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1 Colonial Statecraft and the Rise of Border Jumping

IN A STUDY of smuggling across the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, David Newbury argues that the shift from the idea of a frontier to a geopolitical boundary resulted in the illegalization of activities that had been considered perfectly reasonable and normal.¹ To emphasize this point, Newbury says that the nature of the social and economic activities in the region did not change, “but a profound shift in the political/ideological context [occurred] . . . so that the same activities of at least 200 years’ duration and undoubtedly longer than that are classified in a new manner by the state system.”² A similar scenario unfolded along the Zimbabwe–South Africa border following the British conquest of the Zimbabwean plateau in 1890. This development, which took place at the height of the European scramble for Africa, led to the reconfiguration of the Limpopo River as an interstate boundary and the beginning of state-centered controls of people’s movements between Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and the Transvaal (South Africa). As the region grappled with new ideas of borders and territoriality, people who crossed the Limpopo without following officially designated channels came to be regarded as illegal or clandestine migrants. This view was a huge departure from the previous scenario where communities astride the Limpopo moved back and forth across the river without fear of breaking any state-centered protocol.

Before the colonization of Zimbabwe, the Limpopo Valley had witnessed the development of sociocultural and economic networks that thrived on cross-Limpopo mobility. Among other factors, the existence of the Venda people on both sides of the river helped make cross-Limpopo connections stronger. For example, people from the Zoutpansberg area on the southern side of the Limpopo used to send messengers to the Marungudze (Malungudze) shrine in Beitbridge District to seek spiritual guidance in times of famines, wars, and other difficulties.³ It was also common (and still is) for the Venda people to marry across the Limpopo. As a result, some men moved permanently onto one side of the river, whereas others established multiple homes (with multiple wives and children) on both sides of the Limpopo. Some parents also used to send their adolescent sons and daughters across the Limpopo to attend initiation schools. Regardless of the side of the river where the initiation rites and classes took place, the initiates sometimes spent more than six weeks in the home area of the elders who presided over their training.⁴ In addition, people often moved their livestock back and forth across the Limpopo in search of pastures. Sometimes cattle herders had to migrate temporarily and spend several months in camps along the banks of the Limpopo regardless of which side of the river they came from. Whether people moved from one side of the Limpopo River to another as cattle herders, initiates, brides, bridegrooms, or mere visitors, the Venda did not think of themselves as intruders, foreigners, or even migrants because they regarded the region as unified geographically, socially, and politically.⁵

In ways similar to the Tonga, Nambya and other communities astride the Zambezi River—the focus of JoAnn McGregor’s Crossing the Zambezi—the Venda developed an intimate understanding of the Limpopo Valley and the river’s flowing patterns.⁶ In addition to acquiring the skills to build makeshift canoes to cross the Limpopo in flood, they had identified low-risk crossing points, which avoided parts of the river with crocodile-infested pools. In that respect, the Venda knew how and where to cross the Limpopo River during those times of the year when it was dangerous to cross (usually December to March). They also understood the behaviors of different kinds of animals that roamed the valley before construction of the Gonarezhou and Kruger national parks on the Zimbabwean and South African sides, respectively, of the border. As David Siyasongwe, a resident of Beitbridge, pointed out, “if they [the Venda] saw elephants from a distance they would throw dust in the air to determine the direction of the wind. Knowing that the elephant’s sense of smell is much stronger than its sense of sight, they would make sure to walk on the side where the wind was blowing.”⁷ In this way, the Limpopo, which the Venda referred to as Vhembe, was not a boundary per se but “just one of the perennial streams that flowed across the Venda territory on their way to the Indian Ocean.”⁸ With no state-based controls of mobility, the Limpopo’s flowing patterns determined when and how people moved back and forth across it.

In the same vein, the Afrikaners who occupied what became the Transvaal colony in northern South Africa in the 1850s viewed the Limpopo not as a marker of territorial limits of their state but as a river within a frontier zone. Commenting on this scenario, Stefanus Du Toit—an Afrikaner participant at the 1883–84 London Convention that restored the Transvaal’s autonomy after brief colonization by the British—wrote that although “the Transvaal bound itself to enter into no treaty with the natives to the east and west of the Republic without the sanction of England, the north was, for good reasons, left unmentioned.”⁹ In Du Toit’s thinking, which reflects that of many of his contemporaries, not using the Limpopo to define the northern boundary of the Transvaal meant that the Afrikaners had leeway to expand their territorial possessions and influence as far northward as they wanted. When large-scale gold mining operations began in the Witwatersrand area in the 1880s, the Transvaal officials did not see the need to restrict the entry of migrant workers from the Zimbabwean plateau, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, and other places. However, state officials actively sought to restrict the movements of people from the Transvaal to the Cape Colony and Natal, which were under the control of British settlers. Given that the British also tried to regulate people’s movements across the borders of the Cape Colony, it is no surprise that “illegal” migration became an issue of concern in pre-1890 South Africa.¹⁰ However, such concerns did not apply to movements across the Limpopo River, which were generally unregulated.

Colonial Conquest and the Rise of the Wage-Based Economy in Zimbabwe

Without the British South Africa Company (BSAC)-sponsored occupation of Zimbabwe on behalf of Britain in September 1890, the history of “illegal” migration across the country’s border with South Africa would have been different. Although previous centuries had witnessed other developments that stirred things up in the Limpopo Valley—such as the rise and fall of the Venda Kingdom and the settlement of the Shangani, Ndebele, Sotho, and other groups—the conquest of Zimbabwe significantly changed the character of the region.¹¹ The greatest impact came from policies implemented by the BSAC administration that disrupted livelihood strategies on the Zimbabwean plateau and changed the meaning of cross-Limpopo mobility. The company’s labor mobilization efforts, which introduced the idea of wage-based livelihoods across the territory, were particularly disruptive. Although some people, especially those from the country’s border districts, had started working in the Transvaal mines before the 1890s, labor migration was not a major livelihood strategy for Zimbabweans then. It was only after the BSAC sponsored occupation of the territory that wage-based migrations became common among Zimbabweans.¹²

As a profit-oriented entity, the BSAC directed the bulk of the colony’s capital resources toward the labor-intensive sectors of mining and agriculture. In that respect, most policies that the company administration implemented in the early years of colonial rule sought to create a reservoir of cheap labor. For example, the company authorities introduced a “native” taxation apparatus that required Africans to pay different kinds of taxes (e.g., hut tax, dog tax, poll tax) with cash. This requirement was intended to force Africans to look for employment in various sectors of the emerging colonial economy so they could earn the money to pay taxes. Whereas most Africans on the Zimbabwean plateau previously worked only to produce food for their subsistence, they now had to work to earn money. The BSAC-administered taxation was also “arbitrary and irregular, appearing more like the levy of a tribute than the collection of a civil tax, as marauding bands of Native Department levies despoiled villages and districts of their crops and livestock.”¹³ As a technology of governance, taxation not only raised revenue for the colonial administration but also dragged Africans into the wage-based capitalist economy on an unequal footing.

In addition to cash taxation, the early 1890s witnessed the introduction of identity documents and travel passes in Southern Rhodesia. This process began with the BSAC administration compiling what it called the Registration of Natives Regulations in 1895. Borrowing several aspects of the pass systems that existed in the Transvaal and other parts of South Africa, the 1895 regulations stipulated that every African male who entered a township or a mining area—both of which were dominated by white settlers—must be registered and in possession of a permit (or pass) authorizing him to be in those areas. The regulations also introduced two categories of passes: one for Africans seeking employment in industrial and mining towns and the other for those taking up jobs as domestic servants in white people’s homes anywhere in the colony. Along with these requirements, the administration appointed a “registrar of natives” with the responsibility of issuing passes to Africans as they moved from one part of the colony to another.¹⁴ In most modern states, identification documents serve to distinguish between citizens and noncitizens, whereas in early colonial Zimbabwe, they were mostly used to trace the movement of Africans. As Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar argues in her study of the chaos that emanated from the partition of India in 1947, these permits were not mere documents; they were bureaucratic tools for imposing limits on the colonized people.¹⁵

The introduction of the 1895 regulations coincided with the beginning of a territory-wide land dispossession and community restructuring process that gained momentum after the Ndebele–Shona revolts of 1896–97. As part of this process, the BSAC administration set aside large tracts of the colony’s prime lands for white settlers to use as farms and established “native reserves” mostly in areas with low rainfall and poor soils. With total disregard of preexisting community settlement patterns and ethnolinguistic boundaries, the colonists then forcibly relocated tens of thousands of Africans into the reserves. Land dispossession and forced relocations led not only to the loss of arable lands but also to overcrowding, overgrazing, and a general sense of insecurity among Africans in the reserves. It also helped to emasculate the local population to ensure their complete subjugation. More important, these policies created a pool of cheap labor for the emerging colonial economy.¹⁶ Without stable and dependable sources of livelihood, many Africans were forced to look for work on the mines, farms, and other industries in Southern Rhodesia.

It was also common for colonial officials to inflict pain on African people’s bodies to force them to sign up for jobs in different sectors of the economy. For example, while bragging about his use of coercion in dealing with Africans in 1895, the native commissioner for Hartley District wrote, “I am forcing the natives of this district to work sorely against their will.”¹⁷ As Harry Thomson noted in 1898, this meant flogging Africans to make sure they went out to work. In this regard, Thomson wrote, “I was told that if a boy will not work, or tries to run away, the usual thing is to take him to the native commissioner, and have him given twenty-five, and I found that the word ‘twenty five’ said in English to any of the boys was sufficient to make them grin in a sickly way—they quite understood what it meant.”¹⁸

In an attempt to supplement local supplies of labor, which kept fluctuating for the larger part of the first and second decades of colonial rule, Southern Rhodesian authorities made arrangements to import foreign workers. Like their counterparts in the Transvaal, Natal, and other parts of South Africa, colonial officials intended to import indentured workers from India and China. However, negative stereotypes of Indians, deriving mostly from the European–Indian interactions in other parts of the world, stirred an anti-Indian attitude among white settlers in Southern Rhodesia and led to the discontinuance of the arrangements.¹⁹ Another arrangement meant to facilitate the importation of Arabs, Shamis, and Somali workers from Djibouti to Southern Rhodesia was also implemented but only briefly because it failed to achieve desired results. Ultimately, Southern Rhodesia turned to its neighboring territories, particularly Nyasaland (Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia), and Mozambique. However, many early migrant workers from these areas did not stay long in Southern Rhodesia, which they considered a temporary stopover on their way to better-paying jobs in South Africa.²⁰

Given that cross-Limpopo mobility had existed for centuries prior to 1890, it might appear unfair to blame the British occupation of Zimbabwe for the prevalence of border jumping across the country’s border with South Africa. However, the point I am making in this chapter and throughout the entire book is that the imposition of colonial rule in Zimbabwe changed the political, economic, and ideological context in which cross-Limpopo mobility took place. Although the Venda, Sotho, Ndebele, and other groups of people in Zimbabwe’s border districts continued to visit their relatives across the river, which had become a colonial boundary, they did so under different conditions. Because the Limpopo was no longer just another river, the act of crossing it no longer meant the same thing. In addition, the imposition of new demands on life that came with the introduction of a cash-based economy induced new forms of mobility across the Limpopo. In this respect, people used cross-Limpopo mobility in a bid to escape taxation, poverty, overcrowding, or other conditions of insecurity in the native reserves.²¹

The Beginning of State-Centered Restrictions of Cross-Limpopo Mobility

In what became the first major state-based attempt to stop Zimbabweans from moving to South Africa or to any other country, the BSAC administration introduced the Natives Employment Ordinance in 1899. As the president of the Legislative Council pointed out during the Second Reading of the ordinance, the objective was to “meet the representations which have been addressed to the Administration as to the necessity of controlling and regulating the employment of natives, especially in regard to those natives induced to leave Rhodesia.”²² Whereas the 1895 regulations focused on the control of African workers’ movements within the colony, this ordinance targeted those who intended to seek employment elsewhere. Given that South African mines had emerged as the major employers of migrant workers from Southern Rhodesia and other territories in the region, there is no doubt that the ordinance was meant to control cross-Limpopo mobility. It is also very likely that the “representations” that the president of the Legislative Council referred to came from white settlers who owned mines and commercial farms where demand for cheap labor rose steeply during the first decade of colonial rule.²³ Over the years, employers’ organizations became major players in the politics of migration control in Southern Rhodesia and South Africa.

A key provision of this piece of legislation was that it required every person working as a labor agent in Southern Rhodesia to register and obtain a license and to provide a security deposit and keep the chief native commissioner’s office informed about his operations. While the annual cost of a license to recruit people for work within the colony was set at £1, labor agents who wanted to recruit workers for employment outside Southern Rhodesia were required to pay £50 annually. As for a security deposit, a person applying for a permit to recruit Africans for the local employers had to pay £100, and those intending to engage workers for employment outside the territory paid £250.²⁴ Just by looking at the differences between these figures, one can tell that the officials wanted to encourage the recruiting of labor for local employers while making it hard for labor agents to send workers out of the colony. The ordinance also gave the Native Affairs Department officials, especially the native commissioners, the authority to apprehend labor agents who recruited people for work in South Africa without the proper licenses. Thus, in addition to laying out the procedures and requirements for employment of Africans within the colony, the Natives Employment Ordinance discouraged the recruitment of locals for work outside Southern Rhodesia. In this way, the ordinance marked the beginning of regulatory frameworks that fueled border jumping across the Zimbabwe–South Africa border.

Yielding to pressure from white settlers who advocated for more stringent controls of Africans’ mobility, Southern Rhodesia’s Legislative Council introduced the Natives Pass Ordinance in 1902. This legislation did not simply modify previous “native regulations” but caused an overhaul of the colony’s native administration system. During the Second Reading of this ordinance in the Legislative Assembly, the attorney general argued that the 1902 pass law was “designed not only to meet the wishes and wants of those interested in the native labour—masters and employers of all kinds, but it was also in the interests of the good governance and proper control of the natives themselves.”²⁵ This statement shows how the interests of business owners began driving Southern Rhodesia’s policies toward the local people just as the colonial state was evolving. This outcome is not surprising, given that this colony was founded and administered by a for-profit company. However, such an approach fueled the tension between the state and the local people, whose lives became more difficult following the introduction of this ordinance.

The 1902 law required every male African aged fourteen years and older to obtain a registration certificate containing the details of his name, height, and any visible marks as well as the identities of his ethnic group, chief, headman, and district of residence. Each certificate had a unique identity number assigned to the holder. Although it was considered lawful for such people to move around the districts in which they resided without a permit, the ordinance required them to carry their registration certificates and be prepared to produce them at any given time if asked to do so by state officials.²⁶ The Natives Pass Ordinance also required African chiefs and village heads, the majority of whom had been coopted as salaried civil servants, to ensure that “all male natives of the age of fourteen years and upwards living or being within their tribal districts are properly registered.”²⁷ Furthermore, it became mandatory for male Africans to obtain traveling passes (also known as permits of removal) from pass officers in their districts every time they traveled to other areas. Section 8(1) of the Natives Pass Ordinance says, “Any native desiring to remove from the district in which he shall have been registered to any other district shall before removal obtain a travelling pass in the prescribed form which he shall produce at the proper Pass Office in such last-mentioned district, together with his certificate of registration in order that he may be properly registered in such district.”²⁸

If the purpose of leaving one’s district of habitual residence was to look for employment, the ordinance required that he obtain “a pass to seek work, in the prescribed form which shall be of force for a period not exceeding twenty-one days. Should the Native fail to find work within the period mentioned in his pass he shall proceed to the nearest Pass Office and may obtain an extension for a period not exceeding fourteen days, which shall be noted upon the pass.”²⁹

It was also a requirement that the pass contain the holder’s identity number, as indicated on his registration certificate. As a result, the issuing of identity documents helped with the mobilization of labor and the collection of taxes while taking away African people’s anonymity and the power and freedom that came with it. The 1895 regulations required the registration and identification of only those Africans entering designated towns and labor areas, whereas under the 1902 law, every male “adult” had to obtain a certificate of registration. In a way that speaks to “the creation of tribalism” thesis, which Terence Ranger and others have debated extensively.³⁰ Identity documents also sought to tie different groups of Africans to specific geographical areas in colonial Zimbabwe.

The 1902 law also reflected the BSAC administration’s desire to control the mobility of migrant workers brought into Southern Rhodesia from Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, and Mozambique. Although the migrants benefited from transportation and food handouts provided by the Rhodesia Labor Bureau, which brought them into the colony, many such migrants left their jobs and the colony (often without notice) as soon as they found an opportunity to proceed to South Africa.³¹ In an attempt to stop “foreign natives” from leaving the colony willy-nilly, section 3(1) of the 1902 ordinance provided for the issuance of registration certificates as well as traveling passes and passes to seek work to “any native entering the Territory from any country in which no provision exists for the granting of passes.” It also stipulated that “on leaving the territory such native shall deliver up to the Pass Officer, who issues him a travelling pass for that purpose, his certificate of registration.”³² Regarding migrants who entered Southern Rhodesia in possession of identity documents or passes from other countries, the ordinance required such documents to be endorsed, without delay, by the magistrate or other official who would then issue traveling passes or passes to seek work to the concerned individuals. In so doing, Southern Rhodesian officials made it clear that they preferred to shut the colony’s southern border to Africans intending to move to the Transvaal while leaving the northern and eastern borders with Northern Rhodesia and Portuguese East Africa open to let in migrant workers.

In further attempts to tighten the control of Africans’ mobility, the 1902 ordinance made it mandatory for employers to keep passes of their African workers for the duration of the service contract. At the expiry of employment contracts, employers had to endorse the pass by signing it before returning it to its holder. If a discharged worker wanted to look for another job, he had to take his signed-off pass to the nearest pass office and obtain a traveling pass and a pass to seek work. Failure to observe any stipulations of the pass law attracted various amounts of fines and prison terms for African workers and employers alike. In this respect, section 26(1) of the ordinance states that “any native who, while under contract of service to one employer, shall knowingly enter the service of another employer, shall on conviction, be liable to a fine not exceeding ten pounds, and in default of payment to imprisonment, with or without hard labour, for a term not exceeding three months.”³³ Pertaining to employers, the ordinance imposed a fine of up to £50 or prison terms not exceeding six months in cases involving a misdemeanor such as knowingly employing an African bound by a contract of service to another employer, withholding a pass or certificate of registration of any person entitled to it, or destroying or tampering with any pass or certificate of service belonging to an African.³⁴

Over the next few years, the Legislative Council amended the ordinance to address some inadequacies that had emerged. For example, through the 1905 Natives Pass Amendment Ordinance, Southern Rhodesia made it a punishable offence for Africans to erase, alter, or destroy a pass.³⁵ A year later the Natives Pass Further Amendment Ordinance (1906) was issued, and a 1909 review of the pass laws revealed that a large section of the white community desired to see a much tighter native pass system. Although several native commissioners urged the government to require employers to closely monitor African workers to avoid desertions that had become a major issue of concern, one went further, arguing that “some system of finger prints must be enforced if it is desired to really possess an effective Pass Law.”³⁶ In calling for such measures, the colonists wanted to ensure better state control of Africans’ mobility within the colony as well as movements from Southern Rhodesia to South Africa. Given that Southern Rhodesian officials were, at the time, considering the use of fingerprints to weed out “undesirable” and “prohibited” immigrants from India, such a recommendation probably resonated with the majority of British settlers in the colony.³⁷

Along with enforcing the pass laws in the colony, the BSAC administration instructed railway staff to refuse tickets to Africans traveling to South Africa without permission to leave the territory. Although this requirement may sound familiar and logical in today’s world, where international transporters are required to check travelers’ identity documents before boarding a plane, bus, train, or ship, such a policy presented several challenges for people who were not used to carrying identity documents all the time. Furthermore, Southern Rhodesian officials established rudimentary checkpoints at places such as Liebig’s Drift and Main Drift along the Limpopo River and occasionally deployed police patrol units that apprehended people trying to cross the border without passes.³⁸ In implementing such measures, colonial officials in Southern Rhodesia sought to assert the state’s position as the “monopoly of the legitimate means of movement” and to impose a new kind of (dis)order based on the strict control of the colonized people’s mobility.³⁹ As was the case at the border between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the imposition of state-centered instruments of migration control changed the meaning of cross-Limpopo mobility.⁴⁰ Furthermore, state-based controls of Africans’ movements had the effect of classifying cross-Limpopo mobility into some movements that were legalized and others that were illegalized.

It Takes Two to Tango: The Transvaal’s Open Border Policy

In contrast to their northern neighbors who zealously embraced the colonial border and fervently sought to enforce it, the Transvaal authorities did very little to control cross-Limpopo mobility before the formation of the Union of South Africa. Owing to the demand for cheap labor at the Witwatersrand mines, which greatly increased during the 1890s and after the South African war of 1899–1902, the Transvaal Parliament (the Volksraad) did not seek to prohibit the influx of Africans from the Zimbabwean plateau and other areas north of the Limpopo River. Instead, it supported several initiatives that the Transvaal Chamber of Mines⁴¹ put in place with the view to meeting the Witwatersrand (Rand) mines’ demands for workers. In this respect, the Kruger administration signed a labor agreement with the Portuguese colonial officials in Mozambique in 1896. Through this agreement, which came to be known as the First Mozambican Convention, the Rand mines received permission to recruit workers from Mozambique’s southern districts, which were believed to be in the same climatic region as the Transvaal.⁴² In return, the Transvaal officials pledged to help the Portuguese officials in Mozambique by making sure that migrants paid their annual taxes when they were due and returned home at the expiry of their contracts. In that respect, the agreement put in place a framework similar to the Bracero Program, an arrangement that allowed the United States to import temporary workers from Mexico between 1942 and 1964.⁴³

The Transvaal officials also supported the mining companies when they set up the Rand Native Labour Association (RNLA) in 1897 to coordinate their labor mobilization efforts. This organization followed the establishment of the chamber’s Native Labor Department in 1893, which laid the groundwork for a regional labor recruitment strategy. In 1900, the chamber transformed the RNLA and renamed it the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) with the intention of improving the methods of labor recruitment and reducing “indiscriminate competition, touting and traffic in Natives which [had] in the past existed amongst Mining Companies” on the Witwatersrand.⁴⁴ Over the years, the WNLA would become a major player in the politics of labor and mobility across the Zimbabwe–South Africa border and in Southern Africa more generally.

With the Transvaal government backing the efforts to mobilize regional labor for the Rand mines on one hand and the Southern Rhodesian government supporting the Rhodesia Chamber of Mines’ competing interests on the other, it became difficult for the two territories to come up with a joint strategy of controlling cross-Limpopo mobility. In an attempt to minimize competition over the Mozambican labor, which had become crucial for the success of mining businesses in both territories, the two chambers of mines signed a memorandum of understanding in 1900. In part, the agreement required the Rhodesia Native Labour Bureau (RNLB), which acted on behalf of the Rhodesia Chamber of Mines, to withdraw its labor recruiters from Mozambique and employ only Africans from that territory through the help of the WNLA. In return, the Transvaal Chamber of Mines agreed to deliver to their Rhodesian counterparts 12.5 percent of labor recruited in Mozambique and to stop WNLA agents from recruiting in Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland.⁴⁵ Unlike the 1896 labor agreement between the Transvaal government and Portuguese officials in Mozambique, this deal did not involve government representatives from either territory. It also did not last long.

In theory, the arrangement that the Transvaal Chamber of Mines signed with its Southern Rhodesia counterpart lasted for just about a year, but in practice it suffered a stillbirth because neither party took it seriously. The RNLB continued to recruit from Mozambique while the WNLA sent its agents to recruit in the southern districts of Southern Rhodesia as well as in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In a further attempt to strike a deal, the Transvaal Chamber of Mines made a proposal for the establishment of a joint agency to recruit labor from north of the Zambezi River and distribute it to mining companies in both territories, but that plan also did not materialize.⁴⁶ Competition for regional labor supplies prevented government officials and business owners in Southern Rhodesia from working with their counterparts in the Transvaal to come up with a durable agreement that could have helped control people’s movements across the Limpopo River boundary.

In another development that shows the two territories had different perceptions about the border, the Transvaal officials asked their Southern Rhodesian counterparts not to obstruct the mobility of Africans from other territories who passed through the Zimbabwean plateau on their way to South Africa. In making the request, which coincided with debates surrounding the 1902 Natives Pass Ordinance in Southern Rhodesia, the Transvaal authorities did not want their neighbors to require people in transit to obtain traveling passes if they possessed passes from their territories of origin. In line with that position, the Transvaal government backed the Rand mines’ calls for the RNLB to stop recruiting in southern Mozambique. As such, the prime minister’s office released a statement stressing that as long as the Southern Rhodesian administration denied the Transvaal companies the permission to recruit from the Zimbabwe plateau, the Transvaal government would not support the RNLB’s interests in Mozambique. The Transvaal officials further argued that “the introduction of a competing labour agency in the districts south of Latitude 22° was never contemplated, and would be detrimental to the interests of the Transvaal Mines.”⁴⁷

Despite the competition and antagonism between the two territories, the WNLA made further attempts to find a working arrangement on the issue by asking the Salisbury Municipality for space to build a compound to accommodate migrant workers from Mozambique, who passed by Southern Rhodesia on their way to the Rand. The news about this proposal triggered some negative responses from various sectors of the white settler community in Southern Rhodesia. On August 17, 1907, for example, representatives of the Rhodesia Chamber of Mines, the Individual Workers and Distributors Association, the Rhodesian Landowners and Farmers Association, the Rhodesia Agricultural Union, and the RNLB met with some members of the Legislative Council under the auspices of what came to be known as the Native Labor Conference to chart the way forward. Among other things, the conference resolved to urge the Southern Rhodesian administration to turn down the WNLA’s request “to bring gangs of natives from territories beyond the Zambesi through Rhodesia to the Rand,” arguing that the government should prohibit the WNLA’s recruits from passing through the Zimbabwean plateau.⁴⁸

In a letter to the editor of the Rhodesia Herald, another resident of Salisbury encouraged the municipality to turn down the request on the ground that Southern Rhodesian mine owners and farmers were concerned that the arrangement would encourage local “natives” to seek employment in South Africa. The concerned resident rhetorically asked, “Has our Rhodesian Administration given any definite assurance as to their intention to restrict by all means in their power the migration of boys from Rhodesian territory to the Rand?”⁴⁹ As reflected in this individual’s letter, as well as in the Native Labor Conference’s resolutions, access to regional labor supplies was one of the major factors that shaped relations between the Transvaal and Southern Rhodesia from the onset of British colonial rule in the latter. Inevitably, this issue significantly influenced the two territories’ border enforcement strategies as well as travelers’ experiences of crossing what once was merely a river in the Venda territory.

When negotiations for the amalgamation of the Transvaal, the Cape Colony, Natal, and the Orange Free State into the Union of South Africa reached an advanced stage—a few years before the BSAC’s permit to run the affairs of Zimbabwe on behalf of Britain was scheduled to expire in 1914—the Southern Rhodesian Legislative Council extensively debated the idea of merging the colony into a united South Africa. During those debates, which went on for several months between 1908 and 1909, the labor question emerged as a key point of disagreement. As one legislator pointed out, the people who opposed the idea of joining the Union of South Africa feared that “the native labour of Rhodesia might be induced to go out of this country south, which would mean the ruin of both the mining and the farming industries here.”⁵⁰ Contrary to this position, supporters of the merge with South Africa argued that the move would actually reduce competition for labor between the two territories and ultimately benefit Southern Rhodesian companies, which had fewer financial resources than their counterparts in the Transvaal. On this issue, Herbert T. Longden, who represented Midlands District, said “a mine in Rhodesia would have the same privileges in regard to recruiting and distributing labour as a mine on the Rand. . . . The danger threatening their labour supply would come, not if they entered the Union, but if they remained outside.”⁵¹ Stressing the same point, Western District representative Robert A. Fletcher argued that if Southern Rhodesia joined South Africa, employers “would have every right to go to the Union Parliament and ask for the protection of their native labour, as being a part of South Africa.”⁵² When a territory-wide referendum on this issue eventually took place in 1922, the majority of Rhodesians voted for the “responsible government” as opposed to merging with South Africa. This type of dominion status allowed the settlers to run much of their own affairs, with the British government playing a supervisory role, especially in matters concerning the administration of Africans.

Although it is difficult to speculate on what could have happened if Southern Rhodesia joined the Union of South Africa in 1910, what is clear is that competition for African labor prevented the two neighboring territories from adopting joint strategies for managing cross-Limpopo mobility. Yielding to pressure from mining companies on opposite sides of the border, policy makers in Southern Rhodesia and the Transvaal shared opposing views of the border and its significance to nation-state building. Whereas Southern Rhodesian officials saw the control of Africans’ mobility across the Limpopo as a necessary measure in preventing loss of labor and in safeguarding the colony’s territorial sovereignty, their counterparts in the Transvaal viewed the same measures as unwarranted obstruction of the free movement of people in the region. Because the Rand mines were richer and better positioned to pay higher wages, the Transvaal officials preferred to not obstruct migrant workers’ movements across the Limpopo. On their part, Africans from communities astride the border and others from areas far from it welcomed the lack of cooperation and coordination between policy makers in these territories as an opportunity to continue traveling back and forth across the Limpopo. All they needed to do was to figure out strategies for evading Southern Rhodesia’s pass laws and other measures of migration control.

Through the Cracks: The Rise of Border Jumping from Zimbabwe to South Africa

In describing the European partition of Africa as a “political surgery” that split cultural communities into two or more competing entities, Anthony I. Asiwaju has argued that despite being so divided, “partitioned Africans have tended in their normal activities to ignore the boundaries as dividing lines and to carry on social relations across them more or less as in the days before Partition.”⁵³ This observation brings out two ideas that feature in most discussions of “illegal” border crossings in Africa. The first is that people from communities that were divided by colonial borders challenged the legitimacy of colonial states by continuing with activities that straddled the newly imposed boundaries. This argument, which echoes broader ideas about resistance to colonial conquest in Africa, resonates with James C. Scott’s conceptualization of peasant struggles in Malaysian history, in which he deployed the notion of “weapons of the weak.”⁵⁴ Put differently, this idea suggests that the continuation of prohibited (precolonial) patterns of mobility and other activities that crossed colonial boundaries was a form of subaltern agency or activism against colonial rule. The second point that Asiwaju’s observation brings out is that it was easy for Africans to ignore colonial borders because they were largely porous, unguarded, and sometimes not even marked on the ground.⁵⁵

Both ideas help greatly in understanding how border jumping across the Zimbabwe–South Africa border emerged in the 1890s. Given that the conquest of the Zimbabwean plateau came on the backdrop of centuries of cross-Limpopo mobility, the imposition of the colonial boundary and the beginning of state-based controls of mobility produced new kinds of struggles and illegalized activities in the region. Although the Venda and other communities in Beitbridge did not wage a military struggle against the colonists as the Ndebele did in 1893, they sought ways of continuing with cross-Limpopo mobility because such movements were crucial in maintaining their cultures and means of livelihood. As Tshabeni Ndou pointed out in an interview I had with him, the Venda people “continued to view the Limpopo as a river within their territory because they continued to water their cattle there and to cross it regularly using footpaths and crossing points that had been in use for generations.”⁵⁶ This was possible because Southern Rhodesian authorities did not have enough personnel and financial resources to monitor movements across the entire length of the boundary. Although people traveling in horse- and ox-drawn carts (mostly white settlers) crossed the border at the rudimentary checkpoints that the BSAC administration had established, many Africans traveled on foot and crossed at various points, using what Alan H. Jeeves and Jonathan Crush call “secret foot paths” for the larger part of the year when the Limpopo was dry.⁵⁷

Furthermore, there were no native commissioners’ offices in Beitbridge district until the 1930s. As such, expecting people who resided only a kilometer or so away from the Limpopo to travel several kilometers to obtain passes every time they wanted to cross the river created the incentive for noncompliance. Commenting on a similar scenario in the West African context, Paul Nugent has argued that the colonists’ efforts to control precolonial trading activities following the demarcation of the Gold Coast–Togo boundary in the 1880s “caused intense annoyance on the part of traders and chiefs alike.”⁵⁸ In addition to the desire to keep preexisting ties with relatives across the Limpopo, some border people moved to the Transvaal hoping to work and raise money to pay taxes in Southern Rhodesia, but others crossed the border to escape taxation. With their knowledge of the landscape, it was relatively easy for the Venda people to evade official measures of controlling mobility across the border.⁵⁹

Away from the border districts, pass laws were a huge inconvenience to people who wanted to maintain sociocultural ties with kith and kin across the boundaries of “native” districts. Commenting on this issue, the native commissioner for Umtali district, along Southern Rhodesia’s eastern border with Mozambique, wrote, “The natives living in Inyanga district are under chief Umtasa and are of the same tribe as those in Umtali district, and yet to visit one another they must travel 40 miles to Inyanga to take out a pass, this means that a native living on the Nyatande River would, by the time he reached his home from Umtali have travelled some 120 miles, whereas under ordinary circumstances it should have been a journey of 40 miles only.”⁶⁰ In this respect, Southern Rhodesia’s pass laws, together with cash taxation, land alienation, low wages, and poor work conditions at the emerging mines and farms, made life difficult for the colonized people.

Instead of attending to African people’s complaints about various aspects of the colonial system, the administration focused on finding ways to tighten pass laws and punish offenders. Developments such as the doubling of hut tax between 1903 and 1907—a period when wages and direct expenditure toward the provision of accommodation, medical facilities, and food in the mining industry significantly declined—did not help the officials’ efforts to enforce pass laws. Commenting on the state of affairs in the mining industry in 1907, one health inspector argued that the conditions under which African workers lived in most mine compounds were “gloomy and comfortless,” noting, “a damp floor is not the healthiest resting place for a man who has done a good day’s work . . . but it is the only bed the majority get as a rule. . . . A few sleep on rough structures erected by themselves.”⁶¹ Whereas some people complied with the new order of things, others devised subtle and not-so-subtle strategies to challenge state-centered efforts to control mobility within the colony and across the Limpopo River.

As Southern Rhodesia’s Chief Secretary observed in 1901, some people who obtained “town passes” under the auspices of the 1895 Natives Registration Regulations loaned or sold them when they did not need to travel.⁶² Despite lacking previous experiences with identity documents of the kind that the colonists introduced, Africans took advantage of the fact that the concerned passes did not include the photos or fingerprints of the individuals to whom they were originally issued. As such, being able to exchange passes allowed people who did not have permission to enter certain spaces to do so clandestinely. It also helped those who did not particularly like the working conditions in one place or another to simply walk away without their employer’s permission. In this respect, desertion emerged as the most common strategy that African workers used to reclaim freedom of movement, which the colonists intended to take away from them. By engaging in such activities, the colonized people’s objective was not to do away with colonial rule (although they might have wanted to) but to create alternative spaces for themselves as the colonized people.

With the introduction of Southern Rhodesia’s 1902 Natives Pass Ordinance, border jumping gathered momentum within the territory (across district boundaries) and across the border with the Transvaal. Within the first few years of the implementation of this ordinance, Southern Rhodesia’s attorney general revealed that the number of Africans imprisoned for contravening the pass laws had risen dramatically. While pushing for the amendment of the Natives Pass Ordinance in 1905, the attorney general said that “a number of boys after getting into difficulty, had mutilated their passes, and had torn or erased many important particulars, such as description of previous wages.”⁶³ Because the pass system tied Africans to specific areas in the colony, some people destroyed or discarded their original passes as soon as they entered a new area and then applied for new ones using different names. This strategy was particularly common among migrant workers from Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique who destroyed the documents that identified them as “foreign natives” and proceeded to obtain new ones purporting to be locals. Being in possession of documents that identified them as “Rhodesian natives” provided them with better chances of obtaining passes to visit the border districts where they worked while waiting for opportunities to sneak out and proceed to South Africa.⁶⁴

In a development that shows how the increase in border jumping had become an issue of concern to colonial authorities, the representative for Southern Rhodesia’s Western District (Gordon Forbes) brought this issue up for discussion in the Legislative Council in 1907. He asked if the administration knew that “numbers of natives have left Victoria District for the Transvaal not in possession of proper passes” and demanded to know “what, if any, steps have been taken to enforce compliance with the law on part of such natives, and to prevent such exodus in future.” In response to his question, the treasurer said, “It is known that a certain number do leave the territory. . . . It has not been found possible to establish stations in the low country along the Limpopo, in the south-east of the territory, from which it is believed that the bulk of these natives proceed.”⁶⁵ The 1909 review of the pass system, which we discussed earlier, also revealed that the number of Africans who left the territory without permits was on the increase. However, Southern Rhodesian officials’ efforts to address this situation stirred the contestations that promoted border jumping from Zimbabwe to South Africa.

Border Enforcement and the Rise of Human Smugglers along the Limpopo

With the beginning of state-centered controls of people’s movements across the Limpopo River, human smuggling also emerged as a salient feature of the “informal” economy of the Zimbabwe–South Africa border. Although other factors might have contributed to the rise of this phenomenon, Southern Rhodesian authorities’ imposition of restrictions on labor recruitment using the Natives Employment Ordinance of 1899 was probably the major producer of human smugglers. This ordinance not only made a distinction between recruiting for the local and foreign markets but also created the incentive for unlicensed recruiting by requiring labor agents to pay more than twice as much for permits to recruit workers for other territories as they would for permits to recruit for local employment. This requirement inadvertently encouraged some labor agents to recruit workers in Southern Rhodesia and sent them to the Transvaal without obtaining the necessary permissions and licenses. As the chief secretary of the BSAC administration noted while supporting the proposed amendments of the Native Employment Ordinance in 1907, “the government was concerned about labour agents who came up from the Transvaal and recruited labour on the Southern Rhodesia side of the border, and recruited Portuguese natives coming across into the Southern Rhodesia territory without a license.”⁶⁶ Although some of these agents were independent and recruited workers on behalf of different organizations and employers, others were employees of the WNLA. It was also common for recruiters who were licensed to operate in Southern Rhodesia to transport migrant workers to the Transvaal without following official channels, thereby breaching the terms and conditions of their licenses. As such, the first decade of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of unlicensed recruiting and human smuggling across the Limpopo River.⁶⁷ As the contestation over the control of cross-Limpopo mobility evolved over the period that I cover in this book, this phenomenon also evolved, leading to the rise of the maguma-guma (human smugglers) in the mid-1990s.

People from communities astride the border did not need much assistance with crossing the Limpopo and finding work in the Transvaal; however, long-distance migrants who had very little knowledge about the Limpopo Valley relied on labor recruiters. Given that Beitbridge district, on the Zimbabwean side of the border, was barely served by any form of public transport before the construction of the cross-Limpopo bridge that became operational in the early 1930s, such people had two ways of getting to the Transvaal. One was to use the train that plied the Bulawayo-Mafeking (Botswana) route, disembarking at the Southern Rhodesia–Botswana border and then walking to the Limpopo River. The other was to walk from various departure points to the Transvaal, following footpaths and routes that led to the Limpopo River. Regardless of the method they used, such people often arrived in the border area without much knowledge about how to cross the Limpopo and where to go after crossing it. It was mostly people in this situation who ended up engaging labor recruiters roaming around areas adjacent to the Limpopo River.⁶⁸

By saying that migrants sought the assistance of smugglers who helped them to dodge the Southern Rhodesian authorities’ measures of controlling cross-Limpopo mobility, I am by no means suggesting that the interactions between these two groups always happened in a pleasant and business-like environment. Labor recruiters often “used all sorts of tricks and ploys,” to force work-seeking migrants to sign up with them.⁶⁹ One strategy they used was to establish makeshift camps in the border zone, from which they deployed African “touts” and “runners” along the routes that migrants used as they traveled between the two territories. In addition to intercepting migrants already en route to the Transvaal, labor recruiters sometimes paid bribes to village leaders to gain access into the African communities where they met potential clients. On entering African communities, recruiters often used cash advances, clothes, and food handouts to lure potential workers to sign up for work contracts and leave their villages.⁷⁰ Given the challenges that cash taxation, land alienation, and other colonial policies caused among the African communities in Southern Rhodesia, it is not surprising that some people embraced labor recruiters, who they regarded as helpers rather than the exploiters that they were.

As the demand for labor in the Transvaal grew rapidly in the first decade of the twentieth century—when Southern Rhodesian authorities increased controls of cross-Limpopo mobility—the triangular space at the intersection of the Southern Rhodesia–Mozambique–Transvaal borders became a hive of activities associated with labor recruitment and smuggling. This area, then known as the Pafuri Triangle, was in a remote and rugged terrain infested with the tsetse fly and malarial mosquitoes. Emphasizing how difficult it was to get to Pafuri, Thomas V. Bulpin says, “The journey to this spot was as arduous as it was perilous, passing through a land tormented by the devils of heat and thirst where constant danger lurked around every corner, and only the most adventuresome or foolish attempted it.”⁷¹ Given that Southern Rhodesia did not have any administrative post in the Beitbridge area, the nearest place where state officials were located was the police station at Sibasa in the northern Transvaal, more than a hundred miles away.

Because the Transvaal government was not much invested in the control of cross-Limpopo mobility, the Sibasa police station served little purpose. As such, there was barely any presence of law enforcement agents at Pafuri during much of the first decade of the twentieth century. Taking advantage of the general absence of state functionaries in the Pafuri Triangle, numerous individuals with criminal records in the Transvaal sought to escape the law by camping in this place. Consequently, the Pafuri Triangle also became known as “Crooks’ Corner.”⁷²

While some fugitives at Pafuri survived on hunting elephants and other wild animals in the Limpopo Valley, others joined the rank and file of unlicensed recruiters who also camped at Crooks’ Corner. As Martin J. Murray put it, most of the campers at Crooks’ Corner were “unscrupulous fortune-hunters specialising in smuggling a particular kind of contraband: African labour.”⁷³ Being at the intersection of three different territories, this location also made it easier for the residents of Pafuri to play hide and seek with the police whenever the latter visited the area in pursuit of one individual or another. Boasting about how they used the beacon at the intersection of the three territories’ borders to avoid arrest, a former labor recruiter, who spent several years at Crooks’ Corner, said, “Whoever comes for you, you can always be on the other side in someone else’s territory; and if they all come at once, you can always sit on the beacon top and let them fight over who is to pinch you.”⁷⁴ Migrants originating from areas far from the border, such as Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, and other parts of Southern Rhodesia, also went to Crooks’ Corner, where they linked up with labor recruiters ready to take them to potential employers in the Transvaal. It was also common for recruiters at Crooks’ Corner to dispatch touts to communities adjacent the Limpopo River to scout for potential workers. That the WNLA stationed some of its labor agents at Crooks’ Corner shows not only the extent to which this place had become an important part of the region’s market-oriented economies but also the ways in which border jumping blurred the distinction between formal- and informal-sector activities in Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Sometime in 1910 two European adventurers, Alec Thompson and William Pye, built a store “atop a low, 500-feet high ridge, which formed a sort of topographical backbone to the wild wedge of land” between the three territories.⁷⁵ In addition to selling food, clothes, malaria drugs (mostly quinine), and whisky, Pye and Thompson, like the rest of the campers at this place, also functioned as labor recruiters. They often engaged work-seekers who arrived at the store in starving conditions and passed them along to the Transvaal mine owners. In that respect, the pair used their store as a clearinghouse or auction floor for work-seeking migrants who ate, rested, obtained new clothes, and signed engagement contracts at Crooks’ Corner before proceeding to different places in the Transvaal and beyond.⁷⁶ This effectively made the Pafuri Triangle the headquarters of labor pirates who promoted border jumping from Zimbabwe to South Africa in the early twentieth century.

The significance of Crooks’ Corner in this history is not simply that it quickly became the most known place where border jumpers met human smugglers. This place also became the center of migration-related violence within a few years of the British colonization of Zimbabwe. As labor recruiters sought to maximize returns in this environment, where lawlessness prevailed, some of them deployed violent methods. This often involved the use of guns to intercept border jumpers and force them to sign contracts that directed them to specific employers. It was also common for recruiters to fight over and rob each other of the migrants they would have mobilized. Referring to recruiters’ violent behavior, Bulpin wrote, “The bushrangers were as tough a crowd as any bully bosun. They asked no quarter from life, and gave none.”⁷⁷

By the time the Transvaal merged with the Orange Free State, Natal, and the Cape Colony, forming the Union of South Africa in May 1910, border jumping had emerged a defining feature of the Transvaal–Southern Rhodesia border. What previously was simply a river in a frontier zone had become a geopolitical and juridical boundary. As was the case with the US–Mexico border, which split culturally homogenous groups into two sovereign states, the South Africa–Zimbabwe border tore communities asunder.⁷⁸