Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  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.

  Its secrets were rediscovered in 1933, when a group of fortune seekers, pursuing tales of hidden riches, clambered up the narrow crevice that leads to the top. There they dug up a grave that had lain undisturbed for 700 years. Inside they found a skeleton, adorned with gold. The bones crumbled when they touched them. Near the skull, one of them found a delicate gold-foil rhinoceros, once a symbol of royalty, and today the site’s best-known artefact.

  In forty years, Lemmer Snr had never locked his doors. Violent crime was something that happened in the towns and cities. Out here, people felt safe. Of course, there were the occasional stock thefts and petty theft, but in more recent years, there had been a dramatic escalation in the illegal bush-meat trade and the poaching of game.

  The most notorious poacher in the area was nicknamed ‘Rasta’. For years he’d evaded capture. Although his snares were everywhere, few people had ever seen him. Those who had said he wore dreadlocks, carried a knife and an AK-47 assault rifle, and daubed himself with muti, a traditional potion designed to protect him. Some said he was a ghost. When Mapungubwe park rangers finally captured him, he reportedly asked them how they had tracked him – the muti was meant to conceal him. The conservative local newspaper approvingly reported that ‘the ranger replied that muti does not work on a man of God’.

  Faan and Christi walk me through the events of that Friday night in May. ‘We were negligent, but after so many years, who would think to lock the doors?’ he asks. He recalls that it was late – probably about 11 p.m. Christi was watching television, and he had just taken a shower. He stepped outside for a moment. He was only wearing shorts. It was a hot night. ‘I saw that my dad’s light was still burning. Normally he’d be having a kip by then. I went to the main house to have a look. The door was pulled shut, but as usual it wasn’t locked.

  ‘When I got to his room, there they stood. The four “gentlemen”. I knew we were in big kak. What are three guys doing in another guy’s bedroom at eleven at night?’ Faan Snr was sitting on the side of the bed, looking up at the men. He seemed bewildered. Someone had struck him on the leg with a heavy object, perhaps an iron pipe. His deafness, it seemed, had been mistaken for defiance.

  The men surrounded Faan. ‘One of them took me by the arm and led me out of the house. They didn’t say anything. Jissus, but when we got to the stoep, they bliksemmed me! I don’t know what they hit me with. I remember three blows, and then I passed out. When I came to, I was sitting up and the blood was pouring off my head like water. For some reason I took my watch off and threw it into the darkness. Then one of the blacks tied my hands tightly behind my back. Two of them pulled me to my feet and marched me back to the house.’

  He remembers the look of horror on his father’s face and the old man’s desperate question: ‘Fanie, what’s going on?’ Afraid of what they might do if he spoke, Faan simply shrugged his shoulders. All the men, except one, spoke to him in English. From the accents, he thought they were Zimbabwean. The fourth man spoke Afrikaans. He was local. ‘I know this place,’ he told Faan. The men wanted money, and lots of it.

  They dragged Faan to the flat. One of them had found Christi and was busying himself tying her wrists together. ‘If you make a noise, we are going to kill you,’ he said. Faan tried to reason with them. ‘I voted for the ANC,’ he lied. ‘Fuck the ANC!’ came the terse reply. Christi remembers that one of the men had red-painted fingernails. ‘He had such cruel eyes,’ she says. Another carried a hand-axe. ‘That’s probably what they hit me with,’ Faan speculates. ‘With the blunt side. If it was the sharp side, I’d be dead.’

  For three hours, the men terrorised the family. They ransacked the flat, piling up their spoils: R14 000 in cash, a camera, a pair of binoculars, bottles of whisky and beer, biltong, chocolates, cold meats and clothes. They demanded the keys to the two gun safes in the farmhouse. ‘If I hadn’t given them the keys, the chances are slim that I’d still be alive,’ Faan tells me. There was a small arsenal there for the taking: five hunting rifles and a 9mm pistol. One of the weapons was an old .375 Holland & Holland Magnum rifle that belonged to Faan’s nephew, who had relocated to the United States.

  Christi had somehow managed to hide a knife under a bowl of dog food in the flat and cut them loose once the men had gone. The robbers had taken their keys, including those for the two bakkies on the farm. ‘We stayed inside until the farmworkers arrived at 7 a.m. We were too scared to go out. If they caught us, they’d kill us.’

  Hours later, two of the suspects were arrested on a nearby farm after boasting to a farm labourer about the guns they had stolen. Three rifles were seized. The other weapons, including the .375, were nowhere to be found. The case was postponed six times between October 2009 and February 2011. On the seventh occasion, a Musina regional court magistrate scrapped it from the court roll and freed the suspects. The reason: a key witness – the farm labourer who had turned the men in – was not in court to testify and was unlikely to return. He had sent a message to the prosecutor. He was in Zimbabwe, he said, but had no way of coming back, because ‘the Limpopo River is full’.

  The Lemmers spent the Saturday night after the attack on the farm. They barely slept. The next day, they packed their bags. ‘I decided, fuck it, we weren’t going to stay here any more.’ They moved to a house in Musina. Ironically, it is situated a few blocks from the house where Johan Roos and his father live. ‘It was so nice here,’ Christi tells me. ‘We never thought something like this would happen. We hardly ever come here any more.’

  The property is neglected. Game fences are in need of repair. In the bushes, there are mounting numbers of snares. Squatters are building wood and corrugated-iron shacks near a dip in the road below the farmhouse. ‘They are probably family or connections of the workers,’ Faan says. He no longer cares. ‘Our policy, when we lived here, was that no other family members were allowed, not even children,’ says Christi. ‘We paid for electricity and food. Now everyone is squatting here and they come
to me this morning to say they are short of bread, milk and coffee.’

  Later, Faan loads up the workers in the back of the bakkie and heads out to inspect the farm. It is green and lush after recent rains. Grey storm clouds hang overhead. We stop and get out. There’s a pungent smell of decay. The desiccated remains of a dead warthog lie caught in a snare under a bush. Further away is the skull of an impala, and another snare. ‘The poachers are a bloody curse,’ Faan remarks.

  He drives me to a spot on the farm where the burnt-out remains of an old Mercedes-Benz had been found. ‘We think it was poachers [who] were driving through long grass, [and when] the engine got hot, the grass caught fire. The car was completely burnt out. The poachers ran away.’

  But there is no sign of the wreck when we get there. ‘Where is it?’ he snaps at one of the workers on the back of the bakkie. ‘It’s gone,’ the man replies. ‘The people from the scrapyard came and took it.’ Faan is enraged. ‘This is what happens if the farm owners aren’t around.’

  He jerks his thumb towards the back. ‘They start to think that they are boss and do what they like.’ He spits out orders at the men. His contempt is poisonous. For the most part, they ignore him, sniggering when his back is turned. He has no authority here any more. He’ll be gone before nightfall, and it will be weeks before they have to endure him again.

  Musina is an ugly place, tacky and cheap; a rough-and-ready border town that is not uncommonly referred to as South Africa’s ‘Wild West’. The Great North Road runs through the town to the border with Zimbabwe. It is rutted and potholed from the wheels of the thousands of trucks that pass through it every year.

  Near the taxi rank, a faded mural blackened by exhaust smoke warns: ‘Play it safe, AIDS kills’. It is plastered over with pamphlets for penis enlargements and ‘Quick Same Day Abortions’ by ‘Dr Bob’ that are supposedly ‘100% guaranteed and pain free’. Alongside it, another mural exhorts: ‘Keep our country clean for the next generation’.

  The shops in the main street have names like the Musina Cheap Price Shop and the Bargain Centre. There are countless cut-price dealers, informal traders and spaza shops. Fast-food outlets do a roaring trade in greasy fried chicken. You could say that Zimbabwe’s economic catastrophe was a boon for Musina.

  Johan Roos lives in Paul Mills Street, a few blocks from the Spur steak-house. The house is largely hidden from view by trees and thick foliage. There are two bakkies and a car parked in the driveway, but nobody is home. A domestic worker says the baas is away. She’s not sure when he will be back.

  On my return to Johannesburg, I dial his cellphone number, hoping we can arrange a meeting and that he’ll be prepared to talk to me about Zimbabwe. There’s no answer. Fifteen minutes later, at 3.33 p.m., while I’m on another call, someone leaves a voicemail on my phone. ‘It is Johan speaking … You can possibly just give me a call again so that I know who it is that is looking for me,’ he says.

  But when I call back, the phone is answered by another man. He identifies himself as Johan’s brother, Pieter. I tell him about the message. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he says. There’s a pause. ‘It was probably my friend. He’s sitting in the bakkie.’ He admits that it is Johan’s phone, but claims Johan is in Swaziland.

  I ask about the allegations levelled against his brother in Zimbabwe. ‘It is just a story that is being spread,’ he tells me. ‘They held him completely unnecessarily. He was totally innocent. He had nothing with him. His name was mentioned by a black who stuffed up,’ Pieter says. ‘It was completely ridiculous. He did absolutely nothing and he had absolutely nothing with him [when they arrested him].’

  I never do hear from Roos. Not even when one of Media24’s papers, Beeld, leads with a story exposing the ‘Musina Mafia’ and the rifles smuggled across the border. Not long afterwards, Roos changes his cellphone number.

  ‘If you want to know rage,’ says Blondie Leathem, ‘you have to see a rhino calf standing next to her decaying mother for three days in 40 °C heat, trying to suckle.’ For thirty years, Leathem has been at the heart of Zimbabwe’s bloody rhino wars, first in the Zambezi Valley and now in the Lowveld. It is a rage he knows all too well.

  Zimbabwe escaped the initial poaching surge of the 1970s and early 1980s, which saw Africa’s black rhinos reduced from roughly 65 000 in the late 1960s to just 15 000 in 1980. Ironically, the Rhodesian Bush War in the 1970s insulated the country’s rhinos from the carnage elsewhere on the continent. It was a brief respite.

  To Zimbabwe’s north, across the Zambezi River, lies Zambia. In 1981, its national parks, particularly those in the Luangwa Valley, had an estimated 3 000 black rhino. Six years later, there were fewer than 100. Zambia’s economy had historically been based on copper, but when copper prices plummeted in the 1970s, so did its economy. By the 1980s the country was destitute, its currency almost worthless. Poaching surged, and one by one Zambia’s wildlife sanctuaries were decimated.

  By 1983, Zambian poachers were venturing across the river into Zim babwe’s northernmost parks. Fishermen and tourists began to report hearing unexplained volleys of shots. Four rhino carcasses were discovered after the 1983 rainy season. The skulls bore signs of having been hacked with machetes. The horns were gone.

  Once it started, the killing was relentless. In 1984, twelve carcasses were found. In 1985, it was sixty-eight; in 1986, 149; in 1987, 170. In response, Zimbabwe’s then prime minister, Robert Mugabe, approved a controversial ‘shoot-on-sight’ policy against poachers, known as Operation Stronghold. The man in charge was Glenn Tatham, the newly appointed chief warden of Zimparks. He didn’t mince his words. ‘Desperate situations require desperate measures,’ he told a reporter from Sports Illustrated. ‘We knew we had to take the guys on and fight fire with fire. Our objective is to save animals; it’s not to kill people. But we cannot afford the possible loss of life among our men by letting them walk into gangs of armed criminals without having the option of shooting first.’

  Blondie Leathem is a veteran of the Bush War and fought with the Rhodesian Light Infantry, an elite airborne commando unit known as ‘The Saints’ or ‘The Incredibles’. He was badly wounded in combat, suffering a gunshot wound to the stomach and losing two fingers on his left hand. He spent a year recovering in hospital and then returned to the RLI. At the end of the war, when the unit was disbanded, he signed up with Zimparks, took a substantial cut in pay, and found himself in the middle of a new war.

  By 1986, the number of incursions by armed poachers had risen to 150 a year. There were frantic efforts to move black rhinos out of the lower Zambezi Valley, the area closest to the border. Over the course of the next three years, 170 would be translocated to the relative safety of private lands in central and southern Zimbabawe.

  In the Zambezi Valley, dozens of poachers were being killed. ‘The poachers were coming across the river in dugouts. A lot of [them] had AK-47s. The fire-fights were usually over quickly. If you didn’t get them down in the first couple of seconds, they were gone.’

  ‘It got really ugly,’ Leathem says. ‘We had carte blanche and we hammered them, but it didn’t help, of course. More guys just kept coming. We had one period where we killed ten guys in fourteen days. And then it went quiet. For three weeks there wasn’t a single incursion. But after three weeks, they came back with a vengeance. It turned out, from our informant, that these okes had gone back to the middleman and said: “It’s dangerous over there. We’re not going back.” The middleman then simply upped the price per kilogram from $300 to $800. Now, they had three times the number of guys prepared to come in and risk it.’

  Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, was a key hub in the international rhino horn and ivory trade. The police were easily corrupted and turned a blind eye to the traders. Leathem and his men ran their own groups of informants, but were careful not to pay them in cash and risk violating currency regulations. The Zambians were so poor that the informers routinely did their work for a few cigarettes, cooking oil, maize, cakes of soap and
cheap digital watches.

  Norman English was a senior ranger at the time. ‘We got sorted properly there. I remember one day when I had six gangs in my area with an average of four to six guys in a gang. When you have fourteen scouts to take them on, you’re not going to win. We lost 104 rhino in three years.’

  In one incident in 1989, English’s scouts found a gang of six in the Chizarira National Park. Once described as the black rhino’s last Eden, it is a spectacularly beautiful landscape with deep gorges and panoramic views. A tour guide had taken a group of tourists up to a viewpoint overlooking a gorge. Three hundred metres below, he spotted a group of six men bathing in a river. On the bank were military backpacks and kit. He radioed English.

  ‘It was a group of poachers,’ English says. ‘They felt so secure that they were bathing there in the middle of the day. We killed five and caught the last bugger. In their camp we found heavy weapons and thirty-two rhino horns.’

  As the killings in the Zambezi Valley mounted, so did criticism of the operation, both within the Zimbabwean government and from human rights organisations abroad. Relations between Zimbabwean police, Central Intelligence Organisation operatives and the Zimparks rangers grew increasingly strained.

  ‘It was a helluva thing being a white guy in charge of anti-poaching operations where you were shooting black ouens,’ Leathem says. ‘By the end of 1987, I had been locked up on three occasions by police. It was getting beyond a joke.’ He was arrested for murder after a suspected poacher – the son of a senior Zambian police official – drowned in the Zambezi River. Later, Leathem was accused of being a South African spy. Glenn Tatham was also arrested and accused of murdering a poacher on an undercover operation. The cases were all eventually dismissed. Of the shootings, Leathem told a Time magazine reporter at the time: ‘Trying to arrest a man with an AK-47 is like trying to grab a lion with your bare hands.’