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