Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni
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for recruiters at Crooks’ Corner to dispatch touts to communities adjacent the Limpopo River to scout for potential workers. That the WNLA stationed some of its labor agents at Crooks’ Corner shows not only the extent to which this place had become an important part of the region’s market-oriented economies but also the ways in which border jumping blurred the distinction between formal- and informal-sector activities in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Sometime in 1910 two European adventurers, Alec Thompson and William Pye, built a store “atop a low, 500-feet high ridge, which formed a sort of topographical backbone to the wild wedge of land” between the three territories.75 In addition to selling food, clothes, malaria drugs (mostly quinine), and whisky, Pye and Thompson, like the rest of the campers at this place, also functioned as labor recruiters. They often engaged work-seekers who arrived at the store in starving conditions and passed them along to the Transvaal mine owners. In that respect, the pair used their store as a clearinghouse or auction floor for work-seeking migrants who ate, rested, obtained new clothes, and signed engagement contracts at Crooks’ Corner before proceeding to different places in the Transvaal and beyond.76 This effectively made the Pafuri Triangle the headquarters of labor pirates who promoted border jumping from Zimbabwe to South Africa in the early twentieth century.
The significance of Crooks’ Corner in this history is not simply that it quickly became the most known place where border jumpers met human smugglers. This place also became the center of migration-related violence within a few years of the British colonization of Zimbabwe. As labor recruiters sought to maximize returns in this environment, where lawlessness prevailed, some of them deployed violent methods. This often involved the use of guns to intercept border jumpers and force them to sign contracts that directed them to specific employers. It was also common for recruiters to fight over and rob each other of the migrants they would have mobilized. Referring to recruiters’ violent behavior, Bulpin wrote, “The bushrangers were as tough a crowd as any bully bosun. They asked no quarter from life, and gave none.”77
By the time the Transvaal merged with the Orange Free State, Natal, and the Cape Colony, forming the Union of South Africa in May 1910, border jumping had emerged a defining feature of the Transvaal–Southern Rhodesia border. What previously was simply a river in a frontier zone had become a geopolitical and juridical boundary. As was the case with the US–Mexico border, which split culturally homogenous groups into two sovereign states, the South Africa–Zimbabwe border tore communities asunder.78
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