‘I’m tired of this,” remarked a South African National Defence Force (SANDF) soldier offloading a small group of glum-looking immigrants at the Musina police station, a ramshackle collection of squat buildings in South Africa’s most northerly outpost.
It was not yet mid-morning and the soldier’s company had arrested yet another batch of desperate Zimbabweans illegally crossing the nearby Limpopo river. “Night and day, all the time, every day the same,” he sighed, leading the men to the station’s cells.
“I haven’t eaten for two days,” said 24-year-old Phillip Chikumbo, his dark eyes bloodshot with fatigue. There was no hint of outrage or bitterness in his comment; he was simply hungry. “They do not have food for us here because we are unexpected visitors.”
Dressed in a blue-and-white check shirt, his hair closely cropped, Chikumbo is one of about 20 young men — all Zimbabwean — patiently awaiting deportation to a place he no longer wants to call home.
“My father is not very happy,” he said, squatting on his haunches among a tangle of roots belonging to a wild fig that prospered in the middle of the prison courtyard. “He is angry that I left; he says it’s running away. But there is nothing to do [in Zimbabwe] as far as a job. It’s hard to raise money.”
A qualified mechanic, Chikumbo was born and raised in Chiredzi, in Zimbabwe’s central Mashonaland district. Long disheartened by the lack of opportunity in the country, he is an old hand at crossing the border illegally.
Chikumbo works as a junior mechanic at a private trucking company on the road to Thohoyandou. It is not an uncommon story told in the prison courtyard. Maxwell (33), “caught in an ambush along the river”, has been a mall security guard in Johannesburg for nine years. Morris (18), from Masvingo, earns R750 as a tractor driver on a Mpumalanga farm.
“I get paid R600 a month,” said Chikumbo. Exploitation wages to be sure, but he is happy with the opportunity to work. The income allows him to visit his girlfriend Sara every three to four months in Chiredzi.
Chikumbo said his arrest is a minor inconvenience, his words echoing the sentiments of many of the detainees. Take, for example, Freedom Kulalelo (23). Arrested two weeks ago in the Johannesburg suburb of Berea, he spent 10 days at Lindela repatriation centre near Krugersdorp. After his return to Zimbabwe he headed straight back to South Africa.
It used to be, a policeman told us, that Zimbabweans detained illegally crossing into South Africa were fined upon repatriation. They were even sent away to Harare. But occurrences of illegal crossings are so frequent along this border (26 742 in 2000, 19 932 in 2001, and 18 033 recorded last year) that the Zimbabwean authorities have stopped imposing punitive sanctions. At worst, one border-jumper told us, they might be told to clean the Beit Bridge police station before being released.
“I have been disturbed from my programme,” commented Maxwell, who had been following our conversation intently. Tinged with a suggestion of humour, Maxwell’s comment nonetheless articulated the thoughts of many of those in the Musina prison. “I am late for work now,” he quipped, adding: “It’s very obvious. I can’t live in that place of [President Robert] Mugabe anymore. I’m coming back — today.” Chikumbo smiled: “Me too.”
We arranged to meet Chikumbo in Beit Bridge with the aim of accompanying him on his illegal border crossing. Having previously visited this Zimbabwean town perched on the periphery of Mugabe’s politically besieged country, we knew it to be relatively docile, which is not to say it is a benign, sleepy hollow. Stern Zanu-PF banners in the town’s centre offered a reminder of the larger context: “Land Reform for Economic Empowerment,” one of them read.
A necessary pit stop for migrants travelling south, the town of Beit Bridge presents many obstacles. Aside from the obdurate plainclothes policeman from the criminal investigations department, there are also exploitative taxi drivers, dissolute gangs of robbers (otherwise known as the guma guma), rapacious crocodiles and the SANDF.
“You have to be clever,” Kulalelo told us, particularly when it comes to the guma guma. “They don’t have guns, but they carry spears, screwdrivers, axes, knives.” While crossing the Limpopo, Kulalelo saw a woman being raped by eight of them, an allegation later confirmed by a SANDF patrol.
By all accounts the guma guma are motivated by economic expediency alone, a fact emphasised by the Shona meaning of the word. Loosely translated, guma guma means to get something by no effort. One migrant we spoke to said the word was actually onomatopoeic, deriving from the sound of pigs eating. This aptly pegs the guma guma for what they are, scavengers who prey on naive, often cash-rich border-jumpers.
Operating in banded groups along the Beit Bridge border area, the guma guma ostensibly offer guided walks and/or taxi journeys to various points along the South Africa/Zimbabwe border. They charge a minimum of R50 for leading migrants to purpose-cut holes in the South African border fence, a 180km tangle of electric wires delineating the political boundary between the two countries.
Chikumbo’s protracted ritual breaching of this patchwork fence, a toothless beast that is a throwback to apartheid times, merely highlights the ease with which border-jumpers cross the border with impunity. With the cost of processing undocumented migrants said to be R16 000 a person, the implications of these crossings are by no means inconsequential. Last year the SANDF arrested 50 852 immigrants along South Africa’s borders with Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Swaziland and Botswana.
After being offloaded by a Department of Home Affairs truck at the Beit Bridge police station Chikumbo immediately headed for the township of Dulibadzimo, on the outskirts of town. At the central market he chartered a sky-blue Datsun taxi, at a cost of Z$35 000 (R90). “It’s not a good business,” the lanky taxi-driver confided as he drove us an hour or so east of Beit Bridge. “Fuel is too expensive.”
The scenery on our drive was revealing. Drought and profligate overgrazing have destroyed the landscape. Only the baobabs prosper. We passed four men walking. Chikumbo waved. “They were with me in prison this morning,” he chuckled. “They’re also going back.”
The taxi ride came to an end at a dusty soccer field 20km east of Beit Bridge. From there we had to walk, the mass of small rural paths finally congre- gating into one well-worn (smuggler’s) path that led us to the river. I asked Chikumbo about the crocodiles, which have been known to take migrants. “It’s a matter of starvation,” he said. “You can’t worry about those things.”
We eventually forded the Limpopo by moonlight, darting around slimy pools of stagnant water. When there was no way around these, we waded knee-deep through the river. On the South African side a bedraggled series of farm fences hinted that we were not the first visitors to crawl under the first, then hop over the second.
It is really that simple gaining entry into South Africa, though the reality for many border-jumpers is that they will be detained by the SANDF in Musina. But this is nothing compared with the disastrous situation in Zimbabwe. “It’s true! It’s real!” said Chikumbo. “People from the opposition are being killed; even job applications are turned down. People are angry.”
As long as this anger is unattended to, it seems that Musina’s prison courtyard will continue to be a congregation point for the youths who gather there like the collected flotsam of some invisible shipwreck: Zimbabwe.