Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni
for this attention vary from security concerns fueled by the 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City by individuals linked to Al-Qaeda—a terrorist organization whose activities rely on cross-border movements of its operatives—to the rise of anti-immigration movements in many parts of the world. In the United States, for example, debates around this issue became more complicated than ever when presidential candidate Donald Trump made a pledge to prevent illegal migration from Mexico by building a wall along the border between the two countries and then went on to win the 2016 election. In addition to these developments, widely circulated media reports and images from the Mediterranean region, where thousands of people from Africa and the Middle East (including young children) have died while trying to enter Europe through unofficial channels, have also contributed to ongoing debates around this topic.1
Away from the spotlight of international media outlets, hundreds of Zimbabweans died while many others faced various forms of violence as they tried to escape from a double-dip recession that engulfed their country during the first decade of the twenty-first century. At least three million people—about 25 percent of Zimbabwe’s entire population—are believed to have left the crisis-ridden country between 1999 and 2008.2 Although the majority of people who left Zimbabwe relocated to South Africa, many others regularly traveled between the two countries as cross-border traders or subsistence shoppers. By 2009, when I began research for this book, the Beitbridge border post between Zimbabwe and South Africa had become one of Africa’s busiest inland ports of entry. Long queues of people and vehicles were a common sight at this place where travelers often spent several hours awaiting clearance by Zimbabwean and South African border officials. Although some travelers followed official channels for crossing the border, others swam across the Limpopo River and crawled under or jumped over the South African border fence. Some of those who sought to avoid the official border post enlisted the help of unregistered transport operators, locally referred to as malayitsha or omalayisha, and human smugglers (maguma-guma), who removed portions of the border fence and charged fees for the use of the “alternative gates” they created.3 However, the malayitsha and maguma-guma often assaulted, raped, and even killed travelers they interacted with in the border zone. As such, the Zimbabwe–South Africa border—particularly the no-man’s land between the Limpopo River, which separates these countries, and the border fence on the South African side—also became a hotbed of crime and violence associated with border jumping.4
Although a substantial body of literature exists on “illegal migration” in Southern Africa, the bulk of the studies on this phenomenon come from geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists who focus predominantly on the post-1990s period.5 This book takes a different approach by exploring the history of border jumping from Zimbabwe to South Africa since the border’s inception as a colonial boundary, between what was then known as the Transvaal (now the Limpopo province of South Africa) and what became Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1890s, to the early 2000s. Arguing that the practice of evading state-centered measures of controlling migration between the two countries is as old as the border itself, I tell the story of how border jumping in this region came to be so prevalent and violent. At the center of this history are multilevel contestations over the meaning of this border and movements across it. On one level, the study explores contestations between policy makers and employers of unskilled workers in Zimbabwe and South Africa, who had different and at times conflicting understandings of cross-Limpopo mobility. On another level, we see migrant workers, cross-border shoppers, and traders from colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe and other areas north of the Limpopo River doing everything they can to defy state-centered controls of mobility by entering South Africa through unofficial channels. Moreover, I probe the contribution of corrupt state officials, labor recruiters, and the malayitsha and maguma-guma who facilitated border jumpers’ breaches of various measures of border enforcement and migration control that both countries have deployed at different times.
By focusing on contestations about the meaning of the border and attempts to control people’s movements from Zimbabwe to South Africa, this study challenges the argument that conditions of insecurity in the migrants’ countries of origin are the major causes of “illegal” migration that features prominently in scholarly and policy discussions of migrations in many parts of the world. In the case of Southern Africa, scholars, journalists, and policy makers often point at the Mozambican civil war and the rising rates of unemployment and poverty that have prevailed in other countries of the region from the 1990s onward as the major drivers of illegal migration to South Africa.6 In challenging this view, my study invites readers to make a distinction between factors that push people out of their countries of origin and those that cause or promote illegal crossings of international boundaries. For example, although various factors in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe compelled many people to leave on short- or long-term trips to South Africa, such factors did not cause travelers to cross the border between the two countries through illegal, irregular, or informal channels. In fact, most people whose experiences I discuss in this book resorted to border jumping only after they were denied documents such as passbooks, visas, or permits that would have allowed them to use official channels.
My study also engages with the view that “illegal immigration” is a sign that the receiving country has failed to secure its borders.7 This argument is at the center of ongoing immigration debates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries with large immigrant populations. In South Africa, this view is common among opposition politicians and other government critics who argue that the postapartheid administration has weakened the country’s borders by withdrawing the military from border patrol units.8 Although this argument has some merits, the story I tell suggests that tightening border control measures does not eradicate border jumping; it only makes border jumping more violent and risky. Over the more than 120 years studied in this book, state officials on both sides of the Zimbabwe–South Africa border made several attempts to harden the border, but border jumpers responded to each and every initiative by devising new strategies to dodge the revised policies. Rather than eliminating border jumping, the attempts to tighten border control in these countries actually encouraged and promoted it. In making this point, my study resonates with works in other areas of the world where tightening border enforcement and immigration control measures encouraged migrants to use unofficial channels to cross borders. Joseph Nevins’s study of Operation Gatekeeper, a boundary enforcement strategy that the Clinton administration launched in 1994, reveals that militarization of the United States–Mexico border did not eliminate illegal migration between the countries. By 1998, the United States had installed floodlights on sections of the border in addition to deploying helicopters that hovered over the border area, monitoring people’s movements. Despite these and other measures put in place since then, the United States–Mexico border has remained a site of intense contestation.9 A similar scenario has unfolded along the border between Morocco and Spain, where border jumping and smuggling turned violent and more complicated over the past decade despite Spain’s attempts to fortify the Melilla border fence. Instead of ending border jumping, the tightening of border controls in this region gave rise to what Ruben Andersson has aptly called “an illegal migration industry” that thrives on a wide variety of factors and actors in Africa and Europe.10
This book also builds on a growing body of scholarship on Africa’s borders and borderlands.11 Existing work often uncritically adopts and deploys state-centered notions of legality and illegality in characterizing cross-border movements. In contrast, my study advances the idea that Africa’s boundaries and borderlands are products of historical contestations and negotiations. In line with this argument, I show that the contestations and other interactions that take place both in and away from this in-between space either produce or fuel illegal activities, such as bribing border enforcement agents and cutting South Africa’s border fence. These activities do not just exceed the intended master plan of the border but rather encourage and promote border jumping. Furthermore, instead of viewing the Zimbabwe–South Africa boundary as simply a marker of territorial and political limits between the two states, this book provides a nuanced analysis of this border as a socially constructed space where local and global forces converge to produce history.12
Border Jumping as an Analytical Concept
Just