Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (4 page)

The tiny village of Mpande is situated about seventy kilometres east of Bubye
in the so-called Siyoka Communal Lands. It is a hardscrabble place – a scattering of mud-walled houses, a liquor store and a spaza shop set in an arid wasteland of dry scrub and dust.

It was to Mpande that Roos went in about 2000, allegedly in search of zebra skin. ‘The guys in the area recall him going there, sitting around drinking beer with the people, and then suddenly the villagers were buying cars and had money to spend,’ Norman English, the head of anti-poaching at Bubye, says.

More than any other village, Mpande has been a thorn in the conservancy’s side for close to a decade. Hardlife, Life and Never were all from there. So was Rodgers Mukwena – the man they called ‘Teacher’. As you drive into the village, one house stands out among all the others. There’s a stone wall around it. Although it is not a particularly prepossessing place, in Mpande’s impoverished surroundings it signals money. It is the house Mukwena built, allegedly on the proceeds of zebra skin and rhino horn.

Mukwena was a teacher before he became a poacher. When Zimbabwe’s economy collapsed in the late 1990s, he, like so many others, found himself trying to survive on a salary that amounted to little more than $100 a month. It wasn’t long before he picked up a rifle.

‘Mukwena’s a bright guy,’ English says. ‘Unlike the others, he’s done all right. The rest have come out of it with nothing. But he’s got a couple of houses in Beitbridge that he rents out. By local standards, he’s well off.’

In 2005 Mukwena was arrested in Mpande along with several other men. Two .303 hunting rifles – the serial numbers removed – were found, along with zebra and lion skins and pangolin scales. There were bags of skinning salt and brine bins in which to prepare the skins. Despite the evidence, the case never went to trial. There were suspicions that a cop, a prosecutor or even a magistrate had been paid off to quash the charges.

Mukwena was arrested again in February 2010, having been named in the confessions of five men caught trying to poach rhino in Bubye. They had been found with a silenced .303 rifle, which they had brought into Zimbabwe from South Africa. It was concealed in a secret compartment built into the tailgate of a Nissan bakkie. Unlike the silenced rifle found when Life was killed and Hardlife wounded, it wasn’t particularly well made. ‘It was just a tin can on the end of a barrel,’ says English.

A search of Mukwena’s house turned up one rhino horn. Mukwena claimed to have picked it up in the veld in the Bubiana Conservancy. Later he changed his story and the charge was shifted to his wife, who was alone inside the house when the horn was found. By then she was safe and sound in South Africa.

In September 2010, police confirmed that a .303 rifle, registered to Mukwena, had been modified to accommodate a silencer. Silencers are illegal in Zimbabwe. But by then Mukwena was also nowhere to be found. There were rumours that he had fled to South Africa and was hiding out in Musina with his wife.

4 August 2009

Roos is transferred to the Beitbridge police cells ahead of his first court appearance. He convinces a cop to let him use his cellphone to call his ‘sick father’. The phone is taken away from him when someone spots him ‘pushing way more buttons than required to simply phone his dad’.

A few messages appear to have been deleted. The cops leave the cellphone on. At 1 p.m. it beeps loudly. It is an SMS from ‘Teacher number 2’. There is only one word: ‘Boom’. Sixteen minutes later, there is another SMS, this one from ‘Jonathan New 2’. ‘When will we meet,’ it reads. ‘I hope to bring stuff.’

The case against Roos crumbles spectacularly quickly. Prior to his appearance in the local magistrate’s court, an ‘influential Beitbridge businessman’ complains to senior court officials that his ‘friend’, Johan Roos, is being unfairly ‘harassed’ by the police. When the case is finally called, the prosecutor fails to make any mention of key evidence against Roos. The magistrate orders that Roos be released. Within a few hours he’s across the border and over the bridge, safely back in South Africa.

Never Ndlovu is arrested five months after the shooting at Bubye. He appears in court and then disappears. Later he is sighted in Musina in South Africa. In April 2010, Hardlife Nkomo – by now fully recovered from his chest wound – is sentenced to six years in prison. The sentence is hailed by Vitalis Chadenga – the then acting director-general of the Parks and Wildlife
Management Authority – as a necessary deterrent that will ‘help put the country’s conservation efforts back on track’.

Roos’s arrest and subsequent release go largely unnoticed but for an article in the
Zoutpansberger
, a tiny community newspaper in Limpopo province. It picks up on the story two weeks after the shooting. Roos’s name, however, appears in only two paragraphs at the end of a brief article that quotes a Zimbabwe police spokesman, Chief Superintendent Hosiah Mukombero, who describes him as the ‘brainpower behind the poaching syndicate’. Mukombero – either because he is misinformed or lying – claims that Roos is still in custody.

19 April 2010

For two days game scouts follow the tracks of two poachers deep inside Bubye. Finally, after a frustrating hunt, they find fresh spoor leading out of the conservancy towards the Beitbridge road. They radio ahead. Police set up a trap near the fence line in the general direction the spoor appears to be taking. At last two men emerge from the bushes. One is holding a rifle. They are quickly apprehended.

The ‘shooter’ is subsequently identified as Andrew ‘British’ Bvute, a government veterinary officer. He had previously admitted to poaching a rhino in Bubye, but somehow the case had gone nowhere. The second man – the tracker – is called Joseph Chiguba. He’s from Beitbridge. Four other men, who had dropped the poachers off, are also arrested.

The weapon Bvute had been carrying is a .375-calibre hunting rifle with the serial number G1179783. The rifle has been fitted with a silencer. The lathe work appears to be identical to the silenced .303 found next to Life Mbedzi’s body after the contact in Bubye.

Under interrogation, Bvute and his cohorts claim that Johan Roos had supplied them with the rifle and ammunition, along with instructions to shoot a rhino and bring out the horns. He had supposedly bragged that he had ‘eight different gangs [of poachers] operating for him’ in the area.

Bvute is later fined $100 for possession of an unlicensed firearm. The fact
that the rifle was fitted with an illegal silencer is completely overlooked by the magistrate. The others are all acquitted.

In April 2010, I drove to Beitbridge and then on to Bubye. I wanted to know more about Roos and the origin of the rifles and the silencers. A few months earlier I had joined a team of investigative journalists at South Africa’s Media24 newspaper group. By chance, in the course of researching another story, I had stumbled across the article in the
Zoutpansberger
and the reference to Roos. The only other mention of his name that I could find when I Googled it was contained in a submission made by Zimbabwe to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) about the status of the country’s rhinos. The report gave basic details about the case, the shooting at Bubye and the discovery of the silenced.303. It was a detail that intrigued me. I had never before heard of silenced weapons being used to kill rhinos.

On my return to South Africa, I called up a law-enforcement contact and asked him whether he could find out anything about the .375 that had been found with Bvute. It was one of the few weapons to be recovered with an intact serial number. A few days later, he called back. ‘The rifle was stolen in a farm attack near Musina,’ he said. A case had been registered with the police. The complainant was a man named Faan Lemmer.

The farmhouse smells of mildew and mothballs. ‘They never open it up any more,’ Faan Lemmer complains, motioning disdainfully at a servant in the kitchen. I follow him along a darkened passageway to his father’s bedroom. Pink light streams through the curtains. The furnishings are spartan: a white dresser, a full-length mirror, seventies-style built-in cupboards and a space where a safe once stood. ‘This is where it happened,’ Lemmer says. ‘My dad was sitting on this bed. The four
bliksems
were standing there in front of him, looking at me … They didn’t say a word.’

It was 8 May 2009. Two days later, the family fled the farm. Faan, sixty-seven, and his wife, Christi, sixty, lived in a flat behind the main farmhouse. They had moved there from Vryburg in South Africa’s North West province five years earlier, following the death of Faan’s mother. His father, Faan Snr, aged ninety, couldn’t continue on his own – he’d lost most of his hearing and his eyesight was fading.

The old man had bought the 1 300-hectare farm, called Nekel, in 1957 while working as an accountant for ISCOR, the state-owned steel company. A decade later he retired early and moved there to take up cattle farming.

Situated ninety kilometres west of Musina in Limpopo province, the farm is a stone’s throw from the entrance to the Mapungubwe National Park, one of South Africa’s most significant archaeological sites. The park is situated at the confluence of the Shashi and Limpopo Rivers, where the borders of South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana converge. A kilometre inland, rising above the southern bank of the Limpopo River, is Mapungubwe Hill, a natural citadel that once guarded the golden treasures of an Iron Age kingdom.