation’s work extends far beyond the camps themselves. It has created meaningful opportunities for local people, especially women like Nthabie, through training, mentoring and conservation careers that make a lasting impact. 

Explore Botswana with cazenove+loyd

Nthabie is one of those people who reminds you how powerful it is to trust your instincts and back yourself. Brave, curious and quietly confident, she represents the next generation of female guides in Botswana – and is a wonderful ambassador for Great Plains.