Donald McNeil reports on one of the greatest ostrich-smuggling scams of all time
Timotheus Voges says he has gone straight these days, but there was a time when he was the most devious ostrich smuggler in Africa.
He’s just another businessman now – like any other who owns 8 000 birds that dress like model Carol Channing, kick like king of kung-fu movies Jackie Chan and have the brains of gnats. But in the heady days of the early 1990s, when Texans with visions of low-cholesterol red meat and pimply looking Gucci bags dancing in their heads were paying as much as $150 an egg, he was an ostrich lord.
He pulled off his greatest scam in 1994, when instead of smuggling birds over a border he smuggled the border out from under 860 birds.
To explain that, one must go back to 1982, when Voges, who has dabbled in everything from tyre retreading to commercial fishing, decided to try his hand at ostriches.
At the time, South Africa dominated the trade the way Russia dominates sables or the Netherlands once dominated tulips. Oudtshoorn, the world’s ostrich capital, still boasted “feather palace” mansions built when the Victorian craze for ostrich- feather boas made millionaires of a few farmers. To protect its near-monopoly, the powerful ostrich-ranching lobby had prevailed on the government to outlaw the export of live birds or eggs.
Taking a risk, Voges bought some South African birds and started for the border. “The conservation people were waiting for us there with shotguns,” he said. He blamed the Klein Karoo Koperasie for tipping them off.
But in 1982 Namibia was still virtually a colony of South Africa. A court ruled that he wasn’t really exporting them and, after the birds spent a few months in quarantine, they were released to him.
At first he was not very good at it. His chicks had an 85% mortality rate. As another rancher has lamented: “These stupid birds just go looking for things to die of.”
But he struggled along, eventually building a large ranch in the town of Mariental, which nowadays has 7 581 people and more than that number of ostriches.
In 1990, when Namibia gained independence, Voges and other ranchers persuaded the new agriculture minister to legalise exporting, and he began making money at that.
A year later, for reasons no one really understands, the American ostrich market went wild. “It might have been cowboy boots, I don’t know,” Voges said. “Americans seem to like fads.”
Would-be flightless-biped magnates from New Jersey to California drove the price of a breeding pair up to $35 000, and of a fertile egg to $150.
Meanwhile, in South Africa, farmers were forced to trade at prices set by the Klein Karoo Koperasie and were getting less than a tenth of that. Opportunity pecked.
From 1991 to 1994, ostrich-smuggling arrests soared. South Africans would drive up to remote sand dunes on the Namibian border, cut holes in the fence and chase their birds through to confederates on the other side. They would even scatter corn to attract guinea fowl to cover the big birds’ tracks and wipe battery acid on the fence wires to make the cuts look old.
One enterprising family bought a ranch that straddled the frontier and imported birds on one side while exporting them from the other.
And – lest one be accused of sticking one’s head in the sand – it must be noted here that Voges was part of those scandals. The Great Namibian Ostrich Trial opened on July 27 1993, heralded by the headline “Ostrich tycoon faces 137 charges”.
He and four workers at his ranch were accused of being the last stop for a smuggling ring based in Boshof, in the western Free State, that flew small planes over the border by night. They were charged under everything from the Animal Disease and Parasites Act to the Riotous Assemblies Act.
The trial’s high point was the testimony of Willie Hattingh, a bush pilot whose fiery night-time crash led to the arrests and unravelled the whole scheme.
As Hattingh told it, his last cargo was not the usual eggs or chicks but 37 adult birds, carried loose in the cabin behind him, not even wearing their seat belts.
On his final approach to a dirt runway lit by flaming tyres, he dipped the nose too low. Normally he could have adjusted, but his passengers, whether unbalanced or simply curious, suddenly shuffled forward, pressing “right up against the cockpit seat”.
The plane tipped and began to plummet. Veering to avoid a windmill in the dark, he clipped a tree and crash-landed, skidding 550m but walking away alive. Only two birds died, and another broke a leg and had to be killed.
As luck would have it, Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was due to visit the area the next day to study modern ostrich farming. Voges and three others, worried that the wreck would draw the police, cut up the plane and threw the pieces into a dry well – to no avail.
The trial dragged on for months, and even included Namibia’s first ostrich DNA tests to see whether the birds were wild, a more serious offense. In the end Voges was fined R400, for interfering with the investigation of an aircraft accident.
“We had good advocates,” he said. “The laws were old South African laws, full of loopholes. We walked.”
The scheme was admittedly illegal, he added, “but everybody did it in those days”. – New York Times