Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

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 СКАЧАТЬ