Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  The carnage in Bubiana peaked in June 2008. Over the next six months, nearly fifty black rhino were poached. In the first five months of 2009, a further twenty-four were killed. The remaining rhinos – twenty-two in all – were translocated to Bubye in May 2009. Teams of scouts, veterinarians and conservationists worked frantically to move the survivors. But the slaughter continued to the very end. At night, as Bubiana’s last rhinos were trucked out of the conservancy, the sound of automatic rifle fire could be heard rolling off the hills.

  The Bubye Valley Conservancy escaped the initial surge relatively unscathed, losing only five rhinos in 2008. That changed abruptly in 2009, as Bubiana’s rhino population teetered on the brink of extinction. Bubye’s scouts, caught up in the desperate rescue efforts, had taken their eyes off their ‘own backyard’ just long enough for the poachers to gain a foothold. By the time they managed to bring the situation back under control, Bubye had lost thirty-eight rhinos. The deaths of only four rhinos could be attributed in 2009 to ‘natural mortalities’.

  Two very distinct groups of poachers emerged amid the bloodshed in the Lowveld. There were the Harare-based gangs, armed with AK-47s and axes. Many appeared to be serving, or former, soldiers, as their tactics betrayed their military training. Some also carried army equipment and clothing. They were aggressive and quick to open fire when confronted by the scouts, whom they often outgunned and outnumbered. Once they tracked a rhino, they made little or no effort to hide its killing. The rattle of AK-47 fire could be heard kilometres away, reverberating off the rocks and valleys. The poachers would hit hard and fast, mowing the animals down with sustained bursts of fire, often aiming at their legs to cripple them before they moved in for the kill. The horns were hurriedly hacked off with axes, leaving behind a bloody mess of mangled flesh, bone and cartilage.

  The other poachers were local, drawn from nearby villages and towns. Dubbed the ‘zebra gangs’, they had cut their teeth on hunting game and bush meat, but by 2003 were smuggling hundreds of salted zebra skins across the border into South Africa. Unlike the Harare-based gunmen, they used hunting rifles and bush knives and were subtler, more proficient killers.

  Their signature was their knife-work, a skill they had acquired skinning the zebras they had poached. Some were said to be able to skin an entire zebra carcass in just five minutes. Unlike the ‘AK gangs’, they didn’t waste time hacking off the horn and chopping through bone. A rhino’s horns, unlike those of an antelope, do not have a solid bone core. The horn develops from a dome-shaped growth plate that sits above layers of bone and cartilage. It is a bit like a fingernail. Someone skilled with a knife will cut around the seam at the base of a horn, insert the blade under the edges and then essentially pry it loose.

  The zebra gangs’ weapons of choice were .303s and .458s – standard hunting rifles. It made the killings harder to detect. From a distance, a single shot – and usually that was all that was required – could easily be confused for a legitimate trophy hunt, an elephant snapping a branch or the crack of a whip.

  But there was another significant factor that set them apart from the Harare crime syndicates. The zebra gangs were armed, funded and directed by South Africans – a group that would eventually become known in the press as the ‘Musina Mafia’.

  There are no ambulances in Beitbridge, and the police station at Makado, ninety kilometres to the north, has no patrol cars at its disposal. If a poacher is arrested, shot or killed, a Bubye staffer has to drive to Makado, collect a policeman and return with him to the conservancy. Only then can the suspect be transported to the police cells, the hospital in Beitbridge or the government mortuary.

  The task of getting Hardlife to hospital falls to the co-ordinator of a rhino monitoring project at Bubye. The poacher is bundled into the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser. A Makado cop comes along for the ride.

  Hours later – satisfied that he is not likely to die or escape from the hospital – the pair head back to Makado. Night has fallen. Somewhere near the conservancy scouts and cops are lying in ambush for a heavy-set South African called Johannes. Others are keeping an eye on the road.

  A bakkie tears through the darkness towards the border. The fat man behind the wheel has his foot hard on the accelerator. It is a dangerous road, narrow and jagged along the edges where the tar has crumbled away. At night, cattle and goats roam freely across it. The man barely notices the Toyota Land Cruiser heading in the opposite direction. As he passes it, he flicks his lights on high, blinding the occupants. Then he’s gone, his tail lights a red blur in the blackness. He doesn’t see it, but the Land Cruiser brakes sharply, does a U-turn and speeds after him.

  The immigration hall at Beitbridge is still teeming with people trying to cross the border into South Africa before it gets too late. The fat man hurries inside. Somehow, he manages to force his way to the front of a queue. He is sweating heavily. A Zimbabwean immigration officer stamps his passport and waves him along. He is almost through the door when the cop and the Bubye staffer run inside and confront him.

  They don’t need to look at his passport to know who he is. The conservancy’s anti-poaching unit has had a file on him for years. His name is Jan Johannes George Roos, but he calls himself Johan. He’s forty-two, divorced, and lives with his father in Musina, an uninspiring border town eighteen kilometres away in South Africa. He has lived there most of his life.

  It was 1985 and Roos was nineteen when he fell foul of the law for the first time. A magistrate found him guilty of illegal hunting and contravening South Africa’s nature conservation regulations, and he was given a suspended sentence. Two weeks later, in a separate case, he was convicted of poaching ‘endangered wild animals’. He was sentenced to ‘six strokes with a light cane’. After that, he appeared to remain out of trouble until 1988, when he was arrested again and found guilty of stealing livestock. He was fined R1 000. Five years later he was back in the dock, on charges related to illegal hunting. But he managed to avoid prison and was sentenced to a year’s correctional supervision.

  Blondie Leathem, the Bubye Conservancy’s general manager, recalls catching Roos shooting game along the tar road from Beitbridge to Bulawayo in early 1995. ‘That fat-arsed bastard was klapping animals with three locals and selling the meat in Beitbridge,’ he says. ‘I had him on the ground with an FN [rifle] at his head, and he kept whining, “Ag, meneer, meneer, ek is jammer. Meneer, asseblief, ek het ’n klein kind. Ek sal dit nooit weer doen nie.” (Sir, sir, I’m sorry. Sir, please, I have a small child. I’ll never do it again.) Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have pulled the trigger. It would have saved us a helluva lot of trouble.’

  Records indicate that Roos worked for a construction company in Musina as a foreman for a couple of years until 2002. Then, in October 2003, he and one of his friends were caught illegally hunting game on a farm across the road from Bubye. The farm had been seized by squatters during the 2000 land invasions. A case was opened with Beitbridge police, but neither Roos nor his friend was ever prosecuted.

  The Bubye file states that ‘informants have consistently identified Roos as the buyer of zebra hides and as the supplier of .30-calibre bullets to poachers for them to hunt zebras for him’. In 2006, a group of poachers caught laying snares for zebra in the Bubiana Conservancy named Roos as one of the ‘buyers’. There were also allegations linking him to the poaching of giraffe and zebra on the Nuanetsi Game Ranch, 120 kilometres north-east of Beitbridge.

  ‘There are places that once had 400 or 500 zebra,’ says Leathem. ‘Today there are none left. The sheer quantity of hides going across the border from 2000 onwards into South Africa was staggering, but the South African authorities didn’t do much [about] it. The border is so porous and the level of corruption at Beitbridge so great that the poachers were just sending skins across all the time.’

  Gradually, the zebra gangs began turning their attention to rhinos.

  Outside the immigration hall, Roos’s passport – black and blue with entry and exit s
tamps for Zimbabwe and South Africa – is taken away. Fifty-seven out of fifty-nine pages of the passport have entries on them, revealing that between March 2007 and July 2009, Roos had travelled to Zimbabwe 226 times – an average of two crossings a week.

  In the parking lot, police find his bakkie, a battered gold 1987 Nissan Safari, registration number DZZ 615 N. It matches the description Hardlife had given them – it is also the same bakkie that Roos was driving in October 2003 when he was caught shooting game on the property opposite Bubye.

  Oddly, an identical registration number had previously been recorded for a brown Volkswagen Caravelle, which Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) had stopped at a roadblock in July 2003. The occupants – a dozen South Africans, including four teenagers – had been accused of illegally hunting hippo, crocodile and elephant on a farm that had been seized by ‘war veterans’ in the West Nicholson area. There were claims that one of the South Africans had also shot a black rhino in the Bubiana Conservancy a month earlier. Police confiscated close to 400 kilograms of meat. The South Africans denied any wrongdoing and claimed they belonged to a Christian organisation. The eight adults spent a night in police holding cells in West Nicholson, were questioned and then released without charge after a senior government official ‘pressurised’ the cops into dropping the case.

  Roos is taken to the Makado police station, where he’ll spend the night in a lice-infested cell. His cellphone is confiscated after he is seen hurriedly sending an SMS. In Afrikaans, the text message reads: ‘Clean the laundry’. When questioned about it, he claims the recipient is his ‘garden boy’ in South Africa, a man who investigators know had previously accompanied him on trips to Zimbabwe.

  All other messages stored in the cellphone’s inbox and outbox appear to have been deleted. But fragments of SMSes can still be extracted from the delivery reports sent to the phone, which indicate when messages are successfully delivered. Copies of some SMSes are also found in the phone’s draft folder.

  For instance, there’s a message sent to a contact called ‘Fish’ a day before the Bubye shooting. ‘I will buy 7 items this evening …’ it reads. Two hours later, there’s a message to another contact, identified as Ian: ‘Don’t forget to bring me that [sic] 10 items …’ And there is a record of a call to a number saved as ‘New Mbedzi’. In fact, half a dozen numbers stored on the phone are for ‘Mbedzi’. Investigators write them down as they scroll through the contact list. Two other entries pique their interest: one for ‘Freedom’, and another for ‘Teacher number 2’. The numbers are later linked to two known poachers: Freedom Chiradza and Rodgers ‘Teacher’ Mukwena.

  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 r
ifle. 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.