Musina is a seemingly isolated town just south of the Zimbabwe and South Africa border. National Road, its bustling main street, is an organised chaos of shoppers, truckers and traders. On a hot Saturday in early November it seemed especially eventful, with pairs of fascinated eyes gathered around photographs installed on street poles.
Taken by students of the Johannesburg’s Market Photo Workshop, and supplemented by commissioned work by photographers from neighbouring countries, the images presented a documentary on the lives of traders crossing the borders between South Africa and its neighbouring countries.
The exhibition, a collaboration with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), is currently on at the Workshop Gallery in Johannesburg and along its outside fence.
Reiko Matsuyama, IOM project officer, says: ”The photographers went out and travelled with informal cross-border traders, interviewing them and getting to know what their lives are really like.”
The project was, therefore, not only about capturing photographs, but became an important source of primary research for the organisation. The snippets of interview material accompanying the images make for a detailed and engaged social document, revealing the photographer as an active participant in the lives of the traders, and the traders as active participants in the research into their own lives.
Wilson Johwa, programme co-ordinator for the Workshop’s photoÂÂjournalism and documentary photography progamme (a partnership with Getty Images), says: ”We wanted to capture and raise public awareness of … particularly the factors of vulnerability such as gender inequality, poor living and working conditions, separation from families, exploitation and discrimination and lack of access to health services.”
By shying away from the single, iconic image, Johwa, project manager Kirsten Doermann and their team present a series of intense short stories, giving multiple views of one aspect, or views of multiple aspects of the insecurities of traders’ lives. It is with almost studious precision — surprising since many of the images were shot from the hip, taken on the go — that we get a full picture of the no-holds-barred sex education programme of Corridors of Hope, an organisation working with truckers and traders who pass through the Beit Bridge border post. We get caught up in the excitement of Chipo and her friend’s journey to Gabarone, and we feel the frustration of the passengers from Johannesburg waiting at Soekmekaar station — two hours from their final destination — for MetroRail buses to take them to Musina.
The photographs highlight other hardships of the trading lifestyle: the tediousness of immigration laws and custom duties; the long periods away from home and the dangers of spending these extended times in areas of high traffic; the difficulties of accommodation in the open or at the homes of commercial sex workers; the limited access to healthcare services and so on.
John Fleetwood, head of the Workshop, says: ”Its much more of an interpretive research, in terms of the exchange that happens.” Students — drawn from communities directly affected by migration — present their work to the IOM, which, in turn, leads to a richer base of primary research. But, Fleetwood continues, the project also allows students to ”create their own voices, interpretations and critical responses”.
The visual evidence of direct and indirect job creation supplements the IOM’s findings that traders each employ between one and eight people. Images show that mainly women are involved in trade, pointing to the fact that this informal economy plays a significant role in the transformation of gender relations in the region.
It is the level of communication in the photographs — interactions between photographers and traders, between traders and between traders and their markets in different countries — that indicate the real finding of the research that regional economic trade and social integration is led by women.
The IOM notes: ”Women’s trading culture transcended the formal boundaries imposed by states, ethnicity, class and region,” and that traders ”developed a cosmopolitan sense of self, a trans-border culture that transcended nationality, cutting across national boundaries”.
Not as glam as this sounds, photographer Lerato Maduna says: ”Many of these women sacrifice sleeping in their own beds and instead humble themselves in mediocre places in not-so-familiar surroundings. Yet they are still feminine and sensitive.”
Back and Forth: Informal Cross-Border Traders in Southern Africa is on at the Market Photography Workshop Gallery Until February 28 next year