Читать книгу Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa - Francis Musoni - Страница 11
ОглавлениеWHILE INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION has been a major focus of debates in many parts of the world since the early twentieth century, global attention to cross-border movements that seek to evade official channels of migration control increased significantly over the past few years. The reasons 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 a decade ago it was almost the convention in migration studies to use the phrase illegal migration in reference to cross-border movements that did not conform to official channels of moving from one country to another. Since then, the use of this term has become quite controversial. Although many such movements breach some countries’ migration laws, scholars, policy makers, journalists, and the public sometimes use the term illegal migration in situations where existing laws do not specifically make such movements illegal. The use of this juridical term also implies that people who cross international boundaries without following official channels automatically become criminals who deserve detention, deportation, or other forms of punishment. As Russell King and Daniela DeBono put it, illegal migration “carries a pejorative connotation and reveals an explicit criminalisation of the migrant’s situation of either entry or residence, or both.”13
Owing to the controversies surrounding this term, other scholars and the general public have resorted to the use of adjectives such as informal or irregular when talking about migrants who cross borders without following official channels. However, these terms also suggest that border crossings that do not follow legal or formal channels always take place in a disorderly manner. Furthermore, these terms imply that something is intrinsically wrong, undesirable, or abnormal about people who engage in such movements.14 In other circles, the same phenomenon is often referred to as undocumented migration, which reflects the condition of most migrants who cross borders without presenting or obtaining identity and travel documents at international border posts. However, many migrants classified as undocumented do have documents, except that “they just aren’t the right ones for where they are living and what they are doing.”15 Equally problematic are terms such as unauthorized and unpermitted, which are in popular use among scholars, journalists, migrants rights advocates, and policy makers. Border crossings that avoid official channels usually take place without official authorization; however, it is also quite common for border agents to facilitate such movements in return for monetary rewards and other kinds of favors.
In this book I use the term border jumping to refer to border crossings that avoid officially designated channels of movement from Zimbabwe to South Africa. Although this term also comes across as somewhat derogatory and thus controversial, I use it here without any negative connotations. While conducting research for this study in 2009 and 2010, I noticed that most border residents, migrant workers, cross-border traders, and other travelers I interacted with commonly used the term border jumpers to refer to themselves or their acquaintances who swam across the Limpopo River and jumped over the fence on the South African side of the border. Such people did not see anything pejorative in the use of this term. Given the livelihood challenges that Zimbabweans faced during the first decade of the twenty-first century, being able to evade official controls at the border was associated with a sense of defiance. There was something heroic about being a border jumper in this region. More important, border jumping is increasingly becoming a popular concept among other scholars of migration in Southern Africa.16
By using this contemporary, “vernacular” term, my objective is to understand multiple perspectives of the contestations that produced and sustained a historical phenomenon that I explore in this book. Unlike other terms, which give the impression that something is abnormal about border crossings that avoid official channels, border jumping makes it possible to simultaneously capture both the state’s concerns and the sentiments of nonstate actors who often challenge the legitimacy of borders and state-centered efforts of controlling movements between countries. In a similar fashion, terms such as clandestine crossings and illicit flows are also common among migration scholars. These terms could imply viewing movements from the state’s perspective while concurrently considering the views of the migrant workers, transnational traders, and other travelers who take pride in evading official measures of controlling cross-border mobility.17 However, they give the impression that border crossings that happen outside of official channels are hidden away from state authorities.
I also find border jumping the most appropriate term for exploring the changes and continuities in the nature of “illegal” border crossings that I explore in this book. In the first three chapters, I use this term to reference movements of people who left colonial Zimbabwe without identity documents and travel permits at a time when South African authorities did not require foreign Africans to produce such documents to enter the country. This was the case during the twenty years between the British conquest of Zimbabwe in 1890 and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and throughout much of the period before 1960. During much of that early period, Southern Rhodesian authorities deployed legal and quasilegal measures in an effort to restrict cross-Limpopo mobility. Their counterparts in South Africa leaned toward an open border policy by not actively seeking to restrict immigration from colonial Zimbabwe and other areas in the region.18 From Southern Rhodesia’s perspective, people who left the country during this period without travel permits did so in contravention of the law. For this reason, Southern Rhodesian state officials, business owners, and ordinary colonists used the term illegal migrants to refer to such people. However, those movements did not necessarily violate the Transvaal or South Africa’s immigration policies. Technically, this movement could be referred to as illegal emigration rather than illegal immigration.
The book also uses border jumping to reference border crossings that occurred when either country introduced laws to regulate cross-border mobility but did very little to enforce them. A good example is when the South African government announced the banning of so-called tropical workers (migrants from areas north of latitude 22° south) in 1913 but continued to welcome such people—before lifting the ban in 1932—if they entered the country through unofficial channels. To a large extent, this approach created a situation similar to what Michel Foucault called “tolerated illegality,” which prevailed under the Ancien Regime in France. Although this type of illegality often manifested itself in the form of privileges or exemptions reserved for certain individuals and groups, it was a multifaceted phenomenon. As Foucault puts it, at times tolerated illegality “took the form of massive general non-observance [of laws], which meant that for decades, sometimes for centuries, ordinances could be published and constantly renewed without ever being implemented . . . or quite simply the actual impossibility of imposing the law and apprehending offenders.”19 Sometimes policy contradictions and inconsistencies in the interpretation of laws would make it impossible to enforce laws, creating opportunities for border jumping to thrive. Despite passing laws that illegalized certain kinds of cross-border movements and activities, state officials sometimes saw these phenomena as permissible and even legitimate in some contexts.20 In South Africa, state officials put some barriers at the front entrance and deliberately left the back door open. They knew that some people entered the country through the back door but did very little to stop them. Consequently, I find it problematic to use illegal, clandestine, illicit, or similar terms to describe cross-border movements that did not conform to South African laws during this period.
I also use border jumping in reference to border crossings that openly defied South Africa’s concerted efforts to control immigration from its northern neighbors during the period from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Successive administrations in South Africa at that time actively sought to control people’s movements across the country’s borders using a combination of immigration laws and bilateral agreements with neighboring countries. In the same period, state authorities in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe deployed various measures in an effort to regulate cross-Limpopo mobility. This effort created a scenario in which the term illegal migration could appropriately describe any cross-Limpopo movements that avoided official channels of movements between the two countries. In recognition of this scenario, I occasionally use the term illegal when discussing border crossings that were clearly in violation of South Africa’s immigration laws during this period. However, I put this term in quotation marks to emphasize the specificity associated with its use in those situations. On rare occasions, I use the term clandestine, also in quotation marks, when the nature of movements described warrants the use of that term.
Furthermore, I use border jumping to explore the border-crossing experiences of various categories of mobile people (e.g., migrant workers, refugees, cross-border traders, and human smugglers) who, for one reason or the other, did not follow official channels to travel 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 where colonial boundaries destabilized preexisting land tenure 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. Some people crossed into Bechuanaland and used various strategies to obtain identity documents, purporting to be from that country originally before proceeding to the Transvaal or some other place in South Africa. In some of the cases that I discuss in chapter 3, border jumpers paid drivers of freight trains to disguise their “unauthorized” passengers as part of the crew. In doing so, border jumpers created and utilized what Charles van Onselen refers to as “intelligence networks” to escape from forced labor, low wages, and poor working conditions in Southern Rhodesia.44
The strategies of border jumping changed significantly in the post-1960s period, in large part due to shifts in South Africa’s migration control policies. Although border jumpers continued to use some of the existing routes and networks, they devised new ways of overcoming an increasingly hardened border. This approach developed particularly after the South African government installed an electrified fence and deployed armed personnel along the borderline. The border jumpers might have easily studied and mastered the routines of the border patrol units, which could not cover the entire stretch of the border at all times, but the electrified fence posed a real danger to people trying to cross the border at places other than the official check points. Through sheer resilience, some border jumpers dug holes under the fence and crawled into South Africa. Others threw blankets, clothes, or other nonconductive materials on the fence and climbed over it, whereas the more cunning ones used wire cutters to create holes in the fence and slip through. As already suggested, it was also common for migrants to utilize the services of informal transport operators and other people who smuggled them across the border, often with the help of corrupt state functionaries. Each individual’s decision to use any of these strategies was informed not just by his or her specific situation but also by his or her own understanding of the benefits and risks associated with border jumping.
In examining these strategies and others used by travelers, this book presents the men and women who “illegally” crossed the Zimbabwe–South Africa border as rational thinkers whose actions were informed by their fears, struggles, and desires.45 Rather than presenting border jumpers simply as lawbreakers, these strategies show that they were smart, savvy, and able to adapt to changing circumstances in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the border zone. By engaging in activities that were prohibited by legal statutes or other policy frameworks, border jumpers not only expressed their disgruntlement with the border and how it was enforced but also challenged the legitimacy of the states that sought to regulate people’s mobility across the Limpopo River. In the words of Hastings Donnan and Thomas Wilson, border jumpers threatened “to subvert state institutions by compromising the ability of the institutions to control their self-defined domain.”46 This is not to say that subaltern agency (in the form of border jumpers’ ingenuity) alone gave rise to border jumping in this region. This phenomenon emerged and thrived against the backdrop of competing interests of and contradictory interactions among travelers, state functionaries, and other actors both in and away from the border zone.
Structure of the Book
Although chronology is key to understanding the story I tell in this book, each chapter is focused on a specific regime of migration control that contributed to the historical evolution of border jumping across the Zimbabwe–South Africa border. The first chapter focuses on the two decades between the colonization of the Zimbabwean plateau in 1890 and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910—a fragile period of state formation that witnessed the emergence of a Westphalian type of boundary and the advent of state-centered restrictions of mobility between these two countries. I argue that contestations between Southern Rhodesian authorities, who wanted to restrict migration to the Transvaal, and people from communities astride the Limpopo River, who wanted to continue the patterns of mobility that existed before the 1890s, created the phenomenon of border jumping that is currently prevalent in this region. I also show how state controls of cross-Limpopo mobility created incentives for nonstate actors and corrupt state functionaries to earn money by assisting travelers to cross the border through unofficial channels.
The discussion in chapter 2 explores how South Africa’s ban on migrant workers from Zimbabwe and other areas north of latitude 22° south (announced in 1913 and lifted in 1932) stirred contestations among officials in different departments of the South African state, between state officials and employers’ groups in South Africa, between government officials in South Africa and their counterparts in Southern Rhodesia, and between cross-Limpopo travelers and border enforcement personnel in both countries. I argue that these multisited contestations encouraged and promoted border jumping, which went on to become a defining feature of diplomatic engagements in Southern Africa. Building on this argument, chapter 3 examines how competition for regional labor (from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s) created tensions between Southern Rhodesian authorities, who sought to impose stringent controls of cross-Limpopo mobility, and their counterparts in South Africa, who preferred an open border policy—fueling border jumping between the two countries.
Chapter 4 examines how the intensification of black people’s struggles for independence in South Africa and Zimbabwe shifted the dynamics of mobility between these countries. I argue that the securitization of the border, which began in the 1960s and led to the construction of South Africa’s border fence along the Limpopo River between 1985 and 1986, did not stop border jumping. Instead, it made this phenomenon more dangerous than before. In the fifth chapter, the discussion advances by examining the dynamics of border jumping across the Zimbabwe–South Africa border from the 1990s to 2010—a period when the flow of mobility between these countries significantly increased. I argue that South African authorities’ decision to impose stringent visa conditions on Zimbabwean travelers at a time when the Zimbabwean economy was in distress encouraged contestations, which in turn fueled border jumping as travelers and human smugglers deployed more sophisticated strategies to evade official measures of controlling migration in the region.
In the conclusion, I emphasize the study’s significance in understanding historical and contemporary dynamics of border jumping across the Zimbabwe–South Africa border, arguing that this phenomenon is an understudied legacy of the European partitioning of Africa. The concluding chapter also reiterates the view that border jumping as a product of contestations over borders and regimes of border enforcement—not simply as a result of conditions of insecurity in migrants’ countries of origin—helps explain why this phenomenon is prevalent in many regions of the world despite huge investments in the construction of border fences, walls, and other measures for controlling people’s mobility across international boundaries.
Notes
1. Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014); Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move (London: Verso, 2016). See also, Europe or Die, directed by Milene Larsson (New York: Vice News, 2015), https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exqgek/europe-or-die-all-episodes.
2. Given the prevalence of unrecorded movements of people from Zimbabwe to South Africa, Botswana, and other countries in the region, it is hard to know exactly how many people left the country during this period. For further discussion of this, see Alexander Betts, Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera, eds., Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival (Cape Town: SAMP, 2010); Robyn Leslie, Sandy Johnston, Ann Bernstein, and Riaan de Villiers, eds., Migration from Zimbabwe: Numbers, Needs and Policy Options (Johannesburg: Centre for Development and Enterprise, 2008); JoAnn McGregor and Ranka Primorac, eds., Zimbabwe’s New Diaspora: Displacement and the Cultural Politics of Survival (New York: Bergham, 2010).
3. Malayitsha is a noun derived from the verb layitsha, which refers to the act of loading stuff into a big container, cart, or vehicle. In this case, malayitsha refers to informal transporters of people and goods across the border. Maguma-guma derives from guma-guma, which denotes the use of crooked ways to achieve one’s objectives. In this case, maguma-guma refers to people who use treachery, thievery, and violence in their interactions with travelers. See Tinashe Nyamunda, “Cross-Border Couriers as Symbols of Regional Grievance? The Malayitsha Remittance System in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe,” African Diaspora 7, no.1 (2014): 38–62; Blair Rutherford, “The Politics of Boundaries: The Shifting Terrain of Belonging for Zimbabweans in a South African Border Zone,” African Diaspora 4, no. 2 (2011): 207–29.
4. I use the term border jumping to refer to so-called “illegal migration” in this region because it vernacularizes and decriminalizes the rhetorical overlay of illegal migration and other terms, such as undocumented migration, illicit migration, or irregular migration. For a more detailed discussion of this term and its use in this book, see the section entitled “Border Jumping as an Analytical Concept” in this introduction.
5. John O. Oucho, “Cross-Border Migration and Regional Initiatives in Managing Migration in Southern Africa,” in Migration in South and Southern Africa: Dynamics and Determinants, ed. Pieter Kok, Derik Gelderblom, John Oucho, and Johan Van Zyl (Pretoria: Human Science Research Council, 2006); Jonathan Crush, “Migrations Past: An Historical Overview of Cross-border Movements in Southern Africa,” in On Borders: Perspectives on International Migration in Southern Africa, ed. David A. McDonald (Ontario: SAMP, 2000); Jonathan Klaaren and Jay Ramji, “Inside Illegality: Migration Policing in South Africa after Apartheid,” Africa Today 48, no. 3 (2001): 35–47; Anthony Minaar and Mike Hough, Who Goes There?: Perspectives on Clandestine Migration and Illegal Aliens in Southern Africa (Pretoria: HSRC, 1996); Jonathan Crush, “The Discourse and Dimensions of Irregularity in Post-apartheid South Africa,” International Migration 37, no. 1 (1999): 125–51; Sally A. Peberdy, “Border Crossings: Small Entrepreneurs and Cross-Border Trade Between South Africa and Mozambique,” Tijdschnft voor Economische en Social Geografie 91, no. 4 (2000): 361–378; Jens A. Anderson, “Informal Moves, Informal Markets: International Migrants and Traders from Mzimba District, Malawi,” African Affairs 105, no. 420 (2006): 375–97; Darshan Vigneswaran, Tesfalem Araia, Colin Hoag, and Xolani Tshabalala, “Criminality or Monopoly? Informal Immigration Enforcement in South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 36, no. 2 (2010): 465–81. See also, Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (Dakar: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2006); Jonathan Crush, Abel Chikanda, and Caroline Skinner, eds., Mean Streets: Migration, Xenophobia and Informality in South Africa (Cape Town: Southern African Migration Project, 2015); Norma Kriger, “The Politics of Legal Status for Zimbabweans in South Africa,” in Zimbabwe’s New Diaspora and the Cultural Politics of Survival, ed. JoAnn McGregor and Ranka Primorac (New York: Berghahn, 2010); James Muzondidya, “Makwerekwere: Migration, Citizenship and Identity among Zimbabweans in South Africa,” in McGregor and Primorac, Zimbabwe’s New Diaspora; Loren Landau, “Transplants and Transients: Idioms of Belonging and Dislocation in Inner-City Johannesburg,” African Studies Review 49, no. 2 (2006): 125–45.
6. See Hussein Solomon, Of Myths and Migration: Illegal Immigration into South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 2003); David A. McDonald and Jonathan Crush, eds., Destinations Unknown: Perspectives on the Brain Drain (Pretoria: Africa Institute and SAMP, 2002); Rudo Gaidzanwa, Voting with Their Feet: Migrant Zimbabwean Nurses and Doctors in the Era of Structural Adjustment (Uppsala: Nordiska Institute, 1999); David A. McDonald, Lovemore Zinyama, John Gay, Fion de Vletter, and Robert Mattes, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: Migration from Lesotho, Mozambique and Zimbabwe to South Africa,” International Migration Review 34, no. 3 (2000): 813–41.
7. Sandra Lavenex, “Migration and the EU’s New Eastern Border: Between Realism and Liberalism,” Journal of European Public Policy 8, no. 1 (2001): 24–42; Rob T. Guerette and Ronald V. Clarke, “Border Enforcement, Organized Crime, and Deaths of Smuggled Migrants on the United States–Mexico Border,” European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research 11, no. 2 (2005): 159–74; Sule Toktas and Hande Selimoglu, “Smuggling and Trafficking in Turkey: An Analysis of EU-Turkey Cooperation in Combating Transnational Organized Crime,” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 14, no. 1 (2012): 135–50.
8. Aurelia Segatti, “Reforming South African Immigration Policy in the Post-apartheid Period (1990–2010),” in Contemporary Migration to South Africa: A Regional Development Issue, ed. Aurelia Segatti and Loren B. Landau. (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2011. See also, Democratic Alliance, “Secure Our Borders,” https://www.da.org.za/policy/secure-our-borders. See also, News24, “Parts of SA-Zim Border Stolen,” July 24, 2009, http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/Parts-of-SA-Zim-border-stolen-20090724.
9. Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the US-Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002).
10. Andersson, Illegality, Inc., 3.
11. Anthony I. Asiwaju, ed., Partitioned Africans: Ethnic Relations across Africa’s International Boundaries, 1884–1984 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985); William F. S. Miles, Hausaland Divided: Colonialism and Independence in Nigeria and Niger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Paul Nugent and Anthony Asiwaju, eds., African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities (New York: Pinter, 1996); Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier: The Lie of the Borderlands since 1914 (Oxford: James Currey, 2002).
12. For similar analyses, see Dereje Feyissa and Markus Virgil Hoehne, eds., Borders and Borderlands as Resources in the Horn of Africa (Suffolk: James Currey, 2010); David B. Coplan, “Border Show Business and Performing States,” in A Companion to Border Studies, ed. Thomas M. Wilson, and Hastings Donnan (West Sussex: Blackwell, 2012); Benedikt Korf, and Timothy Raeymakers, eds., Violence on the Margins: States, Conflict, and Borderlands (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
13. Russell King and Daniela DeBono, “Irregular Migration and the ‘Southern European Model’ of Migration,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 22, no. 1 (2013): 3. See also, Nicholas De Genova, “The Production of Culprits: From Deportability to Detainability in the Aftermath of ‘Homeland Security” Citizenship Studies, 11, no. 5 (2007): 421–48; Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
14. For a further discussion of these terms and their usage, see De Genova, “Production of Culprits”; David W. Haines and Karen E. Rosenblum, “Introduction: Problematic Labels, Volatile Issues,” in Illegal Immigration in America: A Reference Handbook, ed. David W. Haines and Karen E. Rosenblum (Westport: Greenwood, 1999).
15. Haines and Rosenblum, “Introduction: Problematic Labels,” 4.
16. See, e.g., Maxim Bolt, Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Josphat Mushongah and Ian Scoones, “Livelihood Change in Rural Zimbabwe over 20 Years” Journal of Development Studies 48, 9 (2012): 1241–57; Nedson Pophiwa, “Mobile Livelihoods—The Players Involved in Smuggling of Commodities across the Zimbabwe‐Mozambique Border,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 25, 2 (2010): 65–76; Blair Rutherford, “Zimbabweans Living in the South African Border-Zone: Negotiating, Suffering and Surviving,” Concerned African Scholars Bulletin 80 (2008): 35–42; Sally Peberdy, “Imagining Immigration: Inclusive Identities and Exclusive Policies in Post-1994 South Africa,” Africa Today 48, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 15–32; Crush, “Discourse and Dimensions” and “Fortress South Africa and the Deconstruction of Apartheid’s Migration Regime” Geoforum 30, no. 1 (1999): 1–11.
17. See, e.g., David Spener, Clandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas-Mexico Border (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, ed., Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders and the Other Side of Globalization, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Janet Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Andersson, Illegality, Inc.
18. Bill Paton, Labour Export Policy in the Development of Southern Africa (London: Macmillan, 1995); Alois S. Mlambo, “A History of Zimbabwean Migration to 1990,” in Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival, ed. Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera (Cape Town: SAMP, 2010).
19. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 82.
20. Janet Roitman, “The Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin,” in Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and “A Successful Life in the Illegal Realm: Smugglers and Road Bandits in the Chad Basin,” in Readings on Modernity in Africa, ed. Peter Geschiere, Birgit Meyer, and Peter Pels (London: International African Institute, 2008).
21. United Nations, “Peace and Security,” https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/peace-and-security/. See also, Kathleen Staudt, Border Politics in a Global Era: Comparative Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
22. Henk Van Houtum, “The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries,” Geopolitics, 10, no. 4 (2005): 672–679.
23. Oscar J. Martinez, Troublesome Borders (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2006), 4.
24. Jonathan Goodhand, “Epilogue: The View from the Border,” in Korf and Raeymakers, Violence on the Margins.
25. Robert Pallitto and Josiah Heyman, “Theorizing Cross-Border Mobility: Surveillance, Security and Identity,” Surveillance and Society 5, no. 3 (2008): 322.
26. Josue D. Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Borders, Citizenship and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2014); Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (New York: Berg, 1999); Dauvergne, Making People Illegal.
27. Josiah McC. Heyman, “The Study of Illegality and Legality: Which Way Forward?” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 36, 2 (2013): 304–7; Chad Richardson and Rosalva Resendiz, On the Edge of the Law: Culture, Labor, and Deviance on the South Texas Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); Sharam Khosravi, ‘Illegal’ Traveller: An Auto-ethnography of Borders (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
28. Heather Nicol and Julian Minghi, “The Continuing Relevance of Borders in Contemporary Contexts,” Geopolitics 10, no. 4 (2005): 681.
29. Benedikt Korf, and Timothy Raeymakers, “Introduction: Border, Frontier and the Geography of Rule at the Margins of the State,” in Violence on the Margins, 14.
30. Ieuan Griffiths, “Permeable Boundaries in Africa,” in African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities, ed. Paul Nugent, and Anthony Asiwaju (New York: Pinter, 1996); Timothy Mechlinski, “Towards an Approach to Borders and Mobility in Africa,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 25, no. 2 (2010): 94–106; Roelof J. Kloppers, “Border Crossings: Life in the Mozambique/South Africa Borderland Since 1975,” (DPhil Diss., University of Pretoria, 2005).
31. Achille Mbembe, “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 263; Paul Nugent, “Arbitrary Lines and the People’s Minds: A Dissenting View on Colonial Boundaries in West Africa,” in Nugent and Asiwaju, African Boundaries.
32. Ivor Wilks, “On Mentally Mapping Greater Asante: A Study of Time and Motion,” Journal of African History 33, no. 2 (1992): 175–90. For further discussion of precolonial notions of borders and frontiers in Africa, see Igor Kopytoff, ed., The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
33. Nugent, “Arbitrary Lines.” See also, Saadia Touval, “Treaties, Borders, and the Partition of Africa,” Journal of African History 7, no. 2 (1966): 279–93; Joseph C. Anene, The International Boundaries of Nigeria, 1885–1960: The Framework of an Emergent African Nation (London: Longman, 1970); Derrick J. Thom, The Niger-Nigeria Boundary, 1890–1906: A Study of Ethnic Frontiers and a Colonial Boundary (Athens: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1975).
34. Anthony I. Asiwaju, Western Yorubaland Under European Rule 1889–1945 (London: Longman, 1976); Anthony I. Asiwaju, “The Conceptual Framework,” in Partitioned Africans.
35. Ken Swindell, “Serawoolies, Tillibunkas and Strange Farmers: The Development of Migrant Groundnut Farming along the Gambia River 1848–95,” Journal of African History 21, no. 1 (1980): 93–104.
36. Said S. Samatar, “The Somali Dilemma: Nation in Search of a State,” in Partitioned Africans. For more examples of groups that were divided by colonial boundaries in Africa, see Asiwaju, “Partitioned Culture Areas: A Checklist,” in Partitioned Africans; Feyissa and Hoehne, Borders and Borderlands; William F. S. Miles, “Postcolonial Borderland Legacies of Anglo-French Partition in West Africa,” African Studies Review 58, no. 3 (2015): 191–213; Ghislaine Geloin, “Displacement, Migration, and the Curse of Borders in Francophone West Africa,” in Movements, Borders and Identities in Africa, ed. Toyin Falola and Aribidesi Usman (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2009).
37. William F. S. Miles, Scars of Partition: Postcolonial Legacies in French and British Borderlands, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2014); Saadia Touval, The Boundary Politics of Independent Africa (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1972).
38. For detailed discussions of precolonial borders and walls in the Limpopo Valley, see Innocent Pikirayi, The Zimbabwe Culture: Origins and Decline of Southern Zambezian States (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2001); Thomas N. Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University, 1996); Mphaya H. Nemudzivhadi, “The Attempts by Makhado to Revive the Venda Kingdom, 1864–1895” (PhD diss., Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, 1998). See also, Andrew MacDonald, “Colonial Trespassers in the Making of South Africa’s International Borders, 1900 to c.1950,” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2012); Enocent Msindo, Ethnicity in Zimbabwe: Transformations in Kalanga and Ndebele Societies, 1860–1990 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012).
39. Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c1860–1910 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994); Jonathan Crush, Alan Jeeves, and David Yudelman, South Africa’s Labor Empire: A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mines (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991); Paton, Labour Export Policy.
40. Crush, “Discourse and Dimensions.” The same is true with several other informal economic activities such as smuggling, prostitution and street vending, which often exist outside the official regulatory frameworks. For further discussions, see Peberdy, “Border Crossings”; Janet MacGaffey and Remmy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, “Introduction: The Making of Illicitness,” in van Schendel and Abraham, Illicit Flows and Criminal Things; Chad Richardson and Michael J. Pisani, The Informal and Underground Economy of the South Texas Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012).
41. Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience.
42. David Newbury “From ‘Frontier’ to ‘Boundary’: Some Historical Roots of Peasant Strategies of Survival in Zaire,” in The Crisis in Zaire: Myths and Realities, ed. George Nzongola-Ntalaja (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1986), 96.
43. Akin Fadahunsi and Peter Rosa, “Entrepreneurship and Illegality: Insights from the Nigerian Cross-border Trade” Journal of Business Venturing, 17 (2002): 402. See also, Donna Flynn, “We are the Border: Identity, Exchange, and the State Along the Benin-Nigeria Border,” American Ethnologist 24, no. 2 (1997): 311–30; Nick Megoran, Gael Raballand, and Jerome Bouyjon, “Performance, Representation and the Economics of Border Control in Uzbekistan,” Geopolitics 10, no. 4 (2005): 712–40.
44. Charles van Onselen, Chibaro: African Mine Labour in Southern Rhodesia, 1900 to 1933 (London: Pluto Press 1976).
45. For similar analyses in other regions of the world, see Spener, Clandestine Crossings; Khosravi, ‘Illegal’ Traveller.
46. Donnan and Wilson, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, 88.
