Once emptied of wildlife, South Africa's Babanango Game Reserve is now home to the Big Five – thanks to a bold rewilding project led by Zulu communities and global conservationists.

Daybreak filters through the fever trees and umbrella thorns of South Africa's White Umfolozi River Valley, splintering orange light across a puckered grassland teeming with newly arrived wildlife. Bumping atop rough roads in an open-sided safari vehicle is field guide Eduan Balt, who's "reading the bush newspaper" – studying fresh prints on dirt trails for signs of apex predators.

Balt drives along some of the valley's 600km of roads – many built in recent years – passing bomas (enclosures) holding quarantined buffalo and a pond where hippos with giant jowls yawn into the morning air. The smell of wild anise wafts over the vehicle as it careens toward the valley floor. Then, suddenly, a lioness darts across the golden grassland to our left, muscling her way to a fallen tree where three kitten-like cubs bound into view.

These are the first lions born in this part of KwaZulu-Natal province in at least 150 years. Lions, like most native animals, became locally extinct in the decades following the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, after which the British Empire gained control of the region, turning it into farmland. Zulu communities got large swathes of it back during the land reforms that followed the fall of apartheid. But after decades of cattle grazing and illicit hunting, the area was largely depleted of wildlife.

That changed starting in 2018, thanks to an innovative collaboration between philanthropic investors, local NGOs and three Zulu community trusts, who leased lands to create one of the most ambitious rewilding projects in South Africa in more than a decade. The 20,000-hectare Babanango Game Reserve has welcomed nearly 4,000 medium- to large-sized animals since the process of game translocation – and remediating landscapes – began, in earnest, five years ago. Many, like the lions, have reproduced. So, there are now about 5,000 wild animals roaming a landscape they were largely absent from for more than a century.

German philanthropists Barbara and Hellmuth Weisser invested nearly 1 billion rand (£42.5m) to rewild these animals. They also bankrolled the tourist infrastructure that should support Babanango's future operational costs. "I don't know of anyone else doing something quite like this," Hellmuth tells me over dinner at the Zulu Rock Lodge, one of four safari lodges now spread across the park.

The 77-year-old – a former energy executive and keen photographer – has been visiting southern Africa since the 1980s. In retirement, he and his wife wanted to find a place for a park that would uplift communities while restoring biodiversity. "The problem for us is that there was no supermarket for finding projects," he recalls.

Babanango is south of Kruger National Park in a poorer region of South Africa closer to Durban than Johannesburg that wasn't historically a safari destination. It appeared on Hellmuth's radar only because the NGO

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