We lost two more of our staff the Sunday before last, brutally murdered at the side of the road, despite being very evidently humanitarian workers.”Although we are used to working in very tough and difficult and dangerous places, there is a bottom line in terms of what we can ask our staff to do.”Mr Aaronson predicted that the withdrawal of Save the Children’s 350 staff would not be the only departure of aid workers from Darfur.”This is not just about one agency deciding to leave,” he said. The Save the Children charity announced today that it was withdrawing from the troubled Darfur region of Sudan after the murders earlier this month of two of its aid workers. A bid above £600 may be enough.For details, go to: (Highest bids as of 6pm last night). Also willing to pay a call is Jeremy Beadle, the television presenter who will host a quiz in your living room. With four days to go, auction highlights include a day’s rambling with Janet Street-Porter: £1,700 is the best bid so far.

If you would rather stay in, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is offering to come round and cook a curry for a reader £950 is the bid to beat. If readers’ generosity continues at such a pace, we will easily have overtaken our target of reaching a grand total of £100,000 by Christmas. They were subject to an assault without parallel and they should be symbols of despair, but in IRDNC’s corner of the world they are also symbols of hope.Readers’ donations pass £85,000 markDonations fot our Green Shoots Christmas Appeal are pouring in, and reached £50,728 by yesterday for the three charities chosen for their environmentally friendly work among the poorest people in the world: WaterAid, Send a Cow, and the Namibian-based wildlife conservation organisation IRDNC.Combined with the £35,023 raised so far in our charity auction, the overall tally now stands at £85,751. But perhaps the best sign of all is the burgeoning black rhino population.You can go out with IRDNC’s rhino trackers, as The Independent did, and find them: rare, fabled animals, the mere sight of which in the wild, close-up, provokes a shiver of awe which must go right back to our distant hunter ancestors. But it was too late: the tactic had started to work.As the poor farming communities in Namibia’s Kunene region that Garth Owen-Smith had visited started to regard their wildlife as an asset of their own, poaching by their own people fell away, and poaching by outsiders became impossible.The result was that at the end of the 1980s rhino (and elephant) numbers in the area had started to recover, and now the black rhino population of north-west Namibia is the healthiest on the continent, after South Africa.Mr Owen-Smith’s initiative has flowered. They were never happy with the project and in 1985 brought official support for it to a premature end. A few local individuals were poaching it and getting the benefit; but what were the communities getting as a whole? How would they be better off when it was all gone?He convinced them that wildlife could be a community asset, and persuaded them to set up a system of community game guards, people of their own choosing who would monitor wildlife and discourage poaching.For the South African government, whose tradition of wildlife management was entirely top-down, this was subversive.

He went to the traditional leaders of local communities, mainly Herrero farmers, and asked them if they were happy that their wildlife was disappearing before their very eyes. A former South African game ranger, in 1982 he found himself in a position to do something about it when conservationists in Namibia (then South African-controlled South-West Africa) set up a group to try and check the poaching of black rhinos and elephants in the country’s remote north-west, which was then at its height.Appointed field officer of the Namibian Wildlife Trust, Mr Owen-Smith came up with an idea that at the time was entirely radical: involve the local people. It meant they could go quickly and the forces ranged against them might be unpredictable and unstoppable.Most of all it meant that their basic survival could no longer be taken for granted. Governments could not be relied on to protect them.Garth Owen-Smith was one of those shocked by the slaughter. It meant that Africa’s wild animals could, in the post-colonial era, completely disappear. In a mere 22 years the population of Diceros bicornis fell by 96 per cent.The crash was checked just in time.

But there had never been anything like this, and although few in the West took it on board properly, it was an event whose catastrophic nature made some conservationists in Africa start to think hard about the future of the continent’s wildlife. With this inflation came slaughter.Instability in many of the newly independent countries where rhinos lived meant that poachers were more or less given a free hand to supply the horn market, and by 1984 the 65,000 animals of 1970 had been reduced to 8,800; by 1992 they were down to 2,500. Always sought-after in traditional Asian medicine as a cure for fever, rhino horn also has a special use in the Arab world, for the handle of the prized ceremonial daggers of North Yemen known as jambiyas.When the 1970s oil boom took off in Saudi Arabia, many Yemenis went to work in the oil fields and prospered; the demand for jambiyas as a status symbol rocketed, and with it, the price of horn.From 50 US dollars a kilo in 1970, it shot up to $500 a kilo in 1975 and $3,000 a kilo in 1980. Enter the white hunters.A rhino is both a trophy head and easy to shoot, and the European big-game hunters of Africa’s colonial period shot staggering numbers.There are many records of men personally shooting hundreds and one account of a game control officer in Kenya who shot more than 1,000 between 1946 and 1948, .As a result, by the time African countries started getting their independence in the early 1960s, the continent’s black rhino population was down to an estimated 100,000 animals, and falling steadily; by 1970 it was thought to be down to 65,000 But then the free-fall set in It was driven by the demand for horn. At the start of the 20th century there were probably about a million black rhinos across the continent, great vegetarian beasts, solitary by and large, meaning no harm to anyone. In the long saga of man slaughtering other living inhabitants of the earth there have been many appalling bloodbaths, but there has probably been nothing quite like what has happened to the black rhino.
The hook-lipped, slightly smaller of the two African rhino types (the white rhino is the other) has undergone what has been described as the biggest deliberate assault on a single species of mammal in the world’s history. In two great lurches it has dropped from having a seven-figure population to the brink of extinction.Massive, dangerous if provoked, weird-looking – what are those horns for? – it is a symbol of Africa’s otherness and its special qualities.