Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (26 page)

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. Now 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.’

19 January 2012

John Hume likes to say that he would buy rhinos from the devil himself. Today, the devil – at least as far as the demonstrators outside the Musina Regional Court are concerned – is seated opposite him with a Knysna loerie on his shoulder and a klipspringer nuzzling his hand.

Dawie Groenewald had flown in earlier to see ‘
Oom
John’ (Uncle John), as he calls him, about a sale of buffalo. Hume’s office, on his farm Mauricedale in Mpumalanga near the southern boundary of the Kruger National Park, opens onto a magnificent aviary. A stained white towel covers his computer keyboard to protect it from the droppings of birds that constantly fly in and out. There are thirty or forty buck inside the aviary, including tiny suni antelope, red duiker, blue duiker and klipspringer, along with dozens, if not hundreds, of exotic birds.

The klipspringer licking Groenewald’s hand with a wet, black tongue is a particular favourite of Hume’s. ‘She’s always been like this,’ he says. ‘That is, until about three months ago, when she started to take umbrage to every second man and she’d go fucking moggy and try and bite them. Now she’s calming down again. She’s pregnant with her fourth kid.’ The klipspringer makes no attempt to bite Groenewald and eventually hops up onto a chair before wandering out the door.

Hume – the largest private rhino owner in the world – is trying to persuade Groenewald to do an interview with a television crew. ‘You people need to go on camera and talk about this,’ Hume says. ‘Somebody will ask you, “Do you shoot rhino?” and you’ll answer, “Yes, we do. We hunt rhino with permits.”’

‘Some without,’ Groenewald laughs, and winks at me. He decides against doing the interview. Later, as Hume takes me to see the rhinos on his farm,
Groenewald calls him on a cellphone from his helicopter. His voice is barely audible over the clatter of rotor blades. ‘Typical fucking Dawie,’ Hume says, shaking his head. Theirs is an odd relationship. ‘John lets me do all these things for him,’ Groenewald says. ‘He trusts me with a lot of money and the things we do together.’ Much of Groenewald’s time has been spent sourcing rhinos for Hume’s farms.

‘I like John’s operation,’ he tells me. ‘That man has so much horn. If they legalise rhino horn tomorrow, he is going to be one of the richest men in the fucking world because he’s got tons of horn ... But if I had his money, I would do it in a much better way than he’s doing it.’

When I ask Hume about the rhino deals he’s transacted with Groenewald, he answers bluntly: ‘I will buy rhinos from the devil himself, especially if I think I may be saving the rhino’s life. Bring me any fucking crook, murderer – doesn’t matter what [they are]. If he’s offering to sell me a rhino and it suits me, I’ll buy it anyway.’

He seems to have a gruff fondness for Groenewald, although he is quick to point out that ‘Dawie is always bloody wheeling and dealing.’

‘He’s what we in Rhodesia would have called a “wide boy”. In other words, he’s a wheeler and dealer, a ducker and diver. You’ll never change Dawie. Where he sees a gap to make money, he’ll take it; if it [means] bending the law, he’ll do it. I think he does have some morals, though. He certainly doesn’t mind killing animals but, as far as robbing a bank or poaching – I don’t think so. Dawie’s opinion is definitely that “I own the rhino, I bought it and if I want to kill it, I’ll kill it. But give me the incentive to keep it alive, then I’ll keep it alive.” And in that way, he’s no different from ninety-nine out of a hundred farmers.’

‘There is no money to be made out of rhinos without the legalisation of horn,’ John Hume tells me as we bounce along a dirt road in his bakkie towards a cluster of about forty cement troughs, where herds of rhinos are gathered like cattle to be fed. ‘If there is no money to be made, how are we going to get farmers to farm with them?’

Hume bought his first black rhinos, six of them, on auction from the Natal Parks Board in 1996. ‘It was to be a retirement project,’ he says. ‘I wanted a place where I could retire and farm like a gentleman. That is when I struck on this idea of being a big-game rancher.’

He had spent his boyhood growing up on a farm in what was then Rhodesia. A precocious child, he displayed an early aptitude for business, roaming his father’s farm collecting bones, wool from dead sheep, bits of copper, the lead from spent batteries, empty bottles – in fact, any scrap that he could find to sell at a profit.

He dropped out of school at fourteen, despite the valiant efforts of an English teacher who tried to persuade him to stay on another year so he could get into Cambridge University. Hume told him, ‘Cambridge? What the hell do I want to go to Cambridge for?’

He bought his first farm at eighteen. ‘I was some sort of natural trader, I suppose.’ By the time he was twenty-five, he had three. But he quickly came to the conclusion that farming was a ‘mug’s game’ and that ‘there must be easier ways to make money’. He bought the Zimbabwe Ruins Hotel and later the Baobab Hotel in Wankie. Then a taxi company. By 1979, as white minority rule crumbled, Hume, like many other white Rhodesians, began to spirit his money out of the country to South Africa. ‘I moved my money illegally from Rhodesia. There were so many bloody adventures, I tell you. I bought fucking gold mines. I took emeralds from one guy in exchange for a supermarket in Salisbury.’

In the late seventies and early eighties, Hume says he ‘lost the plot’ and made the mistake of investing heavily in Hollywood films. ‘I had a hell of an adventure in movies and, for my trouble, I lost $1 million.’

One film –
Zulu Dawn
– starred Peter O’Toole, Burt Lancaster and Bob Hoskins. ‘All of them were a bunch of arseholes,’ Hume says. The only one Hume seemed to like was the South African actor Ken Gampu.

Hume recovered from his losses, and in the mid-eighties turned his attention to timeshare, building some of the first resorts in South Africa. He made millions. Today, he has a ‘lot of fucking rhinos’.

‘I don’t like to talk numbers, but it is a lot of hassle, a lot of responsibility, a lot of worry … a lot of rhinos.’ By some accounts he owns more than 800
and, according to the
Financial Mail
, boasts revenue of R25 million a year, of which about 80 per cent comes from selling live animals to farmers and exporters, and 20 per cent from trophy hunting.

In recent years, Hume has become perhaps the most vocal public proponent of legalising the trade in rhino horn. With the help of his assistant, Tanya Jacobsen, he writes a steady stream of letters to newspapers and does interview after interview arguing his case.

‘My frustration and depression for the rhinos is that not one of the Dawie [Groenewalds] or Marnus Steyls would be killing a rhino if the trade was legal,’ he says, referring to the lion breeder and rhino hunt outfitter Marnus Steyl. ‘To me it is absolutely nonsensical that the only way you can legally change the ownership of a rhino’s horn in this country is to kill the [animal]. I cannot for the life of me understand why we are killing the very goose that lays the golden egg; the very rhinos that are capable of saving their species from extinction.’

Hume argues that if the horns are harvested, ‘every rhino could go on growing a kilo of horn a year for the next thirty years’, which could be sold to meet the Asian demand for rhino horn.

‘Legalisation is their only hope. Our problem is that we are losing the war. Poaching is rocketing. If we try legalising the trade and it doesn’t work, what have we lost? We are losing anyway.’ The possibility that legal trade might involve the same criminal syndicates that currently control the market, and serve to fund the trafficking of other wildlife and contraband, doesn’t seem to perturb him.

‘Quite possibly,’ he says, ‘but surely if you stand a chance of saving rhinos’ lives, that should be paramount?’

Hume has stockpiled a vast quantity of rhino horn, which he claims is stashed away in trunks in the safety deposit rooms of banks across North West province and Limpopo. ‘It is a pain in the arse,’ he tells me, ‘but the banks don’t seem to mind.’ He chuckles. ‘Officially I’m an old-book collector … The trunks are obviously heavy.’ His detractors say he is simply promoting legal trade to serve his own interests. In response, Hume – who turned seventy a few days after the interview – says: ‘If I sold my rhino horn stockpiles – and it would be a huge shithouse full of money I’d get – I don’t know what I’d do with that money. Put it in shares and lose it? Or put it in gold,
maybe. But what [if] the broker [is] crooked or the fucking bullion house [goes] belly-up? [Rhino horn] is an asset that has [increased in value] more than anything else. I don’t think my heirs will bitch if I don’t sell it.’