A farm worker claims he was beaten by vigilantes on an executive’s hunting farm
Fiona Macleod
Police are investigating an alleged sjambok beating carried out by vigilante group Mapogo-A-Mathamaga on a Northern Province hunting farm owned by one of Bill Gates’s right-hand men at Microsoft.
A former employee at the farm of senior Microsoft executive Joachim Kempin alleges he and his wife were badly beaten by Mapogo members on July 12 at the instruction of the farm’s manager.
Kempin bought the 20 000ha farm at Tolwe, near the Botswana border, in 1997 and has named it JK’s Bush Camp. He takes fellow hunters there and is breeding endangered species of wildlife.
His former employee, Gilbert Boloka, says he was wrongly accused when a 9mm pistol disappeared from a safe on the farm and R2 000 went missing from the manager’s pocket.
Despite the fact that the farm is next door to the Tolwe police station, the manager, Herman van Schalkwyk, called in Mapogo vigilantes to track down the missing pistol.
Boloka claims they took him and his wife to JK’s Bush Camp and beat them with sjamboks “for an hour or two” before conceding they knew nothing and letting them go.
Van Schalkwyk only reported the matter to the police two days later. The gun was subsequently recovered by police from a kraal in nearby trust lands.
Northern Province police representative Ronel Otto says Boloka has laid a charge of assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm against Van Schalkwyk. Police are also investigating the theft and/or negligent loss of the pistol.
Kempin has been with Microsoft for 18 years. He was senior vice-president of Microsoft’s OEM (original equipment manufacturer) division and a member of its business leadership team until he was reassigned to overseeing “special projects” for CEO Steve Ballmer in early July.
He was a key witness in the high-profile Microsoft anti-trust trial
that probed whether the giant software company was punishing PC makers using rival software on their machines.
Last year Kempin’s hunting and fishing privileges in Montana, where he owns three ranches, were suspended for 10 years after he was convicted of poaching four antelopes. After losing his appeal against the conviction, he faced the withdrawal of those privileges in eight other western states of the United States.
Evidence before the court was that he illegally transferred hunting licences and “harassed wildlife from a motor vehicle”.
Kempin paid fines of close to $6 000 and told a US newspaper he was paying up because he had made a mistake that he deeply regretted.
Northern Province conservation official Kobus Pienaar says Kempin’s game farm, which used to be an agricultural farm, is still under development. “I am an outspoken Christian and I am not going to hold things that people have done in the past against them,” he says.
JK’s Bush Camp has an exemption permit for hunting, which means the owner can hunt at any time of the year and allow other people to hunt there.
Charges against the Mapogo members who allegedly sjambokked Boloka have been referred to detectives at Ellisras investigating a wide range of murder and violence claims against the vigilante group, including allegedly feeding some of their victims to crocodiles. It is unclear how many Mapogo members are involved in the Boloka case.
Mapogo president Monhle Magolego says he has not received any reports about the case. “It is possible an innocent person can fall into the hands of our members. It’s a human mistake that happens even in the courts,” he says.
Neither Kempin nor Van Schalkwyk had responded to inquiries about the case at the time of going to press.