Adrian Gardiner: The visionary who pioneered rewilding at reserves in the Eastern Cape, isn’t done yet

For decades, Adrian Gardiner has led the charge in rewilding farm land in the Eastern Cape, but he’s still chasing bigger ambitions. His vision is to transform the province into a wildlife jewel, stretching from Plettenberg Bay to the Karoo. In this interview with BizNews about the newly released book The Man Who Changed a Landscape: The Adrian Gardiner Story by Dean Allen, Gardiner recounts his journey and the challenges he faced in realising his vision. It began with a 2,500-acre farm near Port Elizabeth, where he overcame deep scepticism to establish Shamwari, a malaria-free Big Five reserve. Shamwari became a blueprint for 16 similar reserves across the Eastern Cape. Inspired by figures like David Attenborough, the 82-year-old Gardiner’s optimism remains unwavering. Gardiner’s ambition that he shares with other private and public reserve owners includes the creation of an Eastern Cape National Park even larger than the Kruger National Park. He is also determined to help see the end of captive lion breeding, highlighting the staggering reality that 8,000 lions remain in captivity for their bones and canned hunting. Wildlife, Gardiner says is South Africa’s biggest asset, but the most rewarding part of his journey has been the lives he has managed to change. – Linda van Tilburg.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.The auditorium doors will open for BNIC#2 on 10 September 2025 in Hermanus. For more information and tickets, click here..Watch here.Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview.Linda van Tilburg (00:00.01) Few people have the vision and determination to transform desolate land into thriving ecosystem, but Adrian Gardiner is one of them. He has just released a book written by Dean Allen on his journey of rewilding the Eastern Cape. We're really honoured today to have Adrian Gardiner in the BizNews studio with us. Hi Adrian, so lovely to meet you.Adrian Gardiner (00:00.31)Well, BizNews studio and the things that you post, I just can't wait every morning to open them to see what's new on it. It's just something I think as the initiative is as good as what I did in rewilding, because you are keeping us all wildly alive during the day with all the news that's picked up all over the world. So, thank you for that and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you and tell you a little bit about my journey.Linda van Tilburg (00:00:52) Let's talk about that. Can you pinpoint a specific moment that convinced you to move forward with turning land into a wildlife destination despite its bleak state?Adrian Gardiner (00:01:00)Thank you for that, that it's really the history of how I grew up. I was born in Zambia, then I went to school in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and then went to the University of Cape Town. That was many years ago, 1962. My first thing, we're obviously working for SPAR here, and then we created a cash and carry wholesale business, which we sold about five years. Then I had a bit of money, and I said, now I want to go on my own.So, I went on my own and started in building swimming pools, which developed into construction and road works and all sorts of things. And in those days, you know, the tax laws were quite lenient. If you made money in one business, you could put it into another. I was always keen to go farming because of my background in Zimbabwe. There, my dad was in charge of five game ranches, which were owned by an English company, one of which was 365,000 acres, 150,000 hectares which had its own game reserve and cattle and sheep and whatever else. So, I had it in my blood to, you know, this business of nature. We used the tax advantage to go into horse racing, and I was in the breeding side. My partner at that stage, we had a very successful crane and construction business. He was more involved in the racing side, and I wanted to be involved in the breeding side. So, we started a stud farm in Plettenberg Bay, and everybody laughed at us and said it would never work. That isn't the traditional breeding area for horses. But anyway, we had the sort of luck that sometimes you have when we had eight Group One winners in the year, horse of the year, filly of the year, and sprinter of the year. That sort of put us on the map. Then the whole tax structure changed, and I got an offer to buy the farm, and we managed to put our horses into a public company, which Sydney Press had started, who was the founder of Edgars.So, that's how got out of the horse business and now had some money. I was almost 50 years old, and I said, I want my patch of Africa. I went back to Zimbabwe, and I went to the traditional areas of South Africa. I realised soon and thankfully met somebody who said, go and have look at a farm nearby Port Elizabeth and I looked at that. It was only two and a half thousand acres, 1200 hectares and then I decided to read the history and thank goodness, a man called Skead had really documented what was here when the 1820 settlers came in. And you know what? If you look at what was here and the number of species and the carrying capacity on the land, the Kruger Park should have been here because it was totally sad that everything here had virtually been knocked down to 11 elephants were left. Otherwise, all the lions were goneEverything was gone and that was the start of Addo Elephant Park, where they kept those 11 elephants and they started. Then, I looked at this farm and I thought to myself, you know what, if I can just get enough farms next to me, and it wasn't long before I had about 12,000 hectares, and I thought to myself, now I need to create a private nature reserve and put back what was here, the Big Five. Everybody again laughed at me and said it would never work. It took ten years to get them all back because they had to get the breeding up before you could really release the lion so they could hunt and everything. By the year 2000, it was, it was working. So, we started it in 1989 when I bought the first farm and that was, you know, in troubled South Africa. Opened in 1992 and then obviously freedom and everything came in 1994. I can tell you now that my history has taught me that unless you get proper endorsements from the right people. Things won't work. So, as I said to you earlier, the negativity of the surrounding farmers and neighbours who saying this would never work. So, I got hold of Dr. Ian Player, the brother of Gary Player, and I would call him the Attenborough of Southern Africa. He saved the white rhino from extinction. He was really head of all the parks in Natal and I got him to come and see what I was doing. He looked at it and he said, we were one of the first private enterprises that are turning abused land, cattle and sheep into game and he endorsed what I was doing. Then he introduced me to incredible conservationists all over the world and then it really started to work. That's how we came to start Shamwari. Shamwari is a Shona word from where I came from in Zimbabwe, which is for friend and Port Elizabeth was known as a friendly city. So, I called it Shamwari.Linda van Tilburg (00:05:53)Well, many people doubted your vision. So, what kept you pushing forward, even though some people said you were crazy?Adrian Gardiner (00:6:00) I think that the publicity that we were getting, and the endorsements and I was starting to get real film stars were coming, John Travolta, Brad Pitt, Tiger Woods and all sorts of people coming to us and I was making the most of that. The vision grew by the endorsements that these people were giving me and the experience that they had, because we were the first Big Five reserve in Southern Africa to be malaria free.So, my competitors up in the Northern provinces said, you shouldn't advertise negatives and saying you are malaria- free. So, I said, that's no problem. I'll tell them I can get free malaria if they go to you. That got them a bit roused. So, we had a lot of, I call them specialties that nobody else had. We had our own individual, the number of species, the people that were coming to see us, people that endorsed us. That gives you this sort of great confidence about really wanting to be a success. I think the proof of the success is that there are now 16 equivalents of Shamwari in the Eastern Cape. I sold Shamwari in 2008 to Dubai World and the reason for that was that they wanted to take my model, to sell them 70%, wanted to take my model all over Southern Africa.So, I got really involved with them in Rwanda. I'm still in Rwanda, in Zimbabwe. We went and looked in Senegal where they had interests and all the rest of it and then 2008 came and you know, the world collapsed, and they changed their whole outlook about where they were going to spend money and everything. So, I got out of it then, but I kept my lodge, called Founders Lodge with traversing rights over Shamwari. So, we call that Where it all Began.So, if you anybody is considering coming to the Eastern Cape for the first time you should come and see Founders Lodge because we've got the museum there of all the people that came there, the history of it and everything is small. It's intimate. It's seven rooms and I have a private carriage there that I used to go around South Africa in and I've just parked it there that people can spend a night in. In the year 2000 when I had, you know, obviously released the lions, we had five properties in our portfolio. We had the Great Saxon Hotel, which I opened in Johannesburg. We had Steenberg, the winery and hotel there. We had a Lake Pleasant on the Garden Route. I had a great property at the Vic Falls, Stanley and Livingston and I had a property called Halyards in Port Alfred. Now I wanted to create a brand and then again, my team came up with these names, the normal Platinum Collection, this, that, and all the rest of it and said, no, I'm not interested. So, I got Ian Player to help me.Ian was staying with me, and he came down in the morning and breakfast and he said, you asked me last night to think of a name. He said, I think I've got a name for you and he thought about the people who'd influenced him in his life, mainly they were Magqubu Ntombela, his guide and mentor in his parks in the Hluhluwe–Umfolozi Game Reserve in Kwazulu-Natal and then he thought of the Bushmen because he was very close to Sir Laurens van der Post, whom he introduced me to. Sir Laurens was very involved with the Bushmen.They used to be hunters, traveller hunter, they'd move from camp to camp, the Bushman to find their food. Wherever they went, there would be a praying mantis there and the mantis looked over them and he said, ‘you let your properties because they're also diverse and far from you, call it the Mantis Collection, which we created, and we then created the acronym ‘Man and nature together is sustainable.’ It's been a really great journey and the positivity of it all is really related to the people that have followed. The best example that I give to people, and when I put those 15 farms together, which made up about 20,000 hectares of Shamwari, is there were 16 people employed. Today, between Shamwari and founders, we employ over 500 people on those farms. That's without the multiplier effect of the car hire, the transport of getting in there, of air tickets, of food and everything else. So, it just shows you that wildlife done properly, like it's done in East Africa and other parts of Africa, that's our biggest asset is our wildlife. But you've got to get community endorsement. Ian Player always said to me, without the community, believe me, conservation will not work. Because if they don't understand the value of it, they want the land, they want the animals there to eat.It's a journey that we've still got a long way to go with and unfortunately, there are a lot of foundations that are now backing the work that we do. I got Ian Player to bring the Wilderness Foundation to the Eastern Cape where its head office is and run by a great guy called Andrew Muir.Linda van Tilburg (11:10.464) If there's a single moment that you, or a moment that you could single out about what you've done, what would it be? Would you be able to pinpoint something specific that you think that, yeah, I did that well.Adrian Gardiner (11:24:00) Yeah, I think that's quite an interesting question is that just recently we launched a book called The Man Who Changed the Landscape. It's sort of a history of what happened there, and I think that it took a long time to do and Dean Allen, an author, did it for me and interviewed people all over the world that were involved. And I think by just getting the story out there of what we've done is, and we had a great book launch with all the people that had been involved with me over the last 30 years or so, and the journeys that they've come and how it's changed their livesSo, I think the thing that's impacted mostly on me is just the lives that I've managed to change. For example, at one launch came there, there was a barman that worked at a hotel in Plettenberg Bay. I took him out of that, and he became a head ranger, and he works in the maintenance department now. He's a changed guy and there many of those. Most importantly for me is which I haven't mentioned is that I was lucky enough to find out that there was a university in Holland called, it was called Stenden. I got them to come and open a university in South Africa. I wanted them to do it in Grahamstown's famous for its education. We did it in Port Alfred and we created a franchise from Stenden in the Netherlands and it’s the only university in the world where you can do a semester on wildlife conservation or lodge management and that sort of thing and It's been successfulWe just celebrating our 20th year. I did have equity, and I gave it up and said I rather the profit was used to give bursaries to kids and that sort of thing. So, I managed to put through a lot of disadvantaged kids through that and the lives that they've changed so I think that's the sort of thing that really answers your question is what are the moments that I can really reflect on.And the moments are obviously when we released the lions brought them back after being out of here for 150 years, bringing back some of the other species. But I think more importantly is really changing the lives of people who would never have an opportunity to have an education, be involved in conservation and to learn about what this planet is and how important it is that we try and save it.Linda van Tilburg (13:53:00)What do you want future generations to take from your journey?Adrian Gardiner (14:07:00) This is a very interesting project that we're busy with at the moment. Again, I'm being laughed at and most people think it won't work. London, I think is famous for Hyde Park, New York for Central Park. So, we've created a game park between Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage or as they now call it Gqeberha and Kariega, 3000 hectares.We'll be rewilding animals, so animals that are in captivity that come to us. We've just done a very successful rewilding of some cheetah, and we now want to create what we call a land safe haven. We've had lots of meetings and as I've been involved with the ministerial task team, because I'm sure a lot of people don't know that the 8,000 lions in South Africa in captivity for breeding for bone purposes and canned hunting. So. we're trying to eliminate that. that's a project that we're very busy with. It's a road that we're traveling, and we've been successful. We've done our first rewilding of cheetah. We've got some elephant there. We've got the buffalo there. The only one that I can't put there, I think, is rhino because we know the poaching, but I'm right next door to a community and we've got them really involved in all the work that we're doing there. So, we will see.Linda van Tilburg (15:28:00)The book charts your journey, but it seems your journey is just going on and on?Adrian Gardiner (15:36:00) The sadness of it is something crops up every day and we soon realise that there's still more to do. So, like my friend Ian Player and many others, look at David Attenborough. He's turning 99 now and he's still working and still trying to save the planet. I think the inspiration for my life is to see the lives that I'm changing and the people that really want to make sure that this journey continues. That’s the only way it is, is I've got to be able to influence people. Fortunately, my families are very keen to see that it happens, but there's a lot of work to do because the human, we meant to be the most intelligent animal in the world, is not making it easy for us. We really are struggling, but we've got to teach them the value, especially in Africa. I mean, where else in the world do you have what we've got? Forget about our gold and platinum and all the rest of it, we've got this incredible asset of wildlife.Linda van Tilburg (16:36.824) Does the government realise that? Do you have a good relationship with the government?Adrian Gardiner (16:36:00) You know, they've got other priorities, obviously. But, certainly with the ministerial team that are involved in conservation and parks and that sort of thing, we work hard with. But I understand them, when you consider that just in our province alone, we've got a 42 % unemployment, our thing is not really top of the agenda. But we try and get a message across. It's not easy. It's not easy in a lot of places. The politics is different. They've got different agendas. They work on things where they get votes. I've come to realise that in life. So, I just do what I've got to do and try and change people's thinking.Linda van Tilburg (17:21:00) This vision that you have for the Eastern Cape, what would you like the Eastern Cape eventually to be or this National Eastern Cape Park that you are envisioning?Adrian Gardiner (19:50:00) Unfortunately, I don't believe I'll see it in my lifetime because it's quite a difficult one. We're having a lot of discussions with obviously different farmers to drop their fences and see if we can create this corridor from Plettenberg bay to Graaff-Reinet. And if we can get that corridor created and we've looked at it all, we've got all the farms, they're written down, it's possible. But to do that would be something, it'll be one and a half, if not twice the size of Kruger.Can you imagine it? But you know, the Wilderness foundation and other foundations are involved. They're active in it. They want it to happen, and I think that it will happen, but unfortunately, I don't think I will see it, because it's not an easy one, but the discussions are happening. They've employed people full time to influence it. We've got, as I said to you, Global Humane, I worked with Tusk over years, all these great international institutions, just to get them to all get on our back and just say that what we are doing or trying to do is very important and we've got to make sure that all the communities are behind us. That is a vision that I'd love to see because then I think that is a legacy. That's the real legacy. We've created the kindergarten. We've still got to get to high school.Linda van Tilburg (18:58:00) And the book will be available worldwide?Adrian Gardiner (19:01:00) So, Paul (my son) is bringing a whole lot back to London and then we just working out how we get it. But I think it's just the start.

Adrian Gardiner: The visionary who pioneered rewilding at reserves in the Eastern Cape, isn’t done yet

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