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Poacher. Kimon de Greef
Читать онлайн.Название Poacher
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780795708688
Автор произведения Kimon de Greef
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
*
It happened that Shuhood had joined the abalone trade in Hangberg, where I had studied it, and when we met it was possible for me to fact-check much of what he told me. We agreed that I would expand on what he had written, making me both his co-author and interrogator.
It has not been possible to verify every detail of his narrative, but in dozens of attempts I have not found a single discrepancy. (‘You’ve asked me that three times now,’ he once said to me, when I tried to winkle a sensitive bit of information. ‘I have to,’ I answered, and he laughed at me.)
His manuscript forms the spine of this book. Where possible I have quoted directly from his memoir, seeking to preserve his voice with only minor edits for clarity. I have distinguished between quotes from his book (with ‘he wrote’) and from interviews (with ‘he said,’ or similar). He has read and commented on every chapter. The royalties we will divide 50/50.
As equal partner of this project Shuhood has had greater agency than most subjects of nonfiction; this has been both challenging and an opportunity to explore a more participatory approach to storytelling. I have pushed him on aspects of his life that he did not want included, but that I felt were important. Some of these battles I lost. For the purposes of our account he gave me everything I needed.
This is the story of Shuhood Abader and his hunt for abalone on the South African coast.
Shuhood Abader is a pseudonym. Names for his family members, former poaching accomplices and other figures from his past have also been changed.
PART 1
THE BUST AND BEFORE
Lightning flashed at sea as the poachers cut across the flat water. Shuhood gunned the motor, steering towards the slipway with a massive haul of abalone. It was November 2006, four years into Shuhood’s poaching career and the point at which it began unravelling. Two mesh bags lay at his feet, leaking slime across the deck.
Riding with him were Shawn, a white diver he had been working with for several months, and Clayton, an old kreef fisherman from Saldanha Bay. They were returning to shore in Langebaan, a sheltered lagoon on the west coast, after diving illegally inside a restricted military zone across the bay. Following a few early snags, the operation had gone smoothly, and each diver stood to earn R10 000 for the evening. Even the thunderstorm had played to their advantage, its clouds blotting out the full moon as it rose but then discharging over the ocean, too far away to pose a threat.
Under different circumstances, Shuhood might have considered this a good omen, but from early on in the trip he had been unable to shake a sense of unease. Both his wives—an arrangement permitted by Islam—had been unusually anxious before he left, urging him to stay at home despite being accustomed to the dangers of his trade. Had he known where he was going, he said later, he would have listened to them, but he had only been partially informed of the plan.
It would be too late to back out when he found out what was expected of him.
A drug merchant in Vredenburg, a barren town of strip malls and bottle stores between Saldanha Bay’s industrial port and the whitewashed holiday homes of Paternoster, had cut a deal with some guards from a nearby military base. For a share of the profits, the guards would allow a crew of divers inside to hit reefs that had previously been off-limits—a refuge that had withstood the unrelenting hunt for abalone up and down the coast.
The merchant needed divers, but abalone syndicates were not yet established in the area. He reached out to a Cape Town contact, who passed the message to Shuhood. In debt again and eager to work, Shuhood, accompanied by Shawn, had caught a ride up to Vredenburg that week.
The thought of poaching abalone from military waters had appealed to him: it was novel and daring, precisely what was needed to get ahead in the game. Already Shuhood had dived with poachers across the country and travelled internationally, once, to harvest abalone for one of South Africa’s biggest syndicates. He was also out on bail for two separate poaching cases and could not afford to get caught.
But the guards were in on the job. Everything had been organised, the merchant promised. The payoff for working virgin abalone beds would be colossal. It was only when Shuhood learned that they would be diving in Langebaan itself—off the tip of the peninsula, beyond the Postberg wildflower reserve—that Shuhood’s assessment of the situation began to change.
He knew several divers who had tried their luck in the lagoon and been caught, losing their boats and equipment and wasting months, not to mention legal fees, grinding through the courts. The South African National Parks rangers—bokkies, he called them, after the kudu insignia on their uniforms—had offices less than a kilometre from the slipway, with a private jetty for their patrol boats. Langebaan had grown into a prosperous holiday town, with rows of villas and resorts facing the bay and an unending stream of leisure craft launching in the summer months. Most of the holidaymakers were white people, and most white people hated poachers. To Shuhood it seemed obvious: there was too much heat to dive safely. No quantity of abalone seemed worth the risk.
That night the merchant dropped them at a house with no furniture, set among anonymous rental properties on the outskirts of town. Shuhood sat up late with Shawn, swapping poaching stories, and by morning he found himself warming to the plan. Successfully navigating the illicit abalone trade requires accepting, and indeed seeking out, threatening situations, the trade ill-suited for levels of caution that most people would consider nominal. Viewed on a long-enough time axis, most threats tended to fall within tolerable limits for Shuhood.
He was in his thirties at the time, but looked much like he does today: muscular, a little below medium-height, with a bald head and straight Grecian nose. ‘It was a chance to do something different,’ he told me. The military base once more felt within reach.
The merchant brought them breakfast and drove them down to reconnoitre the water. He spoke at high pitch, wore drab clothes and in Shuhood provoked an irreconcilable conflict that had threaded through his poaching career. As an underworld businessman, the merchant had access to the capital and markets for smuggling abalone. As a drug dealer he was responsible for wrecking lives, profiting from a crime that Shuhood had considered, at times, to be punishable by death.
Mostly it was possible for Shuhood to isolate his work as a diver from the wider black market it fed into—including, at the very end, bulk swaps of abalone for tik and its chemical precursors—but when confronted by someone who straddled both worlds it was difficult to maintain the distinction.
The merchant had arranged the job and Shuhood badly needed cash, he decided. If he was a vampire who pumped drugs into vulnerable communities? Fuck him—and there were thousands more just like him.
In the parking lot one of the guards was waiting to take them across the water. The men followed him onto a semi-inflatable vessel, or rubber duck2, with a 30 hp motor, too small for fleeing patrols. Past fishing groups and jet skis they drew into the bay, crossing a line of red and white buoys marked: ‘Military zone. Keep out.’ Their destination, Donkergat, a former whaling station, had been a base for one of the South African Army’s special-forces regiments since the 1970s. Now it was a haven for abalone, the guard said.
But Shuhood had learned to be sceptical of non-poachers who spoke on such matters. He asked Shawn, who had brought a dive mask, to jump in and take a look. Surfacing less than a minute later, Shawn held up two giant shellfish.
The reefs right beneath them, he said, spitting out his snorkel, were packed.
Back on shore that afternoon, the merchant introduced them to Clayton, who would work as their bootsman, or deck assistant, keeping watch while they were underwater and helping haul up their bags. Shuhood thought him ‘a simple Simon,’ he told me; later that evening his suspicions would be confirmed. This time the merchant would stay behind, co-ordinating the pickup