New film follows Namibian trackers searching for desert ‘ghost elephants’

Three Ju/’hoansi trackers from northeastern Namibia are the stars of a new National Geographic documentary by award-winning director Werner Herzog.

‘Ghost Elephants’ follows South African naturalist Steve Boyes on his search for a mythical population of giant elephants in the eastern highlands of Angola.

To find the elephants, National Geographic enlisted the help of three Ju/’hoansi master trackers – Cwi G/aq’o, Kobus and Cwi /kunta – from Namibia’s Nyae Nyae conservancy in the Otjozondjupa region.

“They’re the last trackers alive that can identify an elephant by its footprint,” Boyes says about the trackers in the trailer for the film.

Nyae Nyae conservancy manager Kashe Gcao tells The Namibian that the recognition of the three trackers is a big achievement for the community.

“It means a lot to the Ju/’hoansi people,” he says.

G/aq’o, Kobus and
/kunta are formally accredited indigenous master trackers.

“They hunt according to what they’ve learnt from their elders. Seeing them in this film motivates us young people to learn from them,” Gcao says.

He says all three trackers take young people along when they hunt to pass knowledge on to the younger generation.

Early reviews of the film say the expertise of G/aq’o, Kobus and /kunta are superior to the high-tech cameras, drones, and data in the hunt for the elephants.

“Their ancestral knowledge forms the film’s quiet backbone,” one reviewer says.

Boyes has been searching for the so-called Angolan ‘ghost’ elephants for decades. He believes them to be descendants of a bull killed by a Hungarian hunter in 1955, which is on display in the Smithsonian Museum in the United States.

“I don’t even know if these elephants exist,” Boyes says in the trailer for the film, which will be available for streaming on Hulu and Disney+ on Sunday.

Gcao says there has been no communication yet with the Nyae Nyae conservancy about showing the film to the community.

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