USA Hunting : USA: African Safari guide seeks refuge in Utah
on 2010/2/16 13:26:57
They called him the "Leopard Man of Africa" for his native instinct and daring resolve in stalking trophy animals with safari clients.

Now 56-year-old Cornelius "Con" van Wyk is hiding among friends in Salt Lake City, clawing desperately for refuge from a government he says forced him from his Zimbabwe home and allegedly arranged attempts on his life. He's seeking political asylum here.

Despite moral support from the Utah House of Representatives, so far it isn't working. The U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services tells him he must leave this month for South Africa, a country where he holds a passport and has family -- and site of his latest attack.

"If I go back to South Africa," van Wyk said, "I'm dead."

A fateful birthplace ť Van Wyk is a third-generation white Zimbabwean whose family moved north from South Africa during British colonial days and bought ranches that flourished through the white-rule era of independent Rhodesia. His mother preferred South African hospitals and returned there to deliver him in 1954. He lived there only for three months, but that arguably made him a citizen of both South Africa and Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe when civil war ended white rule in 1980.

The South African connection gives him another country to claim, and that's what his U.S. asylum officer noted in rejecting his application.

Van Wyk and his father enjoyed wealth and adventure on their land, where he raised cattle and based safari operations for American hunters. He had shot his first leopard at age 8 and, he said, gained a reputation for "thinking like a cat" because he killed many that preyed on the family's cattle.

Then Robert Mugabe rose to power in Zimbabwe and began a slow, internationally contested program of expropriating white farms.

Early on it looked like the van Wyks would stay, despite a harrowing 1982 military abduction that Con counts as the first assassination try. His father got a friend on the regional police force to send men to demand his release.

Van Wyk's father died in 1998. Later that year, he said, Zimbabwean soldiers forced his staff from his prized game ranch just east of Hwange National Park, a haven for elephants, buffaloes, zebras, giraffes and big cats. Four years later, he said, 32 soldiers came to his cattle ranch and gave him 24 hours to pack his furniture and leave.

It's a story that has played out many times in Zimbabwe, said Howard Lehman, a University of Utah political scientist who teaches international and African policy. It started as part of Mugabe's promise to help poor blacks and guerilla war veterans, but also has included gifts to political supporters, he said.

"It's not like genocide. There isn't a policy of exterminating people," Lehman said. "They have targeted individual farmers."

Some of those who are targeted end up dead, Lehman said.

Van Wyk's anger over his expulsion returned last week and settled in the square jaw under his brushy mustache as he fanned out the ownership deeds he carried with him to Utah. If not for his three daughters -- two now living under different surnames near his ex-wife in South Africa and one studying in the U.S. -- he said he would have died that day in 2002.

"I would have fought them until they killed me," he said.

Dangerous papers ť Van Wyk believes those deeds are partly to blame for his African woes. Mugabe's government owes him $4.5 million for the land and buildings, he said. As long as he can prove it, and an international court might listen, he believes Mugabe will want him dead.

He believes he's also targeted because he served in his country's military before Mugabe's rise.

Of course, he can't prove that Mugabe is after him at all.

"He doesn't show it," van Wyk said.

Zimbabwe's embassy in Washington did not respond to The Tribune's requests for an interview.

Zimbabwean persecution is not a point that the Citizenship and Immigration Services will debate with van Wyk. In a lengthy Feb. 1 "Notice of Intent to Deny," an official writing for Houston Asylum Office Director Marie Hummert noted Zimbabwe's persecution of white farmers and accepted van Wyk's claims of danger there.

The notice added, though, that he can return to South Africa and had "not demonstrated the South African government would be unwilling or unable to prosecute those who are inclined to harm you."

Van Wyk does not feel safe in South Africa. Last February, while visiting his sister there in Durban, he was attacked by two men. One gouged his eye with a broken bottle before he could escape, he said, so that he now needs a cornea transplant.

With eye surgery, he would like to again accompany Americans into the bush on hunts. First he wants U.S. citizenship so he can change his name here and become untraceable overseas.

A string of close calls ť In recent years, safari has been a dangerous place for van Wyk. Already a survivor of lion and hippo bites, in 2007 he survived an arson attack in his hunting tent.

That was in Tanzania, when he was guiding repeat client and friend Richard Tempest, a former Utah state senator from Holladay who originally had sought him out for his big cat expertise and "Leopard Man" moniker. Tempest and two of his grown children awoke to shouting and found van Wyk's tent -- one among 15 in camp -- circled by flames started with kerosene.

"It really shook us up," Tempest said. But van Wyk shook it off, and they resumed the hunt. Van Wyk's trackers found the arsonists and turned them over to local police, Tempest said, but no one else appears to have been officially implicated.

"I thought it was Robert Mugabe," Tempest said. "I think, now, Con does too."

Fleeing to America ť In 2008 van Wyk survived a collision in his Nissan pickup in Tanzania. A large freight truck crossed into his lane head-on, and the photos he took that day show his cab crushed. He notes a chilling similarity to collisions that have killed other Zimbabweans, and one that last year injured Mugabe rival Morgan Tsvangirai and killed his wife Susan.

Then came the Durban attack, and he decided it was time to leave the continent. He had a U.S. visa for yearly extended business trips meeting clients. He arrived in Atlanta in August with permission to stay until Feb. 24.

Jobless and without a work permit, he made his way to Salt Lake City, where a friend of Tempest's family has let him live in an unoccupied east-side home that's for sale. Tempest has helped out, paying an attorney's retainer last week.

Tempest figures it's what friends do, and he's grateful for van Wyk's bravery on safari. Both men this week separately made wide-eyed recollections of a cape buffalo that charged them without warning. The hunters -- one left-handed and one right-handed -- raised their rifles back-to-back and squeezed off one round apiece. The buffalo fell just short of them.

"No matter what happens he's going to back you and save you," Tempest said.

Persecution or street crime? ť Tempest introduced van Wyk to an old friend, Rep. Mel Brown, R-Coalville. Brown paraded him to the House floor Feb. 6 and asked his colleagues to support the asylum bid. They didn't know it then, but their standing ovation came five days after immigration officials had rejected the request.

Brown shook his head when he heard that part of the rationale was van Wyk's inability to prove Mugabe was behind the attack in South Africa.

"How the hell is he supposed to prove that?" the lawmaker asked.

Citizenship and Immigration Services officials declined an interview request on privacy grounds, but Lehman, the U. political scientist, said he sees their dilemma. Street crime against white people in South Africa is ordinary, and is not proof of persecution.

Van Wyk's friends believe he was a political target in South Africa.

"He can't go back to Africa," said Ed Webber, a retired Montana rancher and frequent van Wyk hunting client. "They're going to keep taking a shot at him."

West Jordan immigration attorney Dorany Rodriguez-Baltazar said she'll appeal the asylum denial on grounds that South African law does not automatically award dual citizenship to foreigners born there. If that fails, she hopes for a hearing before an immigration judge.

In the meantime, the Leopard Man keeps himself busy with handiwork around his borrowed house. He pedals a bike up Emigration Canyon most days to keep his 6-foot-2 frame from packing on more than his 260 pounds. He wants to stay in shape in case things turn his way.

Then he can change his name and return now and then in obscure safety to the African bush.