Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (40 page)

In the shade of another tree, her legs folded under her on a grass mat, Dario’s mother, Amelia Makuvela, works at a makeshift loom with perforated stones serving as weights to stretch the threads. A white headscarf covers her hair. Her blouse is spotless, but frayed with age and torn at the back. Her home – a hut made of rough-hewn wood and plastered with orange mud – is situated a short distance away.

Nearby is a modern construction with ornate burglar bars, lace curtains, a
stoep
, and grey, unfinished cement walls. It stands apart from most of the other wood, mud and thatch homes that are typical of the village. A motorcycle covered with plastic sheeting and a grubby red windbreaker leans against a wall. It is the house Dario was building when he died. His widow lives there now, with their two young sons. Dario’s daughter has been sent to South Africa to stay with relatives.

Mrs Makuvela doesn’t smile. She’s reluctant to discuss her sons with strangers. Dario’s brother, Albert, dressed in a green workman’s overall, takes a seat in the dirt beside her. His sister, Lurdes, sits on her mother’s left. The visitors are given white plastic chairs to sit on. The village headman’s son makes the introductions. In the background, a bored young boy in a torn blue T-shirt and shorts hacks at bushes with a rusted metal bar. A cock crows. Another answers in the distance. Chickens scratch listlessly in the dust. A village cur, ribs showing through skin and fur, ambles past. Two young girls carrying muddy plastic buckets of water stop for a moment and stare at the strangers.

What happened to Dario? Why was he killed? The family is in denial and talks of ‘rumours’. Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead. Albert answers. ‘There are rumours that he was killed by rangers in South Africa, that he was poaching … but I don’t know if that’s true. I was staying in South Africa when he died. I think he was on his way to look for a job in South Africa.

‘When the body came back, it was covered, but you could still look at the face. He had a big wound in the back of his head and a smaller one in front. The head was completely open at the back. He was also shot in the groin and chest. His one arm looked like it had been chopped where it was shot.’

He claims that police in South Africa did not investigate the circumstances of the shooting. No post-mortem was conducted. No inquest was held. (Police records show that an inquest docket was opened on that date in connection with an incident in Houtboschrand, but, oddly, its status is classed as ‘undetected’, meaning there was insufficient evidence to proceed with an investigation. The dead are identified as Mozambican, but their names are listed as ‘unknown’.)

Perhaps Dario was simply crossing the park to find work or to visit him in Johannesburg, Albert speculates. Nobody knows. ‘Once you cross the border, whether you have a firearm or not, whether you’re a poacher or not, they will shoot you. No warning.’

Mrs Makuvela seems less certain of her eldest son’s innocence. She refuses to talk about him. Later, when Albert shows me a photograph of Dario and passes it to her, she shakes her head and refuses to take it.

‘My worry now is for the young boy,’ she says. ‘Batista is very young and he doesn’t know anything. His brother [Dario] took him with him to Kruger and put him where he is now. Batista was shot in the legs and taken to hospital by police.’

She travelled to the South African town of Komatipoort for Batista’s trial. Her eyes redden with tears as she speaks. In court, ‘the man who caught them was called’.

‘He said they saw the footprints where they crossed the border and followed them. They found the three men where they were sleeping. One of them woke up and shouted, “Let’s run.” They started running and the rangers shot them. The young boy [Batista] wasn’t carrying anything, but next to
him on the ground they found an axe. They also found two firearms with the others, but only one was a danger.’

Were the brothers poaching? Like Albert, she speaks of ‘rumours’. ‘The rumours say they went to Kruger to go poaching. I don’t know why they were really there. [Batista] won’t explain it to me now.’

Months later, I discover from police that Batista had been convicted on poaching-related charges and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment or a fine of R5 000. A further three-year jail term was conditionally suspended for five years.

The residents of Canhane and the surrounding villages view the Kruger National Park – which lies about thirty kilometres to the west – as a dangerous obstacle. It stands between them and the promise of jobs and money in South Africa. Passports are difficult and expensive to obtain. The wheels of Mozambique’s corrupt bureaucracy turn at a snail’s pace unless they are greased with cash. For many – particularly those eking out a living below the breadline – there is little choice but to risk the predators, rangers and soldiers. For them, the promised rewards outweigh the risks. Every year people leave for the bush and vanish. Some drown, others are taken by animals. Dozens – some say hundreds – are killed by lions and crocodiles. There are whispered stories of a man-eating pride that lies in wait at full moon to pick off stragglers.

Albert, who found work as a builder in Soweto, near Johannesburg, used to brave the myriad invisible pathways through the bush, but now he is one of the lucky ones – he has a passport. ‘It is difficult to get work here in Canhane. There are no jobs. You have to go to South Africa to earn money. There are also no jobs in Kruger for us, so we just pass through. There is no benefit from Kruger for us here. Inside Kruger there are dangerous animals. Sometimes we meet lions on our way, but we take the risk because we can’t survive here. Life is very hard in the village and we don’t have money to feed our families. But we know that if we can just cross the border and pass the animals, we can find a job in South Africa and support, clothe and feed [our families].’

The treacherous journey through the Kruger offers many a stark choice: why risk being torn apart by animals or arrested or shot simply to earn a pittance in Johannesburg when you can take the same risks for a much greater reward? In a good month, Albert earns R3 000. By contrast, a rhino poacher can pocket anything between R15 000 and R80 000 for a set of horns. For young men like Dario and Maqombisi, the temptation must be overwhelming.

At least two other poachers lie buried under the marula and mopane trees in Canhane’s cemetery. And locals say a dozen more from the town of Massingir and the surrounding villages have been shot and killed in the Kruger over the past two years. Many have been arrested. The names of some of the dead are recorded in the files at the police station situated inside Kruger’s main camp, Skukuza. Nearly half a dozen are from Massingir: Valoyi Mongwe – killed near the Houtboschrand ranger camp on 16 August 2011; ‘Joao’ – shot dead, also near Houtboschrand, on 22 November 2011; Humino Chico, Christo Jose and Jerson Chauke – shot and killed in the Nwanetsi area on 11 March 2012.

Yet there appears to be no shortage of takers prepared to risk everything for a few kilograms of rhino horn. The money-men, who come from Maputo or from Chokwe, a district capital to the south-east, with their promises of guns and cash, don’t have to look far for recruits. It is here, in villages like Canhane, that the war on rhino poachers is being lost.

A few kilometres south of the Mozambican border, two hulking shapes lie motionless in the veld. It is windless and oddly silent but for the angry buzzing of flies. The stench is unbearable. The vultures have been here, the familiar white lines of their excrement streaking the hides of the two carcasses. It is a rhino cow and her calf. The horns are gone. Only tattered flesh remains. A piece of white bone, picked clean by scavengers, juts obscenely from one of the calf ’s hind legs. Perhaps the calf was killed as it harried the poachers hacking away at its mother’s head. More likely, it was killed for what little horn it did have.

The area around the carcasses has been cordoned off with yellow police tape. Square flaps of skin have been cut into the animals’ sides and peeled back to reveal ribcages, mangled intestines and a seething mass of maggots. The bullets that killed the rhinos have been removed to be compared with others, and samples of tissue have been sent for DNA analysis. If the horns are ever recovered, a match will be crucial to obtain a conviction.

Investigators have scoured the ground for clues: spent shell casings, cigarette butts, plastic wrappers, footprints, tracks, bloodstains – any scraps of evidence that will lead them to the killers. Air support is called in. Rangers, soldiers, police and trackers fan out. It is a race to stop the poachers before they make the safety of Mozambique.

‘The line of poachers to our border is never going to end,’ Ken Maggs, the head of SANParks’s environmental crime investigations unit, says bluntly. ‘Not only is the price of horn going up exponentially, but given the unemployment levels in Mozambique and South Africa, there is no limit to the number of people who are going to come across.’

Maggs has worked in South Africa’s national parks for the past twenty-five years. He knows more about poachers and their methods than most other investigators in South Africa. It was Maggs who warned in 1994 that ‘sufficient evidence exists to indicate that an intensified onslaught on the elephant and rhino populations is imminent’.

Maggs is fifty-seven, with close-cropped hair that is rapidly turning white and an intensity of expression that gives him a passing resemblance to a younger, fitter Dennis Hopper. He rarely allows himself to be photographed. ‘I, for one, stay out of the limelight,’ he says. ‘This is a serious business and there are serious risks.’ People who have dealt with Maggs describe him as dedicated, efficient, shrewd, manipulative and adept at navigating the fickle political currents of SANParks. He can also be refreshingly frank, which is probably why his employers don’t allow him to speak to the media too often. In my case, it took several months of emails and phone calls before the SANParks spin doctors grudgingly acceded to an interview. Maggs seemed surprised that they had.

He took over command of Kruger’s anti-poaching unit in 1994. It was a one-man operation based at Skukuza with the huge task of co-ordinating
anti-poaching operations and intelligence gathering. Over the next decade, the unit gradually grew in size, eventually expanding operations to the Eastern and Western Cape, Gauteng and Mpumalanga.

The bulk of the unit’s work is centred around the Kruger. The park is immense – the size of the state of Israel. Maggs uses the United States–Mexican border, and the vast amounts of money, resources and manpower that the US government has poured into stopping thousands of illegal immigrants from slipping through the ‘rat holes’ in the fence line, as an example. Despite this, they keep coming.

‘People say we should put up a big fence. Look at the US–Mexican border. Are they getting on top of it? We have a fairly remote 400-kilometre border with Mozambique. A fence is not going to stop anyone. If there’s a will, there’s a way. All a fence is going to do is give you a feeling of false security.’

It is a view that environmental officials initially didn’t heed. In January 2012, environment minister Edna Molewa announced that talks were taking place with the Department of Public Works about repairing and electrifying a 150-kilometre strip of border fence between the Kruger and Mozambique. It would cost between R250 million and R400 million to erect and a further R100 million a year to maintain.

The plan was controversial for another reason. The original fence – a remnant of apartheid – had been erected in 1975. It had carried a lethal 3 300-volt, one-amp current and was responsible for more deaths over a three-year period than the Berlin Wall in its twenty-eight-year history. Official SADF statistics suggested that eighty-nine people had died on the fence between August 1986 and August 1989. In reality, the numbers were probably closer to 200 a year.

The fence was switched over to ‘non-lethal alarm mode’ in 1990. In 2002, sections were torn down to allow for the creation of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, which straddles the South African, Mozambican and Zimbabwean borders. Molewa’s officials were careful to stress that if the fence was to be electrified again it would carry a non-lethal current and would serve mainly as an ‘early warning system’.