Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni
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across the Zimbabwe–South Africa border. Whereas other scholars might prefer to treat these groups as subjects of different scholarly discourses, border jumping makes it possible to see the common traits in the way people moved between these two countries. For much of the period before the mid-1970s, the majority of people who traveled from Zimbabwe to South Africa through unofficial channels did so in pursuit of employment opportunities in South African mines, farms, and factories. With the outbreak of Zimbabwe’s liberation war in the 1970s, the risks of jumping the border—which had become heavily militarized—to look for work in South Africa outweighed the potential gains. However, some residents of Zimbabwe’s border districts left the war-torn country and sought refuge among their relatives in South Africa. In this way, the figure of the border jumper changed from a migrant worker to a refugee. As the Zimbabwean economy began to shrink in the early to mid-1990s, cross-border traders became the most visible category of people who traveled between these countries without following official channels. In fact, some of these people crossed the border on a regular basis. Most cross-border shoppers tended to spend only a day or two (sometimes even a few hours) in South Africa. To call such people migrants and to characterize their movements between the two countries as migration is problematic. I use the term border jumping to emphasize the point that such people crossed the border without following the official channels, despite the forces that caused them to travel to South Africa and the length of time they stayed there. They did, indeed, jump the border.
Of Contested Borders and Enforcement Regimes
As of August 2019, about two thirds of the United Nations’s 193 member countries were embroiled in territorial disputes of various magnitudes.21 This means that a large number of geopolitical boundaries were sites of conflicts. If we factor in disputes involving nonstate actors, the number of contested borders will surely rise. I doubt that any geopolitical boundary is free of contestation. Some border contestations or disputes have resulted in widely publicized diplomatic standoffs or military confrontations, whereas many others have escaped public attention. This is because borders in different regions of the world have different statuses in global politics. In addition, the causes of border conflict vary from one locale or region to another. Nevertheless, certain attributes of geopolitical boundaries put them at the center of various kinds of disputes and conflicts that the world has witnessed since the prevailing notions of nation-states with strictly defined boundaries were created in the 1648 Spanish–Dutch Treaty of Westphalia.22 A quick overview of some of those attributes will help frame discussion of historical contestations over the Zimbabwe–South Africa border in a broader theoretical context.
It is important to note that the majority of borders in today’s world came out of violent and coercive processes of nation-state building. As Oscar Martinez observed, “history demonstrates that few boundaries have been created as a result of peaceful negotiations; power politics, military pressures, and warfare have been the determining factors in most cases.”23 This is as true of the United States–Mexico border as it is of boundaries in many parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, where borders have been made and remade as empires and states (large and small) competed and fought for their own existence. Apart from, and partly because of, the coercion that is usually involved in making boundaries, states in many parts of the world deploy armed personnel, walls, and fences along their boundaries. Such measures do not simply serve as physical reminders of the state’s presence; they remind the border people and passersby about the state’s commitment to exercising its power through violent means.24 It is also quite common—especially in the current era, characterized by the US-led global campaigns against terrorism—for states to use intrusive surveillance mechanisms to enforce their borders. Robert Pallitto and Josiah Heyman argue that the current “amplified border security regime” has generated debate not simply because of its intrusive nature but also because it has deepened inequalities, as different categories of mobile people are often treated differently at security checkpoints in various places.25
In addition to using bilateral and sometimes multilateral agreements to control cross-border mobility, most modern states deploy legal statutes and other kinds of regulatory frameworks. Measures of controlling cross-border mobility not only impose barriers to movements across space but also invariably illegalize and even criminalize certain forms of cross-border activities.26 For example, it is currently a standard requirement for people to carry passports or other forms of travel documents with visas or permits before they can cross international boundaries. Therefore, anyone who crosses an international boundary without presenting their travel documents for inspection by state officials at a port of entry risks being classified as an “illegal migrant” unless they apply for asylum or other forms of protection. In this respect, some countries treat “illegal” border crossings as criminal offences punishable not just by deportation but also by jail terms or fines. Although nothing appears to be wrong with countries enforcing their laws, migration control policies do not always reflect the interests of minority populations who might not have enough political capital to influence policy formulation. Such people usually find other channels, which may not be legal or formal, to express their opposition to specific measures of border enforcement.27
As geographical margins of state systems, borders usually mark spaces of multiple and often competing sovereignties. Heather Nicol and Julian Minghi note that borders are “at the skin of the state at the same time that they are literally and rhetorically at its heart.”28 As Benedikt Korf and Timothy Raeymaekers point out, borders are the “meeting points of clashing ideological projects, through which metropolises and indigenous populations legitimize their claims to political space.”29 In some cases, this scenario provides fertile conditions for tensions to grow between states and communities in border zones that may feel excluded from major decision-making processes; it also sometimes causes tensions between states on opposite sides of the border. The latter outcome is very likely to occur in situations where interstate boundaries are vaguely defined. For example, some of Africa’s boundaries that appear on paper are either unmarked on the ground or defined by invisible boundary markers, beacons, small rivers, or other geophysical features that barely present barriers for cross-border travelers. Others are virtually unguarded or guarded by personnel of only one of the two or more countries sharing a border. At times, such personnel may be stationed in “border” towns or other locations far away from the actual boundary.30
Some borders are sites of friction because they are not aligned with community-based notions of boundaries. This is the case with most interstate boundaries in Africa, which came out of the European conquest and partition of the continent in the late nineteenth century. As Achille Mbembe argues, precolonial African societies “were not delimited by boundaries in the classical sense of the term, but rather by an imbrication of multiple spaces constantly joined, disjoined, and recombined through wars, conquests, and the mobility of goods and persons.”31 Some scholars refer to this as “mental mapping” to emphasize the idea that boundaries and maps existed in Africa before a group of European powers (mainly Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Belgium, and Italy) invaded the continent.32 However, the impact of colonial rule on notions of borders, border enforcement, and cross-border mobility in Africa should not be underestimated. The colonists went to Africa with the Westphalian ideas of strictly defined geopolitical boundaries. To make matters worse, the process of redrawing Africa’s boundaries, which the colonists legitimized through the Berlin Act of 1885 (a product of the 1884–85 Berlin Conference), barely took into consideration the African people’s interests and conceptions of states and borders.
In saying this, I do not seek to refute Paul Nugent’s and other important studies, which show that the African people, in different parts of the continent, embraced colonial boundaries early on and contributed in several ways to their making.33 What is clear, though, is that the European partitioning of Africa resulted in a mishmash of boundaries that either cut across preexisting cultural communities or grouped together people who previously belonged to different polities. For example, the partition of what was known as Yorubaland in West Africa affected the precolonial kingdoms of Sabe, Ketu, and Ifonyin, whose leaders ended up in the French colony of Dahomey (now Benin) while most of their followers became part of British Nigeria.34 A similar scenario played out among groundnut cultivators in the Senegambia region