Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  But Groenewald is adamant. ‘I am not a poacher,’ he tells me as we sit on the deck of the hunting lodge at his farm Prachtig, sixty kilometres south of Musina. ‘That word makes me sick. It is not necessary for me to poach a rhino.’

  I first heard Groenewald’s name in Zimbabwe a few months before his arrest during my initial inquiries into Johan Roos, the Musina poacher accused of supplying silenced rifles to poaching gangs.

  I had gone to meet Charles Davy, the founder and driving force behind the Bubye Valley Conservancy in Zimbabwe’s south-eastern Lowveld. It was there that two silenced rifles – including one stolen during a farm attack in South Africa – had been recovered and linked to Roos.

  Davy is a controversial figure. He has made millions through property development, game farming and hunting. Until 2006, he had been a director and shareholder of HHK Safaris, one of Zimbabwe’s largest hunting operators.

  Dubbed the ‘great white survivor’ by a British press fixated on his daughter Chelsy’s long on-again, off-again relationship with Prince Harry, Davy was one of the few white farmers to weather the storm of Robert Mugabe’s land grabs. Davy said it had come at a price: ‘I have given up rather a large part of my life to end up with the bit that I have left.’ Four of his farms, covering an area of about 56 000 hectares, were ceded to the government for resettlement. Despite this, rumours persist that he is somehow protected because of his ties to leading figures in Mugabe’s government. The opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) has accused Davy of ‘sustaining’ the Mugabe regime, a claim he denies.

  But they point to his friendship with Webster Shamu, Zimbabwe’s information minister and one of the old guard close to Mugabe. Davy claims he has known Shamu since the mid-1990s and that they have a ‘legitimate, longstanding business partnership’ in a safari business. ‘He’s a person I like and get along with,’ he told me.

  Once Chelsy met Harry, Davy’s business interests and his links to Mugabe’s government became grist for the tabloid mill. In 2009, Britain’s Daily Mail, a newspaper with a reputation for allegedly fabricating stories, published an article linking Davy to a rhino-poaching cartel called the ‘Crocodile Gang’. It was a name unimaginatively plucked from the annals of Zimbabwe’s indepen dence war. The report, littered – by the writer’s own admission – with a ‘cast list lifted straight from the pages of a Wilbur Smith novel’, suggested that Davy was somehow linked to a syndicate led by Emmerson Mnangagwa, a Mugabe confidant known as the ‘butcher of Matabeleland’. It was a story calculated to cause damage. Harry’s brother, Prince William, is an ardent conservationist and has spoken out repeatedly against the illegal trade in rhino horns, describing it on one occasion as ‘ignorant, selfish and utterly wrong’.

  Davy was outraged by the Daily Mail’s allegations. In a rare interview, he told the Telegraph that he had had ‘enough of this nonsense’.

  ‘I have spent a good part of my life building up game sanctuaries and protecting wildlife ... I doubt that you will find anyone who has done as much for the conservation of wildlife with his own money as I have.’

  Raoul du Toit, the director of the Lowveld Rhino Trust and the man credited with saving Zimbabwe’s rhinos from extinction, came to Davy’s defence, saying that he was a vital cog in protecting Zimbabwe’s dwindling black rhino population.

  The Daily Mail article was later quietly removed from the website.

  The sprawling, thatched-roof Davy family homestead sits on a hilltop overlooking the Bubye Conservancy and a vast expanse of acacia trees, granite koppies, veld and mopane woodlands that stretch as far as I can see. There is a pool and a tennis court. Below it lies Towla, the conservancy’s headquarters. Over coffee in his office, Davy is emphatic. Dawie Groenewald, he tells me, is a ‘bad bastard’. He leans forward. ‘Groenewald has bought $4 million worth of rhino at auctions. He bought them because he’s chopping off all the horns.’ It was the first I’d heard of it.

  The two men have never met. But they despise one another. At the root of their enmity lies a long-running feud over a prime government hunting concession in the Matetsi Safari Area, near the Hwange National Park in north-western Zimbabwe. Davy alleges that in about 2003, Groenewald conspired with his former business partner, Ed Kadzombe, and ‘other political elements’ to strip him of the concession.

  ‘After we lost the concession, one of our skinners stayed behind. He told me later that hunters had shot sixty lions. It was absolutely terrible.’ Davy also alleges that Groenewald has been involved in large-scale hunting on farms in the Gwaai Valley Conservancy near Hwange, which had been occupied by squatters as part of Mugabe’s ‘fast-track land-reform programme’. According to conservationists, ‘whole herds of animals’ were shot there.

  Later, when I ask Groenewald about the accusations, he admits to hunting on occupied farms, but says that accusations of illegal hunting are prompted by jealousy and racism. ‘You know what the white Zimbabweans are like to the white South Africans,’ he says. ‘They don’t want us to hunt there in their kingdom. In 2000, when the farms were being taken back from the whites, there were ex-parks guys who each got a piece of land. And I started hunting there. I wasn’t the only South African in Zimbabwe doing that. But then I began hunting with the boys. And people said that was wrong. How could a white guy go hunting with a boy? It just doesn’t work like that.’ (In this context, the word ‘boy’ is used as a demeaning term for a black African man.)

  Groenewald continues: ‘So when I began hunting with the boys, that is when the stories started coming out that I was hunting illegally, that I was slaughtering Zimbabwe’s wildlife, that I was sending planes in to smuggle stuff out.’

  Groenewald says that the Matetsi concession was the cause of his ‘biggest shit’ in Zimbabwe. ‘It is the best hunting in Zim but, jirre, I lost a lot of money there.’ He claims he was harassed in a concerted campaign to get him off the concession. ‘It was police every second day, accusations that we were hunting illegally, all that bullshit, all the time. It was a nightmare. It was all just because we had the most clients.’

  For years Groenewald’s hunting business, Out of Africa Adventurous Safaris, had been dogged by allegations of illegal hunting in Zimbabwe. ‘This is an unscrupulous organisation that doesn’t respect the environment and pursues unsustainable quotas,’ David Coltart, an opposition politician in Zimbabwe, told a Newsweek reporter in 2005. According to the article, ‘critics, including the Zimbabwean Association of Tourism and Safari Operators, say the group … overhunt species in violation of the Zimbabwean government’s hunting rules’. That same year, the influential US-based Hunting Report newsletter stated that Out of Africa was ‘widely known to take people onto seized properties in Zimbabwe’ and was ‘deeply resented by the professional hunting establishment’.

  In 2005, the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority also issued a letter ‘banning’ Out of Africa’s operations in Zimbabwe. Dated 20 January and signed by Dr Morris Mtsambiwa, the then director-general of Zimparks, the letter stated that Out of Africa is ‘not allowed any hunting nor any safari operation in the whole country of Zimbabwe’.

  When I asked Groenewald about the banning letter in June 2011, he said it was ‘bullshit’. He showed me another letter, also on a Zimparks letterhead and signed by Felix Matenda, a senior investigations and security officer in the Bulawayo office. Dated 17 August 2010, it stated that there were no allegations being investigated against Out of Africa.

  ‘How can you ban someone in Zimbabwe? I’m still hunting in Zimbabwe,’ Groenewald said. ‘We’re hunting in [Hwange] National Park now, with permits. Elephant and buffalo. We shot five or six elephant there last year. That is how bad it is over there.’

  Strictly speaking, Zimbabwe’s National Parks Act prohibits hunting in national parks. But in recent years the regulations have been waived to allow the country’s cash-strapped parks authorities to earn an income through ‘non-trophy’ elephant hunts. Under normal circumstances, the animals
would be culled and the meat given to parks officials and local villagers. Now a hunter, paying as little as $10 000 for a seven-day hunt, can shoot an elephant, pose for a photograph with the kill and get a cast of the tusks as a keepsake.

  ‘There is a total overpopulation of elephants there,’ Tielman Erasmus, a professional hunter and one of Groenewald’s co-accused, said. ‘So what a way to get rid of them and make money.’

  The Zimbabwe Professional Hunters and Guides Association has described the practice as ‘unethical’. ‘If we start hunting within a national park, it destroys the entire purpose of having national parks,’ it said in a 2011 statement. According to the Safari Operators’ Association of Zimbabwe, the practice is ‘not ideal or desirable, but it is legal’. One Zimbabwean professional hunter I spoke to, Blondie Leathem, remarked: ‘Only guys like Groenewald would have such low ethics that they are prepared to hunt in a national park – the typical lowlife who believes that money comes before everything else in life.’

  The Zimbabwe allegations seem to have had repercussions in South Africa. In 2006, Groenewald was expelled from PHASA. While the exact nature of the complaints filed against him was never made public, some were said to relate to his activities in Zimbabwe. Adri Kitshoff, PHASA’s CEO, told me in 2012 that most of the charges related to ‘transgressions of laws’ and permit violations. She wouldn’t be drawn on the details.

  Groenewald maintains that he did nothing illegal in Zimbabwe. ‘We are not angels,’ he told me. ‘You can never do anything 100 per cent right. You might pay a bribe in Zimbabwe to go through the border or give a guy a $100 and say, “I don’t want to wait a week for a permit. Give it to me in a day.” But we never stole [anything] from [anybody].’

  As Groenewald tells it, his is a classic rags-to-riches tale – the story of a local boy who defied the odds to become a multimillionaire.

  He was born into a working-class Afrikaans family in Pietersburg – now Polokwane – in 1968. Groenewald’s mother was a hairdresser. His father worked in construction. He doesn’t talk about him much. ‘I see very little of him. We don’t have a relationship. It is difficult. My mother and father separated early. My mother raised us and then we went to boarding school.’

  When he finished school, his mother didn’t have the money to send him or his brother Janneman to university. They were left with a simple choice – the army or the police. In 1987, all young white men were subject to compulsory military service in the armed forces of the apartheid state. There were few exceptions to the rule. One of them was joining the police. Groenewald weighed up his options. The army was a two-year stint. If you opted for the cops, it was four years. The army paid R120 a month, the police force, R600. Groenewald joined the police, as did Janneman.

  The two were eventually assigned to the narcotics bureau, and spent much of their time chasing down dagga dealers. ‘We didn’t even know what stuff like cocaine looked like back then,’ Groenewald says. He also found time to make a name for himself playing rugby for the police and then for the Far North rugby union. He was a fullback. ‘That was a great time,’ he says wistfully.

  But in 1993, the brothers left the force under a cloud. There were whispers that they were somehow linked to a syndicate that smuggled stolen cars across the border into Zimbabwe.

  ‘The whole thing was blown completely out of proportion,’ Groenewald says, taking a sip of Coke. ‘We had left narcotics and were working at the vehicle theft unit. You get a lot of stolen cars coming in and you don’t know who the owner is. Engine numbers are filed off, but you can etch them out and then trace the car. At that stage we didn’t have a private vehicle, so one day in came a fucked-up old Toyota bakkie. We got the number, found out who the owner was, called him up and asked him if we could buy it. He said sure, and we paid R7 000 for it.

  ‘We drove it to work at the police station every day. It’s not like we were hiding it. Then the bomb burst and we were accused of fraud. Afterwards we found out that the guy who had sold us the bakkie wasn’t the real owner. My brother was fined R3 000 for fraud. I wasn’t found guilty. It was a ridiculous case. If we wanted to steal a car, we wouldn’t drive it to work at the fucking police station.’

  ‘It was about jealousy,’ Groenewald says, touching on what is to become a recurring theme in our discussions. ‘We always did nicer things than the others in the unit. The other guys always had a knife out for us.’

  Not long afterwards, Janneman left South Africa and went to the United States. He has never been back, his brother says.

  Out of the police and out of work, Groenewald turned to selling fresh produce. ‘I was selling bananas, peaches and watermelons on the street corners and in the taxi ranks. At 5 a.m., I’d be sitting in a taxi rank selling bananas, just to make money. I’d go to the farmers, buy some Impala, cut it up into small packets and sell it on the street.’

  Everything changed in 1997. That was the year Groenewald and three friends started a hunting business that would become Out of Africa Adventurous Safaris. It was the year that he attended his first Safari Club International (SCI) convention in the United States. Billed as the ‘largest hunting shows on earth’, the annual SCI conventions draw thousands of hunters from across the United States and around the world. Every safari outfitter worth his salt is there looking for clients. It is a cut-throat business. ‘This is the dirtiest business out there,’ Groenewald’s wife, Sariette, says. ‘One day everyone is nice to you at the show, and the next you are their biggest enemy and you mustn’t come within ten metres of their little stall because you’re then stealing their clients.’

  Groenewald quickly found his first clients at the SCI convention. ‘We hired a camp from someone for them to stay at and arranged the hunts.’ Three years later, Out of Africa expanded its operations into Zimbabwe as the first farms were seized and bread riots erupted in Harare.

  In 2002, Groenewald bought Prachtig. ‘It cost R4 million for only 2 500 hectares. That was expensive back then.’ Two of his partners in the hunting business pulled out in 2004 to pursue other interests. That year Groenewald bought his first sables and, a few years later, his first rhinos. Later, he partnered with a Spaniard and bought the neighbouring farm, Krige. He was doing well. An Out of Africa safari brochure for the 2008 to 2009 hunting season shows hunters posing with a variety of kills – eleven lions, ten leopards, twenty elephant, thirty-five buffalo, four rhinos, three hippo and three crocodiles. At the time, Groenewald was charging between $10 000 and $12 500 for an elephant trophy, $5 000 for a lion, $4 500 for a crocodile and a hippo, and $3 000 for a buffalo.

  The first rhino hunts took place on Groenewald’s farm in about 2008. ‘A guy called Alexander Steyn came and hunted here. I bought the rhinos for him to hunt. And it was through him that I met the Vietnamese agent,’ Groenewald says.

  Steyn had previously been implicated in the ‘canned’ hunting of cheetahs. According to records held by the Department of Environmental Affairs, he was also the outfitter in a number of rhino hunts conducted by Vietnamese nationals. Groenewald won’t be drawn on the identity of the mysterious Vietnamese agent – a man who is apparently based in Pretoria.

  Groenewald bought dozens of rhinos on auction from SANParks. ‘Through the years, they have been the biggest supplier of rhinos in South Africa,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t believe they can make a profit without selling rhinos.’ In 2008, SANParks made R22 million from rhino sales to private entities. The following year, the amount increased to R52 million. Many of the biggest buyers were also the biggest organisers of rhino hunts for Vietnamese clients.

  Groenewald says he bought forty-four rhinos from SANParks between 2008 and 2009. ‘Ten were bulls and thirty-four were cows and calves,’ he tells me. Prosecutors contend that a total of at least forty-eight rhinos were bought and moved to Prachtig between June and December 2008.

  Feeding them costs money. ‘It costs me R3 million a year just to feed the animals on this farm,’ Groenewald says. ‘People don’t understand that. No
w and then you have to hunt a rhino to make some money to run the farm.

  ‘Back then I was selling a rhino hunt for $35 000. At that time you could buy a rhino for R150 000 (about $18 000). When the Vietnamese came in, all of a sudden they started paying R50 000, R60 000 and R70 000 (about $8 000) a kilogram. Rhino prices shot through the roof. Now that rhino would [cost] R450 000 (about $55 000).’

  The Vietnamese are ‘making a lot of money out of rhino horns’. ‘I must be honest with you – for me, to do these hunts is very good money. It is really good money. And for those guys [the Vietnamese] it is good money.’ As the South African government has slowly closed the tap on hunters from Southeast Asia, Groenewald has been lobbying behind the scenes to keep them going. His lawyer has visited Vietnam at least twice to hold discussions with CITES authorities there, and Groenewald has threatened to launch a legal challenge to increasingly stringent rhino hunting regulations.

  But the Vietnamese are not hunters, he says frankly. ‘The Vietnamese want the horn, that’s it. That’s what makes it worse. You’re killing a rhino with a guy who is actually not a hunter, just for the horn. But we make them fucking shoot, so they’re doing it all legally.’

  Groenewald blames the ‘system’ for the killing. ‘I don’t enjoy killing rhinos … but I’m killing them because of the system. We are forced to shoot them because that is the only way the trophies can be sold and exported. You have to kill the animal to sell its horns.’

  And, he says, ‘Everyone who has rhinos has done hunts with Vietnamese clients. Everyone, except John Hume. That guy has lots of horns.’