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.
I’m not alone on this trip. Travelling with me is Godknows Nare, a Zimbabwean ex-con. He’d come to South Africa in the mid-1990s, been arrested during a bungled armed robbery and spent the next decade in jail. In prison, he dabbled in journalism. ‘Jail,’ he says, ‘was a college, where I studied to be a better person.’
His release coincided with Zimbabwe’s collapse. It was an ideal time for someone who had the skills and the access to find work as a ‘fixer’. Local and international television networks and correspondents were clamouring for stories about Zimbabwe. Godknows, somewhat to his surprise, discovered that not only did he have a knack for the job, but that he quickly became invaluable. Everyone from the BBC and Al Jazeera to the New York Times eventually came knocking at his door. He won awards. They nicknamed him the ‘Mayor of Musina’. Godknows knows the town like the back of his hand and has an uncanny ability to tap into its underbelly.
Nare takes me to meet Thando. He might know where Mukwena is. Thando also has an intriguing sideline. Nare has arranged for him to show it to me. Thando rents a room in the township and I’m told he changes addresses as often he changes phone numbers. He spends a lot of time in the bush, bringing out shipments of cigarettes. Each shipment is escorted by armed groups of men known as impis. It is common for rival gangs to waylay consignments. There have been shoot-outs. The human mules that carry the contraband in duffel bags and sacks need protection.
Each man carries two boxes. Sometimes there are up to twenty of them in a group. The couriers are paid R200 a head. A box contains about fifty ‘bricks’ of cigarettes. Each brick consists of ten packs of twenties. A box costs about R1 150 in Zimbabwe, and sells for R3 000 in South Africa. It is a lucrative business, and a dangerous one.
‘People get killed,’ Thando says matter-of-factly. ‘It’s just like drugs. Even soldiers have killed each other in the bush over cigarettes.’ But if there is blood to be spilt, it won’t be his. He has his ‘guys’, and they have their guns. ‘Me, I can’t be killed, bra,’ he says. ‘I’m hard-core. Killing is another story. You can come to kill me, but you can be killed yourself.’
Thando is contemptuous of law enforcement. ‘This is South Africa. You can bribe anyone and everybody, as long as there is money. Money talks. As long as I’m sorted here in South Africa, I don’t fuckin’ care.’ He boasts that he has cops and ambulance drivers on his payroll. ‘Musina is fucked up, man. I’ve been using a police van and an ambulance here for smuggling. You pay the driver and then he goes off with the
cargo.’ He laughs and mimics the sound of a siren. ‘Wee! Wee! Wee! Wee!’
The people who make the real money here in the township – in Nancefield and Freedom Park – are into cigarettes, he says. There’s the guy with the black Hummer parked outside his house. He’s a player – a dangerous one at that. Then there are the men with the Audi A4s, BMWs and ‘Tony Yengenis’ (the nickname for Mercedes-Benzes, derived from the name of a corrupt ANC politician). ‘All the nice cars you see are from cigarettes.’
Although Thando comes from Zimbabwe, he’s lived in South Africa for years. He worked as an electrician, and then later as a cook in the kitchen of a private boarding school. He always dreamt of making real money. He wants to move more shipments of cigarettes more often. ‘At the moment, I’m only doing it once or twice a month.’
What about rhino horn? ‘There are people who do that here,’ he says. Two of them live nearby, but there is bad blood between Thando and them and it is unlikely they’ll talk. There are others on the farms along the border he can introduce me to. What about Mukwena? I ask. Thando has heard the name. He’ll see what he can find out. But first he wants to show me something. It is his ‘special thing’.
We drive into town. Our first stop is Al-Noor Motor Spares, then Copperpot Body Parts. Thando ticks off a list: Bodyfilla, Q-Bond, Superglue, Gum-Gum exhaust paste and sandpaper. It comes to R270 and change. Back in Freedom Park, we follow a series of rutted dirt roads to the edge of the township. Finally Thando tells me to stop at a run-down shack. A battered blue bakkie with rusted axles and no tyres is parked outside. The fresh skin from the head of a cow and a skull lie drying in the sun on a discarded grey foam mattress. ‘You can leave your car here. It’s safe,’ Thando assures me. The few people who are around stoically ignore us. A hill surmounted with radio masts lies ahead of us.
I follow Thando as he hikes up to what he calls his ‘private place’. The only sign that other people have been here are empty beer bottles and spent condoms discarded in the bush after fumbled, hurried couplings. The only sound is of our feet crunching on the scrub. The temperature is climbing rapidly to a scorching 37 °C, and it is not even summer yet. Near an ancient baobab, Thando sets down his tools and supplies, packed in a cereal box. He reads out the slogan on the side: ‘So delicious, so nutritious, so good for you.’
First Thando makes a conical frame out of wire coat hangers. He then inserts a 500-millilitre plastic bottle filled with water and sand into its centre. After soaking a cardboard box in water, he tears it into strips and mashes it up before cramming it into the frame around the bottle. Then he adds the tip of a cow horn to the point of the ‘item’.
Once that is done, he coats on Bodyfilla, waits for it to dry and begins sanding. Then he smears on black layers of Gum-Gum. When it dries, which it does rapidly in the sun, it turns grey. The final touches include a band of horsehair and pieces of cow bone, which he breaks up with a rock and pastes to the base with Q-Bond and superglue. The whole process takes five hours.
Finally, he hands me the finished product and announces with a chuckle: ‘People want rhino horn. I make them rhino horn.’ Thando’s sideline is a con. It is known as a ‘knock’. And Thando knocks them hard. He preys on people’s avarice. It amuses him.
‘I charge a lot of bucks,’ he says. ‘It depends on how badly they want it. The last one I sold for R15 000, another for R25 000. These people like things. They like rhino horns, so now I make them so that they can get them faster.’ By the time the victims of the scam realise they have been duped, Thando is gone.
‘I’m saving rhinos,’ he says. ‘The cops can’t arrest me for doing this because I’m trying to prevent animals from being killed.’ Later, he admits to smuggling the ‘real thing’ from Zimbabwe. The bad blood with the two local poachers stems from a rhino horn deal that he hijacked.
He had agreed to act as a middleman in a sale, as the poachers wanted to keep their distance. Thando met the buyer and showed him the horn. ‘The guys had wanted R50 000.’ Instead, he and the buyer cut a private deal. ‘I sold it to him it for R25 000. He was very happy.’ Thando pocketed the cash and returned to the poachers with a replica horn, claiming that the man had backed out of the arrangement. They weren’t fooled for long.
‘They could see it was a fake, mos. They know the stuff they deal in. They couldn’t believe what I’d done. They knew that I’d robbed them. But there was nothing they could do about it. Now they don’t trust me any more.’
I tell him I’m suprised they didn’t kill him. ‘They’re scared of me,’ he says, then adds: ‘If they want to play with guns, they must come …’
The only people Thando seems to fear are the Chinese. ‘I’ve seen them on TV. Those people, they can mos fight and jump. They say a child of five years old in China already knows karate. Have you heard that? Me, I favour someone pointing a gun at me than being killed like that. The [Chinese] break your bones and you go to hospital and lie there and suffer till you die. It is not like a gun. With a gun, it’s just “bang!” and it’s game over.’
In daylight, Thando’s fakes wouldn’t easily pass muster. But he has other tricks up his sleeve. He takes the ‘item’ to a dumpsite littered with cow bones, rotting animal parts and bags of refuse. There he scrounges for a dead dog or cat and rubs the worm-eaten flesh on the horn before burying it in a plastic bag. ‘The temperature in the bag keeps it rotting and smelling like shit,’ he says. Only when he finds a buyer will he dig it up again.
For the con to work, the deal must go down at night. Normally, Thando arranges to meet the ‘mark’ near the taxi rank in Musina. The last one he ‘knocked’ was a Nigerian; before that, a businessman from Nelspruit. ‘A rich man,’ he says. ‘He told me he knows how to test if the item is real. Then he put the tip in his mouth – the cow horn – and bit it. He thought by tasting it he could tell if it was real. He bought it anyway.’
Thando makes sure the meeting takes place in an area where police frequently patrol. Their presence aids the ‘knock’. Often Thando will hang back and just let the mark sit there alone in his car, waiting and waiting. He knows that with each passing cop van, the buyer’s fear is heightened. When he’s let them sweat for a bit, he makes his move.
The deal is done quickly. Thando slides into the car. The buyer usually asks to inspect the horn, and Thando obligingly whips opens the plastic packet. The stench in the confined space is overpowering. ‘Eish! When I open that item, they don’t want to check it too long. They just want to get out of there, away from the smell and the cops. They can see it’s a horn, so they just say, “fine, fine, fine”, and hand over the bucks. Then I’m gone.’
Sometimes, Thando has another surprise in store for his clients. He arranges for one of his cop friends to trail the mark and arrest him on suspicion of smuggling rhino horn. He’s thrown in jail, the ‘horn’ is returned to Thando and the cop gets his cut.
‘Sometimes, after they have been arrested and released, they will even come back for more. They think because they were arrested, they got the real thing.’
He grins.
Thando thinks his scam is unique. It isn’t. From Africa to India to Asia, fakes abound. In Vietnam, horn is often cut into small slabs, weighing between 80 and 100 grams, before it is sold. In this form, it is often impossible to tell the difference between a rhino horn and a water-buffalo horn. It is a common ploy. There are indications that a large percentage of what passes for rhino horn in the medicinal markets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City is actually fabricated from buffalo horn. In the 1980s in India, cow horns were mounted on cement bases and ‘suitably coated to pass off as a genuine rhino horn’. The horns of saiga antelopes have also been used.
In 1983, researchers were shown six fakes in Zambia made from resin, cow hair and cow dung. Other fakes were carved from stone or moulded in plastic. Fakes made from buffalo horns and cow bones were reportedly commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s. A 1995 report compiled by TRAFFIC, the trade-monitoring network, describes how a
buffalo horn ‘is shaped and then the basal surface of a rhinoceros horn imitated by using wax or other resinous substances’.
According to the report:
In many cases it is very difficult to distinguish real horn from manufactured imitations, but examination of the base very carefully is often the best way of doing so. Real rhinoceros horn has many minute canaliculi-like channels that dot the base creating a pitted surface. It is very difficult to reproduce these on fakes. The most interesting fakes and usually the ones resembling real horn most closely are those using bamboo root. The roots of certain kinds of bamboos are dug out and carved in the form of a rhinoceros horn. They are then dipped in oil and hung in the sun for many days until the correct colour is attained … Bamboo has a porous base which lends itself to the creation of a simulated rhinoceros horn base … In most cases, the fakes succeed in being passed off as real ones, and … fetch prices commensurate with rhinoceros horn prices.
More recently, there is evidence of fakes being sold on the internet through auction sites and online classified adverts. The prices, which are substantially lower than black-market rhino horn prices, usually give them away. In 2010 and 2011, reports surfaced in India of reproductions being sold in the state of Assam in the north-east of the country. According to one article, the fakes are ‘crafted out of wood or dry bamboo root’ and then ‘smeared with the flesh of some common animals, like frogs, to give the smell’.
‘It is believed that rhino horns are identified by their distinctive odour.’ In January 2011, police in Thimphu – the capital of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan – arrested a man who was trying to pass off a fake horn. The suspect confessed, saying he had bought it in India for the equivalent of about US$14. He also admitted to selling another fake to an unwitting buyer for about US$7 000. He was charged with fraud or, as the newspaper colourfully described it, ‘deceiving and cheating’.
Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade Page 28
