Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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