Owing to the controversies surrounding this term, other scholars and the general public have resorted to the use of adjectives such as informal or irregular when talking about migrants who cross borders without following official channels. However, these terms also suggest that border crossings that do not follow legal or formal channels always take place in a disorderly manner. Furthermore, these terms imply that something is intrinsically wrong, undesirable, or abnormal about people who engage in such movements.14 In other circles, the same phenomenon is often referred to as undocumented migration, which reflects the condition of most migrants who cross borders without presenting or obtaining identity and travel documents at international border posts. However, many migrants classified as undocumented do have documents, except that “they just aren’t the right ones for where they are living and what they are doing.”15 Equally problematic are terms such as unauthorized and unpermitted, which are in popular use among scholars, journalists, migrants rights advocates, and policy makers. Border crossings that avoid official channels usually take place without official authorization; however, it is also quite common for border agents to facilitate such movements in return for monetary rewards and other kinds of favors.
In this book I use the term border jumping to refer to border crossings that avoid officially designated channels of movement from Zimbabwe to South Africa. Although this term also comes across as somewhat derogatory and thus controversial, I use it here without any negative connotations. While conducting research for this study in 2009 and 2010, I noticed that most border residents, migrant workers, cross-border traders, and other travelers I interacted with commonly used the term border jumpers to refer to themselves or their acquaintances who swam across the Limpopo River and jumped over the fence on the South African side of the border. Such people did not see anything pejorative in the use of this term. Given the livelihood challenges that Zimbabweans faced during the first decade of the twenty-first century, being able to evade official controls at the border was associated with a sense of defiance. There was something heroic about being a border jumper in this region. More important, border jumping is increasingly becoming a popular concept among other scholars of migration in Southern Africa.16
By using this contemporary, “vernacular” term, my objective is to understand multiple perspectives of the contestations that produced and sustained a historical phenomenon that I explore in this book. Unlike other terms, which give the impression that something is abnormal about border crossings that avoid official channels, border jumping makes it possible to simultaneously capture both the state’s concerns and the sentiments of nonstate actors who often challenge the legitimacy of borders and state-centered efforts of controlling movements between countries. In a similar fashion, terms such as clandestine crossings and illicit flows are also common among migration scholars. These terms could imply viewing movements from the state’s perspective while concurrently considering the views of the migrant workers, transnational traders, and other travelers who take pride in evading official measures of controlling cross-border mobility.17 However, they give the impression that border crossings that happen outside of official channels are hidden away from state authorities.
I also find border jumping the most appropriate term for exploring the changes and continuities in the nature of “illegal” border crossings that I explore in this book. In the first three chapters, I use this term to reference movements of people who left colonial Zimbabwe without identity documents and travel permits at a time when South African authorities did not require foreign Africans to produce such documents to enter the country. This was the case during the twenty years between the British conquest of Zimbabwe in 1890 and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and throughout much of the period before 1960. During much of that early period, Southern Rhodesian authorities deployed legal and quasilegal measures in an effort to restrict cross-Limpopo mobility. Their counterparts in South Africa leaned toward an open border policy by not actively seeking to restrict immigration from colonial Zimbabwe and other areas in the region.18 From Southern Rhodesia’s perspective, people who left the country during this period without travel permits did so in contravention of the law. For this reason, Southern Rhodesian state officials, business owners, and ordinary colonists used the term illegal migrants to refer to such people. However, those movements did not necessarily violate the Transvaal or South Africa’s immigration policies. Technically, this movement could be referred to as illegal emigration rather than illegal immigration.
The book also uses border jumping to reference border crossings that occurred when either country introduced laws to regulate cross-border mobility but did very little to enforce them. A good example is when the South African government announced the banning of so-called tropical workers (migrants from areas north of latitude 22° south) in 1913 but continued to welcome such people—before lifting the ban in 1932—if they entered the country through unofficial channels. To a large extent, this approach created a situation similar to what Michel Foucault called “tolerated illegality,” which prevailed under the Ancien Regime in France. Although this type of illegality often manifested itself in the form of privileges or exemptions reserved for certain individuals and groups, it was a multifaceted phenomenon. As Foucault puts it, at times tolerated illegality “took the form of massive general non-observance [of laws], which meant that for decades, sometimes for centuries, ordinances could be published and constantly renewed without ever being implemented . . . or quite simply the actual impossibility of imposing the law and apprehending offenders.”19 Sometimes policy contradictions and inconsistencies in the interpretation of laws would make it impossible to enforce laws, creating opportunities for border jumping to thrive. Despite passing laws that illegalized certain kinds of cross-border movements and activities, state officials sometimes saw these phenomena as permissible and even legitimate in some contexts.20 In South Africa, state officials put some barriers at the front entrance and deliberately left the back door open. They knew that some people entered the country through the back door but did very little to stop them. Consequently, I find it problematic to use illegal, clandestine, illicit, or similar terms to describe cross-border movements that did not conform to South African laws during this period.
I also use border jumping in reference to border crossings that openly defied South Africa’s concerted efforts to control immigration from its northern neighbors during the period from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Successive administrations in South Africa at that time actively sought to control people’s movements across the country’s borders using a combination of immigration laws and bilateral agreements with neighboring countries. In the same period, state authorities in colonial and postcolonial Zimbabwe deployed various measures in an effort to regulate cross-Limpopo mobility. This effort created a scenario in which the term illegal migration could appropriately describe any cross-Limpopo movements that avoided official channels of movements between the two countries. In recognition of this scenario, I occasionally use the term illegal when discussing border crossings that were clearly in violation of South Africa’s immigration laws during this period. However, I put this term in quotation marks to emphasize the specificity associated with its use in those situations. On rare occasions, I use the term clandestine, also in quotation marks, when the nature of movements described warrants the use of that term.
Furthermore, I use border jumping to explore the border-crossing experiences of various categories of mobile people (e.g., migrant workers, refugees, cross-border traders, and human smugglers) who,