Ted Botha

When the body of a man dressed only in his underpants and a gold watch was found in the Black River last year, it seemed clear who was to blame. The dead man's features were Oriental and there was a crossbow bolt through his head: it had to be the work of the Chinese mafia.

If so, the victim would be the third in as many months. The last body had been found in similar circumstances, dumped on the road to the airport, a bullet through his head. Other clashes between Chinese gangs in the city included late-night shoot-outs in the affluent suburb of Constantia; attacks on the home of a Taiwanese shipping magnate; the alleged kidnapping and blackmail of a Chinese restaurant owner.

In fact, Graham Chatburn had been shot by his wife, while he was asleep. But the fevered speculation that attended the discovery of his body was a symptom of Cape Town's fascination with the new phenomenon of Chinese gang warfare. For once, the violence in South Africa wasn't racial or political. It wasn't the black townships of Boipatong or Bisho. Instead, the battles were between clans from Hong Kong and Taiwan and six fishing companies. The Black Society, the K-14s and the Table Mountain Gang were fighting for shark fins.

On the eastern side of Duncan Docks stand several sheds where thousands of dorsals have been hung out to dry. The stench is overwhelming. The fins have been cooked for hours and then scraped; they lose up to three-quarters of their weight as they dry. The leftover product is so valuable, however, that one drug smuggler was reported to have told a meeting of gang chiefs in the upmarket Cape Sun hotel that he was prepared to sacrifice some of his men in order to get a share of the market.

Next to rhino horn and ivory tusks - among the less legal products in which gangs also deal - shark fins are easy booty. Destined for the soup kitchens of the East, they can be traded openly. They are also fairly simple and cheap to come by, once the gangs have exerted some force.

"These guys are sharks," says a police detective who has been on the case for several years. The pun in unintentional.

For these human sharks, the modes operandi is simple. They pay prostitutes, waiting on the quayside for customers, who inform them when they first sight a trawler coming back from the sea. Armed men board the boats before the customs officials arrive and threaten the captain's life if he doesn't agree to sell his catch. Once identified by the police, key gang members flee the country - most of them have entered on false documents anyway - and others take their place. Those the police do manage to catch tend to skip bail.

The gangs are not the only threat to South Africa's shark population. Many of the endangered Great Whites are killed by hunters, although a man named Theo Ferreira is trying to stop them. On the western side of the docks, you can find his office at the White Shark Research Project. His job is a thankless one: to save the most hated fish in the ocean.

The building is old, the decor frugal. Hanging from the walls are massive sets of jaws and copies of magazine articles. Two sandsharks glide lazily in a small pool.

Ferreira does this work for love, not money; his assistants are his children. The statistics he presents are horrifying. The growing demand for fins, Ferreira says, is the first cause for concern. No longer are they exported by the crate, but by the container. One factory, lying between Cape Town and Cape Agulhas, processes up to 40 tons of shark a month. Anyone with a motorboat and a vague idea of "chumming" - throwing offal into the water as bait - can earn about 6 pounds per shark. It's easy money on a coastline renowned for its abundance of sharks, but stocks are dwindling fast. Whereas the factory used to accept only fish weighing between 55 and 130 lbs., it will now take anything as small as 9 lbs.

Some fishermen don't even bother keeping the bodies. They simply cut off the fins, then drop the dying animal back into the water. To comprehend the damage this does to the aquatic food chain, consider that 500 Great Whites eat 162,000 seals a year - seals which, doe-eyed as they might be, consume huge quantities of fish.

Ferreira is a recent convert to the plight of sharks, the Great White in particular. Large and bellicose, he looks less like a conservationist than a shark hunter, which is exactly what he was for most of his adult life. Catching Great Whites was his passion, until the day he hooked one that died only after his boat had dragged it for 30 kilometres and he'd put nine bullets in its head. Ferreira hasn't hunted since.

The Great White is a pointless kill. The meat, containing high levels of mercury and ammonia, is inedible. The jaws are the real trophy; the bigger they are, the better. The most desirable sets of teeth are found on female Great Whites, which grow up to seven metres in length and can weigh 2,200 pounds. The slowest maturing of all sharks, they reach their sexual peak at 15, breed no more than four times in their lives, and produce only half a dozen offspring each time. As Ferreira says, "For every one female Great white that's killed, a 15-year hole is knocked into the breeding cycle."

When Ferreira isn't telling the public things it doesn't want to hear - "Humans don't normally interest sharks" - he studies the Great White. How many are there? Are they territorial? Is there a pecking order? Recently he tagged nine in less than four hours, breaking a record set by Jacques Cousteau. He says that the southern African coastline is one of the few Great White strongholds left in the world.

His task has been made a little easier since the government declared Great Whites an endangered species. The fine for catching one is 10,000 pounds, but there's no money for patrols at sea to enforce the ban. So Ferreira fights the battle on land. It's primarily a battle against ignorance.

He knows that the animals don't enjoy good PR. "When people think of sharks, they think of something chewing a metal cage." He also knows that the first shark most people ever see, if it isn't in a movie, is in a bowl of soup. It might also be their last.