Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ