Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni
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systems by separating people from their lands. As Ken Swindell notes, some groundnut cultivators found themselves in the British territory of the Gambia while their lands became part of the French colony of Senegal, on the other side of the border.35 The East African region also has several cases of groups and “nations” that were divided by colonial boundaries, with the Somalis in four different countries (present-day Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti) being an obvious example.36 As colonial states evolved, the European notions of boundaries became entrenched through the implementation of laws and policies that sought to restrict African people’s mobility. In this context, people who consciously or otherwise defied colonial orders and bypassed official channels when crossing interstate boundaries became classified as “illegal migrants.” Despite the end of European rule in Africa, colonial boundaries remained in place except for minor adjustments here and there. As such, “illegal migration” continued to be a challenge in many parts of the continent where interstate disputes and wars over boundaries abounded.37
The Zimbabwe–South Africa border fits very well into this theoretical framework in that the border emerged and evolved as simultaneously troublesome and troubled. Like the majority of interstate boundaries in Africa, this border emerged with the European colonization of the continent. My analysis of the story of border jumping from Zimbabwe to South Africa begins with the British conquest of Zimbabwe—the event that produced this boundary. Evidence shows that the precolonial inhabitants of the Limpopo Valley used stone walls to enforce boundaries, suggesting that they knew something about border jumping; however, the dynamics and significance of this phenomenon changed following the British conquest of the Zimbabwean plateau in 1890.38 This development did not simply lead to the loss of freedom among the inhabitants of what became Southern Rhodesia; it also resulted in the reconfiguration of the Limpopo River from an ordinary stream to a juridical divide between the British-controlled territory of Southern Rhodesia and the Transvaal (South Africa Republic) under the control of the Boer (Afrikaner) descendants of Dutch sailors who settled at the cape in 1652.
Similar to the West African cases of Yorubaland and Senegambia, this development divided the Venda, Shangaan, Sotho, and other groups astride the Limpopo River into two polities with competing sovereignties. Given this background, the border did not always mean the same thing to policy makers on opposite sides of the Limpopo. From the mid-1890s to the late 1950s, for example, policy makers in Southern Rhodesia deployed several strategies to restrict migration to South Africa while their counterparts across the border covertly and overtly encouraged the free movement of people across the entire region of Southern Africa. People from communities astride the Limpopo, who previously moved freely back and forth across the river, contested the border by disobeying state-sponsored measures of migration control. In doing so, the border people were joined by others from communities further up in Southern Rhodesia, Nyasaland (now Malawi), Mozambique, and other areas who responded to the emerging cash-based (colonial) economies by seeking higher-wage jobs in South Africa.39
With the militarization of antiapartheid and anticolonial struggles in both countries in the 1960s, the dynamics of border contestations and cross-border movements shifted. The fear of infiltration by Umkhonto we Sizwe fighters made policy makers and employers in South Africa view migrants from north of the Limpopo as a security threat rather than as a source of cheap labor. They therefore sought ways of working with their counterparts in Southern Rhodesia who also felt threated by unregulated movements of Africans in the region. However, the two countries’ newly found common ground cracked in 1980 when the shift from white-minority rule to independence in Zimbabwe severed their friendship. Soon thereafter, the South African government constructed an electrified fence along the border between the two countries. With the end of apartheid rule in South Africa in 1994, relations between the two countries improved somewhat. However, the economic challenges that prevailed in Zimbabwe, and that resulted in hundreds of thousands of its citizens moving to South Africa, have made it difficult for the countries to see the border from the same perspective. As policy makers in these countries continued to quarrel over control of cross-Limpopo mobility during the first decade of the twenty-first century, border jumping emerged as a salient feature of the Zimbabwe–South Africa border culture.
Border Jumpers and the Search for Livelihood
Border jumping, like other forms of mobility, often involves the movement of much more than human beings. Sometimes border jumpers smuggle drugs, guns, and other controlled substances across borders. Quite often, this phenomenon also involves cutting border fences, using forged documents, giving bribes to border officials, and performing many other activities that are legally prohibited in many countries. As a result, in addition to being illegalized and criminalized, border jumping is often viewed with disdain and is sometimes regarded as pathological to the existence of law and order. In some cases, border jumpers are also viewed as victims of restrictive measures of controlling migration in many countries and regions of the world.40 Although viewing border jumpers as either criminals or victims helps formulate policy interventions, too much focus on either or both of these perspectives occludes other important dynamics of this phenomenon.
In her ethnographic analysis of the forces that gave rise to what she calls “fiscal disobedience” in the Chad basin, Janet Roitman reminds us about the importance of exploring “the reasoning that leads one to engage in illegal practices—or more distinctly, to maintain the status of illegality.”41 In other words, researchers should seek to understand the motives, desires, and long-term goals as well as the agency and creativity of people who engage in this practice. To do that effectively means recognizing that border jumpers are, first and foremost, individuals who are determined to “seize control of their own lives and . . . struggle to establish their own destiny.”42 In line with this view, my work examines how the dynamics of border jumping shifted at various moments from the border’s inception in the 1890s to 2010. I show that during the early years of the border’s existence, people from areas close to the Limpopo sought to continue preexisting patterns of movement across the river and made up the majority of border jumpers. As the cash-based colonial economy became more entrenched, from the second decade of the twentieth century onward, many people left Southern Rhodesia (through unofficial channels) in search of higher wages and better working conditions in South Africa. When the anticolonial struggles in Zimbabwe turned into full-scale war in the 1960s, most people who jumped the border did so mainly in search of protection in South Africa. As the country’s economy began to shrink in the 1990s, cross-border traders (mostly women) made up the majority of border jumpers. Despite wide differences in their premigration status, most people who crossed the Zimbabwe–South Africa border through unofficial channels over the period studied in this book viewed border jumping as a source of opportunity for a better livelihood.
In exploring the shifting dynamics of border jumping between these countries over the past 120 years, I discuss how different regimes of border enforcement and migration control affected differently positioned travelers. Regardless of where a migrant originated, it was crucial to know the routes that went to the border and to figure out how to avoid arrest and other risks. As Akin Fadahunsi and Peter Rosa observed in their study of smuggling across the Nigeria–Benin border, border jumpers had to acquire a certain level of knowledge about both countries’ migration control policies in order to evade them.43 More important, border jumpers needed to know the border landscape and especially where and how to cross the Limpopo River during the rainy season when the water level made it difficult to cross willy-nilly. Each generation of border jumpers came up with strategies that helped people overcome the kinds of challenges they faced along the way. Some strategies succeeded, but others did not work as anticipated.
During much of the period before the 1960s, the most common strategy that travelers used was to follow “secret” footpaths and crossing points that the police and other state functionaries in Southern Rhodesia found difficult to control. For example, when the South African government announced its highly contested ban on “tropical workers” in 1913, some migrants from Southern Rhodesia had to cross into Mozambique’s southern districts where they posed as “Portuguese natives” to obtain official documents that allowed them to work in South Africa. A similar scenario unfolded along Zimbabwe’s border with Botswana (then known by its colonial name of Bechuanaland), which was not as strictly controlled as the Limpopo boundary.