Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (43 page)

‘I first found work in Maputo and I worked very hard, but my master didn’t pay me as agreed, so I left and came down here to see what I could do.’

In Massingir, he got to know a group of poachers. One day they invited him to join them in the bush. ‘I carried the food and water. Many times when they went into Kruger, I would stay in [the] camp to do the cooking and the others would go in to get the product. I didn’t shoot. They shot it [rhino] in the head.’

On one occasion, the men sent him to find water. As he made his way through the bushes, he saw something moving. He inched closer, then stopped in his tracks. It was a rhino. It was the first time he’d seen one. ‘I saw it, but I was afraid to go near it. I went back and told the bosses, and they said I must stay behind. Finally they came back with the product. They left me and said that if the police come, I must not tell them where they are going.

‘It is an emotional thing because there is the hope that if you can kill the animal and get the product out, you will get a lot of money. Then we can pay school fees, food and household costs. But there is also the disadvantage that because you will eventually finish the money, you will have to go back again to the bush.’

Will he return? ‘No, I won’t go back because the risk is too high. The promise of money is there, but so is the danger.’ These days, he says, he makes a living from the fish he catches. But across the river where he casts his nets lies Kruger and the promise of real money. Mongwe believes Zachariah may still be helping poachers.

‘I don’t think he is telling the truth,’ Mongwe says. ‘There have been fishermen killed going into Kruger. In some cases, the poachers use the fishermen to get across the river into Kruger.’

Zachariah’s story shifts and changes. He’s clearly nervous, and at times I wonder if he isn’t just telling us what he thinks we want to hear. Asked about the poaching and his feelings about the killings, Zachariah says he feels bad. ‘That animal is a meaningful animal. Even now it has big value. Behind the rhino there is money. On the money we use daily (the 20
metacais
note, worth about R6.00 or 70 US cents) there is a picture of a rhino, which means the money is there. So if we continue killing, it is not good.

‘The government must take some blame, because they don’t create jobs for the people or protect the animals properly. They put that animal on the money, which means it has value and it needs good protection.’

That night, a rust-red poacher’s moon rises into the darkness – the largest full moon of the year. As it ascends, the colour bleeds away until only a silvery glow remains. Pale light filters through the bushes and the thorn trees. Out there, somewhere in the shadows, silent groups of poachers are heading south. And across the border in the Kruger, the game rangers, soldiers and cops are lying in wait.

Four days later, the stinking remains of two rhino carcasses are found near the park’s Crocodile Bridge gate. The horns have been hacked off. The rangers pick up the trail: broken blades of grass, scuff marks in the sand, flattened scrub, crushed plants. Police and soldiers are deployed. Hours later, there is the crackle of gunfire and a man lies dead. Two others are taken away, their hands cable-tied behind their backs. Four horns, a hunting rifle and an axe are found.

The number of rhinos killed in the Kruger now stands at 130. And another corpse is consigned to a cheap pine coffin and a dusty grave.

Thando (not his real name) pokes gingerly at the contents of the sweating refuse bag. A cloud of fat green-and-blue flies, disturbed from their feast, buzz angrily into the air. The choking stench of decay sucks the air out of his lungs and he stifles a retch. His hands are double-wrapped in plastic shopping bags. He reaches deeper into the refuse bag, sifting through the grey ooze. The maggots and heat have done their work. Whatever is in there no longer has any discernible form. It was probably a dog, Thando laughs, screwing up his nostrils. He scoops out a handful of rot and smears it on the horn propped up against a tree. Later he’ll bury it and wait for a buyer.

Thando is a smuggler, hustler and two-bit con man. He’ll try anything as long as there is money to be made. These days, cigarettes are his thing – boxes and boxes of them bought on the cheap in Zimbabwe and trafficked illegally across the Limpopo River into South Africa. He sells them in Pretoria, charging up to three times what he paid for them in Zimbabwe, less expenses doled out to couriers and, most importantly, to the transporters with their souped-up cars. It is a risky enterprise, made more so by the currents, crocodiles, wild animals and the ‘guma-guma’ – the notorious thugs who lurk in the no-man’s-land separating the two countries.

The Musina cops are shit-scared of the guma-guma. The more enterprising gangsters control smuggling networks that ply the highways and byways across the border. They’ll move anything from cigarettes and gold to ivory and rhino horn. They smuggle people, too, exacting heavy tolls for safe
passage from those unlucky enough to stray into their path. Often, they rape, rob and kill.

The
Médecins Sans Frontières
clinic in Musina is a refuge for the battered survivors, many of them illegal immigrants too terrified to go to the police. Every year the clinic treats hundreds of people who have been raped and robbed. In a recent year, it recorded 253 rape cases. For the same period, the total number of sexual crimes reported to the Musina police was only ninety-six. At least half the cases seen by the clinic involve incidents of ‘compelled rape’. Men are forced by the guma-guma to rape their wives, girlfriends, sisters, cousins, mothers, grandmothers or total strangers. It amuses the thugs. A woman who works at the clinic told me that many more women are probably raped but never seek help. ‘The women who come to us tell us about others in their group who were beaten and raped, people we never see. So the figures are probably a lot higher.’

Nobody knows how many human bones – bleached white by the sun – are scattered among the scrub, baobabs and fever trees in that strip of no-man’s-land. For those who survive the river crossing and the gauntlet of gumagumas, the Norex security fence – a jagged 260-kilometre steel scar that stretches from Pontdrif to the northern Kruger Park border with Zimbabwe – poses little hindrance. Coke cans, bright-green Sprite bottles and vivid strips of cloth, left behind by smugglers and traffickers, serve as markers for a myriad escape routes. Discarded cellphone airtime vouchers and cigarette butts dot the ground, along with countless dusty footprints.

Along the length of the fence line, barbed silver entrails spill inwards and outwards where the fence has been slashed, cut, trampled, burrowed under or prised apart. Just a hundred metres from the army base under Beitbridge, the link between South Africa and Zimbabwe, is a gaping hole that a troop of thieving baboons uses as a thoroughfare.

From 2000, as Zimbabwe’s economy worsened and the violence meted out by police and supporters of Robert Mugabe escalated, so did the number of refugees and illegals crossing the border. By 2006, year-on-year inflation in the country exceeded 1 000 per cent. Activists for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change were regularly beaten by police. Many were tortured. Some were killed.

As the 2008 elections drew closer, people flooded south to escape the violence, terrified of what might happen next. Along the border fence, journalists – me among them – waited for the battered, broken and bloodied refugees. We’d call out to the furtive shapes in the undergrowth, assuring them that it was safe to come across, that we weren’t the cops. Occasionally, someone would emerge from the bushes. They’d hesitate, uncertain whether to trust us. Then they’d make the final dash, crawling under the barbed wire and through the fence to the waiting microphones, notebooks, cameras and questions.

The images were powerful and rammed home the brutality of what was happening in Zimbabwe. Men with broken bones and faces swollen from beatings, women with their clothes ripped and bloodied. Even the children didn’t escape unscathed. We helped where we could, but we still felt like vultures.

Some mornings, if you drove along the fence early enough, you could see the clean-up crews in no-man’s-land making useless attempts at patching the holes. They would hoard the scattered clothes and shoes the refugees had abandoned in their haste to escape Mugabe and the guma-guma. If you found the right vantage point, you could catch glimpses of the guma-guma gangs in the distance as they crossed over dead ground and vanished into the thickets and thorn trees. Some could be seen above us, moving around on the underside of the bridge.

On one occasion, I raised my camera to photograph one of them as he clambered up onto the bridge. He saw me and turned, fumbling for something behind him, then lifted his arm. It took me a second to realise he was holding a pistol. I ducked. When I looked again, he had disappeared among the struts and support beams.

The Zimbabwean crisis created a myriad new business opportunities for those ruthless enough to seize them. It was a boom time for smugglers. A Musina panel-beater is said to have bought thirty pickup trucks and hired drivers. Every day they would drive along the fence line and the farm roads picking up refugees coming from Zimbabwe. They charged R200 a head to take them to safety, away from the soldiers and the cops. The business wasn’t much of a secret, but the police did nothing to stop it.

Over time, as conditions in Zimbabwe gradually stabilised, the flood of refugees slowed. But the smugglers continued to ply their trade. I remember peering through a pair of powerful binoculars as half a dozen distant figures waded across the river from Zimbabwe. On the South African shoreline, they stopped to catch their breath and wait for the stragglers. Piled up on the bank were what looked like boxes: probably cigarettes sealed in plastic or wrapped up inside black refuse bags. It was hard to tell.

Three of the figures were still in the river, up to their necks in water. As they slowly made their way across, I traced the river’s curve to a sandbank 500 metres further down, out of sight from the figures in the water. Lined up on its shore, baking in the sun, were the unmistakable shapes of a dozen crocodiles. That day, they seemed content to laze in the heat.

Hennie Erwee, a local criminal lawyer, says ‘cigarettes and cars’ are the smugglers’ mainstay. ‘The real money lies with the corruption at the bridge. The guys who smuggle the containers through the border – I hear they make about R6 million per container. Then they pay the bribes: 150 000 for a cop, another 150k to a customs guy. Let’s say the guy brings through ten containers a month, then that cop and that customs guy stand to make 1.5 million each. They’re never going to say anything. Every year new cops and customs guys come here and try to start from scratch and clean it up. But within three months, they’ve also been bought off …’

‘There’s a lot of money involved,’ Erwee says. ‘Be careful, they’ll fucking take you out.’

It is September 2011. I’m back in the town to look for a rhino poacher. Rodgers Mukwena – the former teacher I’d come across during my investigations into Johan Roos in 2010 – is rumoured to have fled here to join his wife. His notoriety in Zimbabwe’s south-eastern lowveld has grown since then. Linked to numerous incidents of zebra and rhino poaching, he has somehow always escaped prosecution. I am hoping to find him and, perhaps, persuade him to talk to me. It is a gamble and probably a futile exercise, but it is worth a shot. You never know what you’ll find. But first I need a way in.