Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni
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of the Natives Pass Ordinance in 1905, the attorney general said that “a number of boys after getting into difficulty, had mutilated their passes, and had torn or erased many important particulars, such as description of previous wages.”63 Because the pass system tied Africans to specific areas in the colony, some people destroyed or discarded their original passes as soon as they entered a new area and then applied for new ones using different names. This strategy was particularly common among migrant workers from Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique who destroyed the documents that identified them as “foreign natives” and proceeded to obtain new ones purporting to be locals. Being in possession of documents that identified them as “Rhodesian natives” provided them with better chances of obtaining passes to visit the border districts where they worked while waiting for opportunities to sneak out and proceed to South Africa.64
In a development that shows how the increase in border jumping had become an issue of concern to colonial authorities, the representative for Southern Rhodesia’s Western District (Gordon Forbes) brought this issue up for discussion in the Legislative Council in 1907. He asked if the administration knew that “numbers of natives have left Victoria District for the Transvaal not in possession of proper passes” and demanded to know “what, if any, steps have been taken to enforce compliance with the law on part of such natives, and to prevent such exodus in future.” In response to his question, the treasurer said, “It is known that a certain number do leave the territory. . . . It has not been found possible to establish stations in the low country along the Limpopo, in the south-east of the territory, from which it is believed that the bulk of these natives proceed.”65 The 1909 review of the pass system, which we discussed earlier, also revealed that the number of Africans who left the territory without permits was on the increase. However, Southern Rhodesian officials’ efforts to address this situation stirred the contestations that promoted border jumping from Zimbabwe to South Africa.
Border Enforcement and the Rise of Human Smugglers along the Limpopo
With the beginning of state-centered controls of people’s movements across the Limpopo River, human smuggling also emerged as a salient feature of the “informal” economy of the Zimbabwe–South Africa border. Although other factors might have contributed to the rise of this phenomenon, Southern Rhodesian authorities’ imposition of restrictions on labor recruitment using the Natives Employment Ordinance of 1899 was probably the major producer of human smugglers. This ordinance not only made a distinction between recruiting for the local and foreign markets but also created the incentive for unlicensed recruiting by requiring labor agents to pay more than twice as much for permits to recruit workers for other territories as they would for permits to recruit for local employment. This requirement inadvertently encouraged some labor agents to recruit workers in Southern Rhodesia and sent them to the Transvaal without obtaining the necessary permissions and licenses. As the chief secretary of the BSAC administration noted while supporting the proposed amendments of the Native Employment Ordinance in 1907, “the government was concerned about labour agents who came up from the Transvaal and recruited labour on the Southern Rhodesia side of the border, and recruited Portuguese natives coming across into the Southern Rhodesia territory without a license.”66 Although some of these agents were independent and recruited workers on behalf of different organizations and employers, others were employees of the WNLA. It was also common for recruiters who were licensed to operate in Southern Rhodesia to transport migrant workers to the Transvaal without following official channels, thereby breaching the terms and conditions of their licenses. As such, the first decade of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of unlicensed recruiting and human smuggling across the Limpopo River.67 As the contestation over the control of cross-Limpopo mobility evolved over the period that I cover in this book, this phenomenon also evolved, leading to the rise of the maguma-guma (human smugglers) in the mid-1990s.
People from communities astride the border did not need much assistance with crossing the Limpopo and finding work in the Transvaal; however, long-distance migrants who had very little knowledge about the Limpopo Valley relied on labor recruiters. Given that Beitbridge district, on the Zimbabwean side of the border, was barely served by any form of public transport before the construction of the cross-Limpopo bridge that became operational in the early 1930s, such people had two ways of getting to the Transvaal. One was to use the train that plied the Bulawayo-Mafeking (Botswana) route, disembarking at the Southern Rhodesia–Botswana border and then walking to the Limpopo River. The other was to walk from various departure points to the Transvaal, following footpaths and routes that led to the Limpopo River. Regardless of the method they used, such people often arrived in the border area without much knowledge about how to cross the Limpopo and where to go after crossing it. It was mostly people in this situation who ended up engaging labor recruiters roaming around areas adjacent to the Limpopo River.68
By saying that migrants sought the assistance of smugglers who helped them to dodge the Southern Rhodesian authorities’ measures of controlling cross-Limpopo mobility, I am by no means suggesting that the interactions between these two groups always happened in a pleasant and business-like environment. Labor recruiters often “used all sorts of tricks and ploys,” to force work-seeking migrants to sign up with them.69 One strategy they used was to establish makeshift camps in the border zone, from which they deployed African “touts” and “runners” along the routes that migrants used as they traveled between the two territories. In addition to intercepting migrants already en route to the Transvaal, labor recruiters sometimes paid bribes to village leaders to gain access into the African communities where they met potential clients. On entering African communities, recruiters often used cash advances, clothes, and food handouts to lure potential workers to sign up for work contracts and leave their villages.70 Given the challenges that cash taxation, land alienation, and other colonial policies caused among the African communities in Southern Rhodesia, it is not surprising that some people embraced labor recruiters, who they regarded as helpers rather than the exploiters that they were.
As the demand for labor in the Transvaal grew rapidly in the first decade of the twentieth century—when Southern Rhodesian authorities increased controls of cross-Limpopo mobility—the triangular space at the intersection of the Southern Rhodesia–Mozambique–Transvaal borders became a hive of activities associated with labor recruitment and smuggling. This area, then known as the Pafuri Triangle, was in a remote and rugged terrain infested with the tsetse fly and malarial mosquitoes. Emphasizing how difficult it was to get to Pafuri, Thomas V. Bulpin says, “The journey to this spot was as arduous as it was perilous, passing through a land tormented by the devils of heat and thirst where constant danger lurked around every corner, and only the most adventuresome or foolish attempted it.”71 Given that Southern Rhodesia did not have any administrative post in the Beitbridge area, the nearest place where state officials were located was the police station at Sibasa in the northern Transvaal, more than a hundred miles away.
Because the Transvaal government was not much invested in the control of cross-Limpopo mobility, the Sibasa police station served little purpose. As such, there was barely any presence of law enforcement agents at Pafuri during much of the first decade of the twentieth century. Taking advantage of the general absence of state functionaries in the Pafuri Triangle, numerous individuals with criminal records in the Transvaal sought to escape the law by camping in this place. Consequently, the Pafuri Triangle also became known as “Crooks’ Corner.”72
While some fugitives at Pafuri survived on hunting elephants and other wild animals in the Limpopo Valley, others joined the rank and file of unlicensed recruiters who also camped at Crooks’ Corner. As Martin J. Murray put it, most of the campers at Crooks’ Corner were “unscrupulous fortune-hunters specialising in smuggling a particular kind of contraband: African labour.”73 Being at the intersection of three different territories, this location also made it easier for the residents of Pafuri to play hide and seek with the police whenever the latter visited the area in pursuit of one individual or another. Boasting about how they used the beacon at the intersection of the three territories’ borders to avoid arrest, a former labor recruiter, who spent several years at Crooks’ Corner, said, “Whoever comes for you, you can always be on the other side in someone else’s territory; and if they all come at once, you can always sit on the beacon top and let them fight