John Grobler visits Okahao, a sleepy settlement near Etosha National Park at the centre of the poaching plague threatening the world’s last viable population of critically endangered black rhinos Sheetu Amunyela’s sprawling new house on the south-eastern outskirts of town, all built in the past two years. Photo: John Grobler It is not hard to spot the successful rhino poachers in Okahao: at a time when everyone else in Namibia is suffering from a crippling, four-year-long drought, they are building new houses, buying more cattle and driving fancy new cars. Their new bars and construction businesses along Okahao’s main road flash new money in garish colours. Some look abandoned halfway – a case of arrested development. Some occasionally get arrested for rhino poaching, but then mysteriously get out again and carry on like nothing has happened, said my local guide, pointing at one of the new properties in the main road owned by Sheetu Amunyela. “When the police searched that boy’s place, they found nearly a million dollars in cash hidden in a bag or something. When the police questioned him, he claimed it belonged to his father, but his father said he knew nothing of that money,” the guide said. Okahao is small, with no more than 2,000 inhabitants, and nothing stays secret for very long. It may have modern tarred roads and two ATMs at the local bank, but it has remained a village. Sheetu Amunyela, the owner of the new bar – thatched roof and tasteful natural stone, metallic one-way glass windows, still closed – had also built himself another bar (called Uukwamatsi Shebeen) and a sprawling new house on the south-eastern outskirts of town, painted a matching garish pink. In spite of Amunyela being in jail, work was continuing at his house: a Northern Electricity Distributors (Nored) team was installing a private transformer to link his house to the national electric grid. Such connections cost nothing less than R100,000 – and are payable in cash, in advance. On July 18, Amunyela and 21 others are to plead formally to charges of hunting a protected species (black rhino). Investigations linked them to six carcasses, but only four horns have been recovered. There is talk of military-grade weapons used. Most were arrested in June 2015 at the villages of Onamatanga, Uutsatsima and Otjinove, all deeply rural Hai//Om San settlements just outside the northern fence of the Etosha National Park. Amunyela and three others were re-arrested a few months later after being caught with rhino horns in Windhoek. Most of the poachers are Hai//Om San, but the main players are all from the Oshiwambo-speaking Ogandjera sub-tribe. As the original inhabitants of the Etosha Pans, the Hai//Om consider their expulsion from the park in 1952 by colonial South Africa’s bureaucrats a historical legal injustice. “They are, even among the San people, the most marginalised of all,” said Peter Watson of the Legal Assistance Centre in Windhoek. “Unlike other San groups who still have access to their ancestral lands in the Khaudom and western Caprivi, the Ha//Om have nothing.” A group of eight of the Hai/Om have filed a legal claim with the Namibian High Court for the return of beneficial rights to their ancestral land, he confirmed. Others, under the influence of politically connected clans from Omusati, appeared to have started taking the law into their own hands. And where the interests of these latter Hai//Om and local rhino-preneurs like Amunyela intersected with larger but as of yet unstated political agendas, rhinos have been dying in large numbers. Big dreams built on the sand of unrealistic expectations – a case of arrested development on Okahao’s main street In her cramped office next to the police station just off the main road in Okahao, the slightly flustered young public prosecutor delved into a dusty filing cabinet to retrieve the court files of two currently pending rhino poaching cases. The magistrate bustled in, requesting the day’s court roll. She apologetically cleared space on her desk, crowded with many other dockets: domestic violence, theft and stock-theft, assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm. “Sorry, we only work here in Okahao in the mornings. We go back to the Outapi [Regional] Court every afternoon,” an hour’s drive away, she hurriedly explained. Yes, all of the 22 rhino poaching suspects have been granted bail and yes, she said, nearly all seemed to have paid. And yes, two or three of those were arrested again subsequent to their release for illegal possession of rhino horns, this time in Windhoek.