In 2020 the guests stopped coming. Camps across Kenya went dark, staff went home, and the money that safari tourism normally pushes into the land simply stopped. In Olderkesi, on the south-eastern edge of the Maasai Mara, the lease payments went out anyway. Cottar’s Safaris had no arrivals and no revenue, and it kept paying Maasai landowners for land it could not use.
“We never stopped paying the leases. If we had, how could the Maasai landowners ever trust us, or trust the biodiversity lease model as a viable long-term use of their land, again? Funding biodiversity leases is a permanent commitment for us. Without that continuity, the land and wildlife could ultimately be lost.”
Calvin Cottar
That decision tells you more about where safari is going than any new lodge opening. The Cottars have been outfitting safaris in East Africa since 1919, longer than any other family on the continent, and they made their name as pioneers: among the first to put clients in motorcars, among the first to swap rifles for cameras. A century later the pioneering is still going on, but it has moved. It is no longer about the vehicle or the tent. It is about who gets paid, and what the land is worth to the people who own it.
Two ideas hold the current business together. Heritage is the experience, the thing guests come for. Impact is the purpose, the reason the business exists at all. The history is where this story starts. It is not what the story is about.
A romance built on things we would not do now
Charles Cottar was born in Iowa in 1874 and came to East Africa in the years before the First World War, drawn by the same Roosevelt-era fever that pulled a generation of Americans towards Africa. In 1919 he and his sons founded Cottar’s Safari Service. The family describes it as the first safari outfit on the continent to use motorcars, replacing the long ox-wagon and porter caravans that had defined safari until then.
The photographs from that period are seductive and they should be read honestly. Tin Lizzies parked in long grass. Canvas mess tents, folding chairs, cut glass. Mike Cottar fly-camping in northern Kenya with his three children in the 1920s. It looks like freedom, and it was, for the people in the pictures. It was also an era of shooting, of trophies and of clients who measured a trip by what they killed. The Cottars were professional hunters. So was almost everyone in the business.
Charles died the way the era’s stories end. In September 1940, filming a rhino in Maasailand, he was charged and gored in the thigh, and he bled to death about ninety minutes later. He had been photographing, not hunting, which is a detail worth holding onto. The change was already starting.
The first reinvention: cameras instead of rifles
The family’s real pivot came with Charles’s grandson Glen and his wife Pat. In the 1960s they moved the business away from hunting towards photographic safaris and built a permanent camp, at a time when almost every camp in Kenya was still a temporary hunting fly-camp struck at the end of a trip.
The camp was Cottar’s Tsavo Camp, opened in 1964: the family’s first permanent photographic camp, and the first purpose-built tented camp in Tsavo. Everything the business does today, including a canvas camp in Olderkesi that guests fly into sixty years later, starts there.
Camps in Amboseli and the Maasai Mara followed through the 1970s and 1980s. Kenya banned hunting in 1977, and a business that had already spent a decade learning to sell a photograph instead of a trophy was in a very different position from its competitors.
In 1998 the fifth generation, Calvin Cottar with Louise Cottar as business partner and chief executive, opened Cottar’s 1920s Camp in Olderkesi on the edge of the Maasai Mara. The camp is a deliberate reconstruction of the period the family’s own photographs come from: canvas, campaign furniture, no glass walls, no infinity pool. In 2012 they added Cottar’s Bush Villa, a private house for one party at a time.
This is what heritage as the experience means in practice. The 1920s aesthetic is not nostalgia for its own sake, and it is not a theme. It is a claim about pace.
“We still want guests to reconnect with the awe of Mother Africa through our patient and dignified way of safari, giving them the space and time to feel the emotions and presence of our ancestors.”
Calvin Cottar
Patient and dignified is a useful test. It rules out the five-camps-in-nine-days itinerary, the radio-called leopard scramble, the drive that treats the Mara as a checklist.
What safari had to leave behind
Ask Calvin what the industry needed to drop and he does not talk about rifles at all.
“What safari needed to leave behind was an approach that did not sufficiently consider biodiversity conservation, financial equity, or genuine partnership with local people, the people on whose land the lions and elephants roam.”
Three things, and only one of them is about wildlife. That framing is the hinge of the whole piece. The hunting era’s deepest flaw, on this reading, was not that it shot animals. It was that the money left. Revenue from Kenya’s wildlife flowed to the state and to private operators, and the Maasai families whose grazing land carried the lions, elephants and wildebeest saw very little of it. A community that earns nothing from wildlife has every reason to fence it out, plough the grass and run cattle instead. The land converts. The corridor closes. Then the wildlife goes.
Paying for the land
The Cottars’ answer is a lease. Rather than buying land, or operating on a state concession, the business pays Maasai landowners directly to keep their land open and unfenced for wildlife.
“Leasing land for conservation is one way of ensuring that tourism revenue reaches the actual landowners, so that they can earn sustainable income from tourism activities rather than seeing those revenues benefit only the state and private operators, as was often the case in the past.”
The Olderkesi Wildlife Conservancy was established in 2015 through a partnership with the local Maasai community. It protects over 7,000 acres of wildlife habitat, and it sits in a corner of the greater Mara ecosystem that matters out of proportion to its size: the south-eastern block between the national reserve and the Tanzanian border, on the route wildebeest use.
The community behind those acres is not a handful of families. Calvin talks about thousands of landowners supported through the conservancy and through the wider expansion of land under conservation with Cottar’s tourism partners, and the payments are structured as an annual commitment rather than a share of a good season.
What that money does on the ground is not abstract. Calvin lists clinics, family planning, water, schools, bursaries, bridges and famine relief, delivered with implementing partners including the Maa Trust. Cottar’s is also accredited as a Global Ecosphere Retreat by The Long Run, and is the only one in the Maasai Mara.
Certifications are easy to be cynical about. The 2020 answer is the part that is hard to fake. Anyone can commit to a lease in a good year.
“We also provided famine relief to the two main cultural villages, whose inhabitants are widows and orphans.”
Beyond the game drive
The second half of the model is what guests actually do. Cottar’s runs more than twenty experiences designed to take people past the 4×4 drive, and the list is more specific than the phrase “impact experience” usually suggests.
Some of it is conservation you take part in rather than watch. Guests spend time learning with the female conservation rangers who patrol the conservancy. They can fly with the Mara Elephant Project on a conservation helicopter flight, sit in on the cheetah monitoring work, scatter seedballs on degraded ground for reforestation, or spend a morning on an immersive raptor experience with a team working on a group of species almost nobody comes to the Mara for.
Some of it is Maasai knowledge, taught by the people who hold it. A foraging and medicinal walk. Beading with Mamma Naishuru Batian. Maasai Warrior School. A run or a walk with a warrior. And the village visit, which turns out to be the one that lands hardest.
Asked which one surprises guests most, Calvin does not pick the helicopter.
“I think it is the cultural village visits, simply because of the stark contrast between what outsiders may perceive as poverty and the way the Maasai have lived for millennia, and how genuinely happy, friendly and engaged they are. Guests are often struck by the absence of self-pity, and by the understanding and appreciation that we are in a genuine, long-term partnership together in Olderkesi.”
Cultural village visits have a bad name in the safari industry, and they have earned it. Too many are a staged twenty minutes, a jumping dance and a table of beadwork, with an entry fee that mostly leaves with the operator. The difference here is structural rather than theatrical. The people in the village are the landowners. The lease is the relationship. The visit is not the transaction, it is the part of the arrangement guests can see.
What it means to pioneer now
We asked Calvin the question the whole piece was built around. His answer came in three parts.
“There are three areas of pioneering in safari today: discovering new wilderness locations; creating new styles of accommodation and service; and, most importantly, being brave enough to engage genuinely with the communities whose land makes safari possible. That means sharing a fair proportion of the revenue generated and ensuring that local people have a compelling reason to protect the forests, landscapes and wildlife on their land.”
Note the order, and the word “brave”. New places and new camps are the pioneering the industry still advertises: another untouched valley, another architectural first. Both are real, and both are comparatively easy. The third is the one that costs something every year, in a line on the accounts that does not move when occupancy does.
It is also the only one of the three that changes the odds for the wildlife. A new camp in a beautiful place protects nothing by itself. A landowner with a compelling reason not to fence and plough protects everything that walks across.
Where this leaves the guest
There is a version of this story where the guest is incidental, a funding mechanism in a khaki shirt. That is not how it works, and it is not how it is sold.
What the Cottars have built is a straight trade. The guest gets the romance, honestly reconstructed: canvas, silver, long unhurried days, the specific pleasure of a way of travelling that has almost disappeared. Paying for that romance is what keeps over 7,000 acres open and the families who own them in the arrangement. Heritage is the experience. Impact is the purpose. Neither works without the other, and the family has been explicit that the second is the point.
Which brings it back to 2020, and a camp with no guests, still paying for grass nobody was looking at. The industry spent that year discovering how much of its conservation funding was really just a by-product of occupancy. A lease paid in an empty year is a different kind of promise, and the Maasai landowners of Olderkesi now know exactly what it is worth.
Cottar’s 1920s Camp and Cottar’s Bush Villa are both listed in our Maasai Mara guide: Cottar’s 1920s Camp and Cottar’s Bush Villa.
Quotes from Calvin Cottar, supplied in writing to 25° SOUTH, September 2026. Photographs courtesy of Cottar’s Safaris.