Border Jumping and Migration Control in Southern Africa. Francis Musoni

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ