Our extended interaction with women migrant mothers from Zimbabwe in South Africa’s Gauteng Province in 2016 left us with both concerns and admiration. After hearing about their situations and the conditions of their existence in post-apartheid South Africa, where female labor migration is “of tenuous legality and therefore deliberately covert” (Dodson Reference Dodson2000:40), we could not help but admire the way these women responded to the second amendment to the 2002 Immigration Act—the legal instrument that introduced tougher immigration regulations on the cross-border movements of children in 2014. The new regulations, which completely changed how the country handles cross-border movements, requires minors (children under 18 years) to have, in addition to a valid passport, an unabridged birth certificate and an affidavit by one parent or both (in cases where the minor is accompanied by any person other than the parents).
The women in question were both mothers and migrant laborers, seeking to work and/or build a new life in foreign territory while maintaining links with children and others remaining in Zimbabwe (Crush et al. 2015). They represented a broad spectrum of what has been described as “mixed migrants” (Linde Reference Linde2011; van der Klaauw 2009). These were women of varying ages, ethnicities, marital status, geographical origin, and legal status (in South Africa). Although they were “compelled ….abroad to ensure basic survival,…or meet aspirations for accumulation and education” (McGregor Reference McGregor2007:806), they showed no intentions of returning to Zimbabwe permanently in the near future. They included heads of households and single mothers, divorcees and teenage mothers, former professionals and high school drop-outs, all with similar migration intentions: to build a new life.
Thus, while the women clearly perceived themselves as economic migrants, they were far from the usual temporary, circular migrants (Crush & Tevera Reference Crush and Tevera2010; Makina Reference Makina2013; Zinyama Reference Zinyama, Tevera and Zinyama2002), they were mostly “permanent and semi-permanent” migrants (Crush et al. 2015:365), with limited opportunities to visit home in Zimbabwe where other family members including children remained.
The women also openly acknowledged the need to maintain contact with their children and the difficulties of paying regular visits to Zimbabwe. They explained that, besides work commitments, there were other barriers to their cross-border movements. More importantly, few of the women believed their children would have the necessary documentation to travel into and out of South Africa legally. For some of these women, it was difficult to legalize their stay in South Africa, and they could not access affidavits; we learned from our long period of interaction that some of the children’s fathers had long disappeared from the women’s lives. This provided a major challenge even for those women who had legal status to access all the necessary consenting documents.Footnote 1
The situation of these women captured several dimensions of what the new immigration amendments actually mean to migrant mothers and their children. The barriers to contact with children linked to the policy amendments can be more easily comprehended if seen from the complexity of the migration of these women, particularly its permanent and semi-permanent nature (Crush et al. 2015) and the constraints faced by the mothers in paying regular visits to their places of origin. In fulfilling the conditions of the new policy, migrant mothers faced many difficulties, ranging from lack of relevant documentation by children and absent fathers (to provide affidavits) to the women’s legal status in South Africa, making the legal cross-border movements of children nearly impossible under the new regulations.
In this article, we build on these themes by exploring the situations and conditions of existence of these women in South Africa and their responses to the changes in policy as they reshaped their interaction with their children around the constraints and new alternatives presented by the new policy regimes. We are particularly interested in how the policy shifts provided an additional layer of challenges for the negotiation of the border for mothers and their children, as well as in how women as mothers used their agency to navigate the constraints imposed by the new policy.
It is not our intention here to focus on the legislation (or of its impact more significantly), given that it only became effective two years before our fieldwork started, but rather, locating our analysis explicitly on Zimbabwean migrant mothers in South Africa, we argue that the new policy environment has acted as an external impediment that has forced migrant mothers to seek alternatives in their constant struggles to negotiate the border.
In the period immediately after the implementation of the new regulations, migrant mothers in Gauteng fell back on existing social networks while at the same time creating others, often combining the services of omalayisha (cross-border transporters) and the cross-border bus service to move children into and out of South Africa. These options allowed the women to evade the legal requirements and avoid cumbersome administration procedures, while also enabling them to accomplish their migration intentions.
Methodology
This article draws on data from an extended study of 45 Zimbabwean migrant mothers conducted during an 18-month period between November 2016 and December 2017 in South Africa’s Gauteng Province. We conducted our study in six suburban areas in the Johannesburg and Pretoria Metropolitan areas, which are dominated by Zimbabwean migrants (see Map 1). In Johannesburg, the women lived in Berea, Hilbrow, and Yeoville, while in Pretoria we selected women from Sunnyside, Pretoria West, and Pretoria Central. We also drew data from brief interviews with cross-border transporters (omalayisha)—the agents who move goods and children across the border. Our extended interaction with migrant mothers in both Johannesburg and Pretoria included interviews, participant observations, home visits, and other social activities.
Map 1. Map of the Gauteng Province showing Greater Johannesburg and Greater Pretoria. Map from http://www.conference-venues.co.za/gauteng.htm.
The interviews took the form of extended conversations over particular themes, which were guided by our own questions as well as by the participants’ knowledge and experiences. In total we conducted over 300 extended visits, with each visit lasting hours and sometimes the whole day. Some of the women were known to us before we began the research and were purposely selected to participate in the study, but other women were referred to us, and after a period of interaction we managed to develop close relationships that allowed us to spend time with them within their social spaces. For ethical reasons the true identities of these women and those of omalayisha were substituted with pseudonyms, which we have used as reference in this article.
In this particular article, we focus on discussions with these migrant mothers and draw on particular episodes and cases in our fourteen months of interaction, mainly for two reasons. First, these typify the experience of a contemporary migrant from Zimbabwe and the complex nature of migration to South Africa. Second, these depict issues of agency and how it is deployed in the face of an external impediment. To analyze this position, we juxtapose the migration realities of these migrant labor mothers with the implications of the new policy. This approach allows for a much broader understanding of the women, their migration, and the dynamics of their agency.
We have structured the article as follows: we first contextualize the women and the migration question in Southern Africa. We next focus on the migrant mothers and their situation in South Africa, and provide a generalized profile, focusing on ages, family situation, employment, relationship with their rural homes, period of arrival and legal status in South Africa, and associated constraints. We then highlight the new policy changes and the added layer of challenges that it has presented for the negotiation of the border by women, and the agency of the women to ensure that they continue receiving visitations from children.
Women and Migrant Labor in Southern Africa
There is undoubtedly a high degree of continuity in the traditional patterns of labor migration and the contemporary immigration flows of economic migrants from other Southern African states. As Belinda Dodson (2000:40) expressed it: “[The] long-established system of trans-nationalism largely persists. It is likely that parallel female migration to South Africa has been underestimated.” It is, perhaps, this continuity which accounts for a skewed understanding of migration, which has left unchallenged the traditional myth of labor migration as fundamentally a male decision and sphere, in contrast to migration by women, who, like children, only move or migrate as men’s companions. Silvia Pedraza (1991:305–6) has referred to an “underlying assumption in studies of migration” of a labor migrant being “the male pauper, a single or married male who looks forward to amassing capital with which to return to his native country.” These assumptions that are deeply embedded in traditional migratory labor regimes basically frame migration flows dominated by women in terms of “movements generated by the original migration of economically motivated young males” (Pedraza Reference Pedraza1991:306). In the words of Marion F. Houstoun et al. (Reference Houstoun, Kramer and Barrett1984:919), women “migrate to create or reunite a family.”
From this perspective, a typical labor migrant would be a male of a certain age, while a typical woman would be one who “remains behind ‘to keep the home fires burning’” (Posel Reference Posel2004:278). Given the long history of impermanent migration of only black males to South African mines in the region, coupled with a labor market that was highly stratified by gender (Crush & Williams Reference Crush and Williams2005), it is perhaps not surprising that female migration has remained in the periphery of debates.
Contrary to the narrative, based on historical trends in cross-border migration, there has been increasing feminization of migration to South Africa in the recent past (Crush & Williams Reference Crush and Williams2005; Johnston Reference Johnston2007; Ulicki & Crush Reference Ulicki and Crush2007). Studies suggest that female migration flows, particularly from South Africa’s neighbor states, escalated significantly after 1994. There is also wide consensus within the scholarly community on the complexity of movements both into and out of South Africa, and the difficulties in classifying migrants (Crush et al. 2015; Bloch Reference Bloch2010). They also agree that migrants, whether female or male, legal or illegal, will always be a feature in South Africa. According to Martin Murray (Reference Murray2003:444):
Whatever the official policy on immigration, the borders separating South Africa and its neighbours are extremely porous. There are few if any deterrents — physical, logistical, or institutional – capable of preventing determined migrants from entering South Africa by car, bus, train, airline, or on foot, and remaining in the country illegally.
This happens in a context where migrant labor to the mines is no longer the most significant form of migration in terms of numbers in South Africa, and many people are involved in clandestine cross-border migration, tending to stay in the country as undocumented migrants (see Griffin Reference Griffin2011; Ulicki & Crush Reference Ulicki and Crush2007). Undocumented migrants satisfy a growing demand for cheap, seasonal, and non-contractual labor in certain sectors of the economy (Bloch Reference Bloch2010). Some of the key culprits are commercial farmers, particularly in the Limpopo and Free State provinces (see Ulicki & Crush Reference Ulicki and Crush2007; Johnston Reference Johnston2007; Rutherford Reference Rutherford2011; Rutherford & Addison Reference Rutherford and Addison2007).
Alongside this form of cross-border migration, there have been high rates of circular migration, mostly by women who come to South Africa for definite periods searching for income generation opportunities (Crush & Tevera Reference Crush and Tevera2010; Ulicki & Crush Reference Ulicki and Crush2007; Makina Reference Makina2012, Reference Makina2013; Rutherford Reference Rutherford2011). This form of migration was popular, particularly among Zimbabweans, between the 1980s and early 2000s (Makina Reference Makina2013; Muzvidziwa Reference Muzvidziwa2001; Zinyama Reference Zinyama, Tevera and Zinyama2002).
In Southern Africa, the cross-border movement of women for employment into South Africa has a long pedigree. From the colonial era to the present, women, like men, have responded to what Francis Wilson called rural push and urban pull forces, migrating to South Africa for employment (Wilson Reference Wilson1972). Judith Gay has alerted us to Basotho women migrants who worked in settler farms in the Orange Free State and Cape Colony together with their husbands as far back as the 1930s. While some of these later returned to Lesotho, others remained working as domestic workers for farmers either after the death of their husbands or after being deserted (Gay Reference Gay1980).
Perhaps most importantly for our understanding of early women’s labor migration is the recorded 9.4 percent of Basotho women who were employed in South Africa that Gay cites from the 1976 national census and an even higher figure during the 1960s. Referring to her study in a rural lowlands village of Lesotho, she indicated that in a sample of 433 women over the age of 17 years, 20.6 percent had either worked or were working in South Africa in 1977. It is from this point that David Coplan (Reference Coplan2001) brings to our attention the long history of interaction, characterized by the movement of labor and goods, between Basotho and the white settler community in the Orange Free State.
In the mining industry, opportunities for women to gain access to jobs started opening in the 1980s and 1990s with the sub-contracting of some mining functions, and significant female migration flows to the goldfields were recorded from 1986. Dunbar T. Moodie (Reference Moodie1994) demonstrated the entry of women migrant laborers into the mining industry through the increasing number of female migrants in townships and informal settlements around mines. In other industries, employers also started recruiting female labor from neighboring countries using the contract migrant labor system (Ulicki & Crush Reference Ulicki and Crush2007).
Female labor migrants in South Africa increased as economic and social challenges increased in neighboring states, which pushed women into employment (Ulicki & Crush Reference Ulicki and Crush2007; Griffin Reference Griffin2011). Literature on Basotho women migrants has focused on how these push factors are intertwined with employer demands, preferences, and recruitment strategies (Johnston Reference Johnston2007; Ulicki & Crush Reference Ulicki and Crush2000, Reference Ulicki and Crush2007).
Deborah Johnston (Reference Johnston2007) has shown that Basotho women migrants embodied the characteristics needed by commercial farmers: they were docile, flexible, and more importantly, so poor that they desperately needed a wage. Theresa Ulicki and Jonathan Crush (2007) also highlighted that farmers preferred employing women rather than men, and the farms they studied had a majority female labor force, both legal and illegal. This reflects that women have become key actors in the South African labor markets, and that this leads to a different way of looking at labor migration in the contemporary era.
Key to our understanding of contemporary migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa is, firstly, the consensus on the feminization of migration, and secondly (but intimately related to the first), the complexity of such migration, particularly the transition from a circular to a semi-permanent or more permanent type (Crush et al. 2015; Thebe Reference Thebe2017).
Based on longitudinal data from three surveys on Zimbabwean migration conducted between 1997 and 2010, where they traced the changes in the nature of mixed migration from Zimbabwe, Jonathan Crush, Abel Chikanda, and Godfrey Tawodzera showed that migrants no longer see their migration as short-term or temporary, but rather, they have come to “build a new life.” These migrants tended to stay longer in South Africa, and to avoid deportation, they would go underground, bribe officials, or move to areas where enforcement was slack (2015:365).
It is this context, yet, significantly, contextualized by a patriarchal tradition that tended to locate women within the domestic sphere as primary caregivers for children, where the immigration policy amendments played out. While these policy dynamics are not directly discussed in the next section, the implications should be kept in mind as we focus on the situation of migrant mothers in South Africa.
Migrant Workers and Mothers
While recognizing that different categories of women migrants from Zimbabwe have been drawn to South Africa since the 1990s, here we want to focus only on a particular category of women: the migrant mothers who had children in Zimbabwe. The women in this category represented a broad spectrum of the Zimbabwean migrant community in South Africa’s major cities. They differed in age, marital status, occupation, ethnicity, geographical origin, and legal status in the country. They included married women, widows, single mothers, deserted wives, and grandparents—all having different initial motives for entering South Africa, yet at some point their migration intentions appeared to converge. This section focuses specifically on their situation in South Africa and on an attempt to understand them as both mothers and migrant laborers with links to their homes in Zimbabwe.
The women in this study were mostly economic migrants who arrived in South Africa during different periods and were mostly driven into South Africa by various economic pressures in Zimbabwe. In the study of 45 migrant mothers in the Johannesburg and Pretoria metropolitan areas, around 11 percent were circular migrants in the 1990s (before settling and working in South Africa after 2005), 38 percent had arrived between 1996 and 2005, and 51 percent were post-2005 migrants. Only 42 percent of the women were married, while the rest were single. The women’s ages ranged from 21 to 55 years, with the majority over the age of 30.
The vast majority (73 percent) of these women had come to South Africa legally, but this does not necessarily mean that they had legal rights to stay and work in the country: they all had literally overstayed their permits, although they had made attempts to stay legally in the country. The women respondents fell into four categories:
a) those who came to South Africa on 30-day visitors’ permits to search or take up jobs (arranged for them by networks already in the country), who often paid bus crews and omalayisha to process their passports out and back into South Africa to legalize their stay in the country;
b) those who allowed their visitors’ permits to expire and continued working illegally in the country using cloned documents;
c) those who were granted special dispensation permits;
d) and, a growing trend, those who applied for asylum and held asylum-seeker permits.
The majority of these women fell into the first and third categories, although there were also some who were using official asylum-seeker permits. At least nine women admitted to using fake asylum-seeker permits, and five said they were using cloned South African documents to secure employment. As literature has shown, the asylum system is certainly still being used by Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa, despite South Africa’s official position that there is “no war in Zimbabwe” and therefore, Zimbabweans do not meet the refugee criterion (Crush et al. 2015; SPT 2004).
Jacoline, for example, was 40 years old and originally from the Ndolwane Communal Area in Plumtree District. Her husband had been a labor migrant in South Africa since the 1990s. She used to visit South Africa regularly and buy items for sale back home, but had never stayed for long in South Africa until 2005 when she finally moved in with her husband and found work at a restaurant as a waitress. She admitted to initially working as an undocumented migrant, using her sister Elizabeth’s particulars. She later joined the asylum system in 2008, despite the fact that she was not a political refugee. She saw nothing wrong with abusing the system. As she puts it: “Everyone was using the asylum system at the time…..it gave you certain rights that ‘illegal migrants’ did not have, including rights to work.” When the special dispensation was announced in 2009, she applied and was granted a permit which she was still using at the time of the study.
Similarly, Mildred, 34 years old and deserted by her husband, arrived in South Africa in 2005 at the age of only 23. She had applied for asylum in Musina Town before proceeding to Johannesburg, where she stayed with her sister. She first worked for a Chinese retail outlet at the CBD before switching jobs in 2007. This was made easier since she was in possession of an asylum-seeker permit. Like most Zimbabwean migrants who held jobs and had employment, she applied for the Zimbabwe Dispensation Permit under the Zimbabwe Special Project and was able to convert the initial permit to a Dispensation for Zimbabwe Project (DZP) in 2014.
In general, because of the changing economic, social, and political environment in Zimbabwe, women were more likely to adopt strategies toward extended stay in South Africa after 2005 than in the 1990s, when their strategies were geared towards short, temporary stays (Makina Reference Makina2013; Muzvidziwa Reference Muzvidziwa2001; Zinyama Reference Zinyama, Tevera and Zinyama2002).
In migrating for labor in South Africa, thirty-two of the women had left their children in Zimbabwe, while the remainder had sent children home from South Africa. Unmarried women were either widowed, separated, or single mothers, and were solely responsible for the children. For eleven of these women, the children’s fathers had either disappeared or remarried and relocated elsewhere, which made it difficult for the women to satisfy all conditions for the legal cross-border movement of their children.
These women were technically single and were exclusively responsible for the children, but said they would require an accompanying affidavit from the absent men since they were both listed as parents. The women explained that without an accompanying affidavit from the men, the opportunities for legal cross-border movement for the children were limited. Yet the men were not always available to provide such documentation. For example, around fourteen of the women did not know the whereabouts of the children’s fathers, and of these, six had last heard of them when the children were still infants. The challenges faced by these women in satisfying the immigration requirements are revealed in the following excerpts:
He disappeared from our lives 10 years ago and has never come back….he has never contacted us. I am not sure whether he is still alive….no one knows. (interview, Pretoria, April 27, 2016)
The last time I heard about him, he was in the Eastern Cape. I do not know whether he is still there, whether he is still alive….He was living with another woman and had started another family,….he has never contacted his children. (interview, Johannesburg, March 3, 2016)
My daughter’s father relocated to the United Kingdom in 2010 when she was only 3 months. He has never been in my daughter’s life. (interview, Pretoria, April 18, 2016)Footnote 2
My ex-husband died some years ago. We had separated at the time. The children are my responsibility alone. The new regulations create difficulties for the children since I am not in possession of his death certificate. (interview, Johannesburg, December 23, 2016)
All the women we interacted with had strong links with their home places, had dependents, and maintained contacts through remittances, phone calls, and occasional visits, but they were all making serious efforts to establish themselves in their new environment. They pointed to the need to settle in South Africa, work, and support families and immediate dependents (including children, some of whom were attending school) back in Zimbabwe. The main reason given by almost all the women, both young and old, for trying to settle in South Africa, (or for the lack of intention to return to Zimbabwe) was that South Africa offered better economic and social prospects, or that it offered economic stability that enabled them to execute their extended responsibilities. A few said they needed a sustainable income source, and South Africa certainly provided such an environment for income stability. The women typically worked hard (including taking extra hours and extra shifts), which was one of the reasons they elected to be separated from their children.
The study suggests that young mothers who gave birth in South Africa were more likely to send the infants to their parents in Zimbabwe to maximize their opportunities for capital accumulation. For example, Lettiah from rural Tsholotsho in western Zimbabwe was 23 years old and employed at a retail food chain. She came to South Africa at the age of 18 after her Ordinary Level qualification, joining her four brothers and two sisters who were already in South Africa. Despite being married and living with a husband, she opted to part with her 3-year-old daughter by sending her to her mother-in-law in rural Tsholotsho. She and her husband sent monthly remittances to their parents, but had only visited home once since the baby was sent home.
Even where the women did not send infants to their parents as Lettiah had done, we learned that the intention was to send them once they reach a certain age. Thus, there were a significant number of women (about twenty-seven in the sample) who had children of school-going age who attended school in Zimbabwe. Women who had no legal status in South Africa found it difficult to access education in South Africa. In this study, there were approximately nine women who had to separate with their children after struggling to enroll them in government schools in the country. Even special permit holders and those with asylum-seeker permits said their rights in South Africa were not clearly defined, which also affected their children.
Acquisition of an asylum-seeker permit protected migrants from deportation by legalizing their stay, but it placed limitations on physical contacts with their former homes. While many of the women who held asylum permits retained links with their home areas, like their irregular counterparts, they could not legally travel to Zimbabwe. The visitation of children therefore presented opportunities for family reunion. Elizabeth, for example, had two children, aged 9 and 11 and in Grades 2 and 6, in Zimbabwe. She held an asylum-seeker permit, which she used for employment and for other services. She admitted to sending for her children every school holiday.
In a similar situation is Simangaliso, 40 years old, who left behind in her rural home three children (a daughter aged 13 and two sons aged 9 and 11) when she came to South Africa in 2010. She also was using an asylum-seeker permit, which legally constrained her visits to Zimbabwe. Her children paid regular visits to South Africa and mostly spent the long Christmas holidays with her and her husband. As she puts it: “this compensates for the long period of separation….but, the children understand and are happy to come here” (interview, Pretoria, June 16, 2016).
Another key factor necessitating regular visitation by children was the question of the occupations of these women mothers in South Africa. The women did different kinds of jobs, ranging from domestics and beauty care to hospitality: sixteen were in the hospitality industry; thirteen were domestic workers; seven worked in the beauty industry; three were in the retail sector; and three fell into the category “other.” There were differences in earnings between those in the hospitality and domestic sectors, and marked differences between waitresses and kitchen staff within the hospitality sector. These differences can be illustrated by using the income of waitresses as an example. On average, waitresses indicated that they earned a total monthly income of between ZAR6 000 and ZAR10 000, either as regular income or commission and tips combined.
Most women therefore had a stable income and could afford rentals (either in the form of backrooms in the townships or flats in the inner cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria). The need for visitation by children, along with the social networks and relationships developed in South Africa, meant that the women had space to house visiting children, and in general married couples had their own apartments. Of the women in the study, nearly almost half (21 of 45) had their own apartments, nine were renting in the township, seven were renting rooms from close relations, six were sharing apartments, and the remainder stayed at their work places.
Women with older children received slightly more visitations than those with younger children who had to be accompanied. MaNdlovu, who had three teenage boys in Zimbabwe, was among the women who initially experienced few challenges with visitation since the boys could travel on their own. They all had passports, and since there were no visa requirements for Zimbabwean migrants entering South Africa, this enabled the elder son to travel with his two siblings without hassles before 2015. She commended him: “He is very responsible. He has been traveling with them since 2008 without any problems…they are very close” (interview, Johannesburg, March 7, 2016).
Some women had been receiving undocumented visitations from their children since they started living in South Africa. About half the women had received visits from children who did not possess valid travel documents. Interestingly, women with young children, who had repatriated their babies to Zimbabwe illegally, were more likely to use the same methods when the children had to pay them visits. When doing this, they enlisted the services of cross-border transporters, who also acted as people smugglers and cargo movers between Zimbabwe and South Africa.
These cross-border transporters, otherwise known as omalayisha, have been in the business of moving remittances and people across the two borders since the early 1990s (Thebe Reference Thebe2011, Reference Thebe, Crush, Chikanda and Skinner2015). The women openly acknowledged utilizing the services of omalayisha in moving their children to and from South Africa. They explained that, since they have been long-term patrons of omalayisha through the movement of remittances, the omalayisha were always willing to assist in the movement of children and other relatives, even without passports, if requested by clients.
New Challenge and Migrant Mothers and their Agency
The implications of the new restrictions on the cross-border movement of children are key to our understanding of the dynamics of being migrant mothers and of their responses thereto. While the law restricted possible legal cross-border movements for children, the women themselves faced certain constraints in traveling to and from Zimbabwe. As we have described, the women’s migration intentions were to stay longer in South Africa, and to achieve this, they made efforts to legalize their stay, including applying for asylum. This placed the women’s intentions to remain in South Africa as central and placed limits on their physical contact with their homes in Zimbabwe.
Practically, the women could be reunited with their children only when the children paid visits to South Africa. As one of the mothers explained: “I am faced with a dilemma…, I have an asylum-seeker permit and cannot travel home…, the only plausible solution is for children to visit.”Footnote 3 Yet the new regulations placed considerable constraints on the free movement of children, in turn forcing women to resort to alternatives. Here we explore these issues by highlighting the provisions of the regulation amendments and the responses of the mothers.
Restrictions on the cross-border movement of children
One key feature of the new immigration amendments is the restriction on children traveling across the country’s borders. Having amended the 2002 Act in 2007, the parliament further amended the Act in 2011, culminating in the Immigration Amendment Acts of 2007 and 2011, which came into force with the Immigration Regulations of 2014 and came into operation on May 26, 2014 (DHA nd). The new regulations cover requirements for children accompanied by both parents, one of the parents, children traveling with someone who is not their biological parent, children in alternative care, and unaccompanied children. Here, we want to focus on only two of these scenarios: unaccompanied minors and children traveling with someone other than their biological parents.
For unaccompanied minors, the following documents are required and must be produced at any point of entry:
• Proof of consent from one or both his/her parents or legal guardian, as the case may be, in the form of a letter or affidavit for the child to travel into or depart from the Republic: Provided that in the case where one parent provides proof of consent, that parent must also provide a copy of a court order issued to him or her in terms of which he or she has been granted full parental responsibilities and rights with respect to the child;
• A letter from the person who is to receive the child in the Republic, containing his or her residential address and contact details in the Republic where the child will be residing;
• A copy of the identity document or valid passport and visa or permanent residence permit of the person who is to receive the child in the Republic; and
• The contact details of the parents or legal guardian of the child.
For children traveling with people who are not their biological parents, which was common in the case of the children of these migrant women, the following documents must be produced to the immigration officer at the border:
• A copy of the unabridged birth certificate of the child;
• An affidavit from the parents or legal guardian of the child confirming that this person has permission to travel with the child;
• Copies of the identity documents or passports of the parents or legal guardian of the child; and
• The contact details of the parents or legal guardian of the child provided that the Director-General may, where the parents of the child are both deceased and the child is traveling with a relative or another person related to him or her or his or her parents, approve such a person to enter into or depart from the Republic with such a child.
The border was thus an increasingly inaccessible space for the majority of children, both South African and foreign. For children separated from their parents, even the remote possibility of crossing the border became slim, even if they were in possession of valid travel documents. Access to the border became highly dependent on documents that had nothing to do with traveling: to cross the border, children had to have consent from both parents or carry stacks of documents, which were not easy to access. The constraints were explained by one of the mothers:
People with legal documents can get their children across the border. They can approach the police for an affidavit here in South Africa. Then they can send the documents home to people accompanying the children. For people whose legal status is unclear, this is not possible. Legally, these people cannot receive legal visitation. (interview, Pretoria, March 12, 2016)
Barriers to visitation were strengthened by the requirement that an unabridged birth certificate of the child reflecting the particulars of parents should be produced at the point of entry; unabridged birth certificates are recent documents, and the most commonly issued document was the abridged birth certificate. Most mothers struggled to satisfy their migration intentions to build a life in South Africa and to access the right documents for their children. Accessing unabridged birth certificates placed further risks on the mothers’ migration, since it involved traveling back to Zimbabwe and lodging an application, which was described as cumbersome and costly. While the women could travel to Zimbabwe, which some did, they cited deportation and being banned from re-entering South Africa as a major threat.
Overcoming constraints: women mothers and their agency
Unable to depend on the formal immigration process, migrant women fell back on already existing relationships with omalayisha and also created new ones, including with the cross-border bus crews. The need for women to bring children to South Africa, along with the country’s porous borders, meant that children could be smuggled into and out of South Africa at a price. Moving children across the Limpopo River did not present any logistical problems for these agents. Besides smuggling goods, many of these were already in the business of smuggling people and had been transporting children for some of the mothers for years. The crucial difference was that, whereas previously they also transported children with legal travel documents, there was no legality in the transit of children after 2015.Footnote 4 Despite the new restrictions in the cross-border movement of children, omalayisha still managed to move children across by bribing border officials.
As well as facilitating the cross-border movement of children, omalayisha also provided door-to-door convenience, both in Zimbabwe and South Africa. The most important element in the movement of children was the women’s ability to pay an agent fee. As they said in their language: “Siyakhokha (we pay)...” (interview, Pretoria, April 7, 2016). The price paid was determined by the method used to move children across. There were differences in the costs for moving children through formal channels as opposed to moving them through undesignated entry points, and the mothers said they paid as much as ZAR2 000 for the use of formal channels. However, a significant proportion of this money was given as bribes to social networks at the border post for omalayisha to access formal entry points, ensuring that migrant mothers received value for their money. The women were fully aware of these illicit payments, and saw them as necessary collateral:
The fee that we pay covers the bribes at the border. We are happy to pay if the children can be allowed through. It has become the only way to have children here. (interview, Johannesburg, June 23, 2016)
Alongside the omalayisha system was a new option in the form of the cross-border bus service, operating between Johannesburg and major centers in Zimbabwe such as Bulawayo, Gweru, Harare, and even as far north as the Victoria Falls. This represented a new and safer way to move children across the border for the women, unlike omalayisha who had no scheduled times and sometimes would move children through undesignated entry points. The bus service, for example, had strict time schedules and could only move people through designated entry points. This worked well for the women:
Once the crew has agreed to transport my child, I know when to pick him/her up from the bus terminus…. We all know when buses arrive in Johannesburg unless if there are delays at the border post or there is a mechanical failure. The challenge with omalayisha is that you will never know when your child will arrive….sometimes the journey may take two days, sometimes a whole week. They have no scheduled times. (interview, Johannesburg, June 11, 2016)
Each service had its own advantages and disadvantages, and the women said the choice of a particular service was guided by a number of factors. The bus service tended to be formalized and left little room for negotiations. The malayisha system, on the other hand was relatively flexible depending on the nature of the relationship between umalayisha and the client. Some of these women mothers were people who had been loyal patrons and sometimes neighbors or close relatives of these transporters (Thebe Reference Thebe2011). These transporters in turn offered a range of payment options for both the movement of goods and people, including children. They offered “cash and deliver,” “pay forward,” and “prepaid” options, which did not necessarily ease the financial burden on the women, but offered convenience.
With regard to the “cash and deliver” contract, the settlement of the agent fee was done by someone back home other than the women in South Africa. Sometimes these agents would also accept payments in assets, usually livestock, which was a far cheaper option. In practice, certainly with regard to the movement of children, the women preferred the “pre-paid” arrangements, not just to ensure that children were guaranteed seats for the journey, but also to avoid the risk of children being moved through undesignated entry points, and exposing them to the dangers of the Limpopo River and Musina forest.
Similarly, omalayisha themselves did not enjoy the use of undesignated entry points. As noted elsewhere (Thebe Reference Thebe2011:663), omalayisha hated using undesignated entry points because “they are dangerous and delay the journey,” and in “ordinary circumstances, we move pre-paid clients, returning migrants and people willing to pay higher fares through the formal channels” (interview, Johannesburg, December 12, 2016). However, they still saw unofficial channels as the most cost-effective method of moving people into South Africa. They often moved people who had not fully paid their fares into South Africa by paying local people smugglers called izimpisi (hyenas of the Limpopo) a small fee to assist people across the Limpopo River, over the fence, and through the Musina forest.Footnote 5 They had reasons for doing so: “you need more money to access designated entry points…you have to pay a ‘cold drink’ fee. If no money is paid up front, but the person is going to Johannesburg, what do you do? Leave them behind?” (interview, Johannesburg, June 24, 2016). Another was even more explicit:
I move clients that have paid fully through designated entry points (ngibahambisa phezulu ngoba bebhadele izimalizabo) since they have paid their money for that service and I can use that money to bribe officials. If someone has not paid and has only made a promise to pay, how am I going to pay the immigration officials and the police? I try as much as possible to use designated entry points, but it is not always possible. So, we have to trust ‘izimpisi’. (interview, Johannesburg, December 12, 2016)
On the other hand, the women would make “pay-forward” arrangements with omalayisha. This worked more straightforward. The agent would pick the children in Zimbabwe and transport them to the mothers in Johannesburg or Pretoria, where he would be paid his full fee. This arrangement was convenient, since the visitation of children was not entirely dependent on the availability of money, and even in some cases, payment could be made at a convenient date.Footnote 6
Another notable contractual arrangement was the “pre-paid” contract, which was a departure from the previous two in that payments were made in advance, and the women said they paid their agents before they could even depart for Zimbabwe. Notwithstanding the fact that the agents and clients had an on-going relationship, however, it is important to note that this entailed an element of trust, which could only develop through long-term interaction.
Previously, as we have seen, women preferred agents “abahambisana phezulu” (who use designated entry points) and were reliable—people whom they could trust with the lives of their children. Thus, trust was earned, and the women chose agents carefully. Trust might quite plausibly have been earned through a long-term record of reliability. In this case, the women’s social networks were fully exhausted as they searched for the right agent.
Such a process would inevitably result in a list of agents who had a good track record, and could be recommended by those who had used their services before. The mutual trust between the two parties was clearly evident during the study. The mothers and children we met appeared to be close to their agents. The children particularly appeared very comfortable around them, and referred to them with a variety of respectful names such as “Bhuti Mandla,” “Bab’ omncane,” or “Malume.”Footnote 7
It should be noted that if the relationship with these agents was well managed, the women were assured of reuniting with their children, despite the constraints imposed by the policy amendments. As noted elsewhere (Thebe Reference Thebe2011), these agents could move anything across the border at a price. This, then, was very far from a child rights crisis as has been portrayed in the media and government circles. These arrangements resulted from women’s agency in reaction to constraints caused by a society that refuses to acknowledge a new order in which women are labor migrants in their own rights.
Conclusion
One of the issues that struck us during our extended interaction with the migrant mothers from Zimbabwe who were living in South Africa was how they responded to the threat imposed by shifting policy and law on the cross-border movement of children. We have drawn possible explanations for their responses. First, the border was something that was intimately connected to migrant mothers; it provided a gateway through which their contact with their homes and loved ones could be maintained, yet the same border also defined their non-citizenship (Klotz Reference Klotz2016). The changes to the immigration policy redefined the way in which children could move across the country’s border, which in turn presented an added layer of challenges for the negotiation of the border by the migrant mothers, forcing them into alternative arrangements to facilitate the movement of their children across the border.
Thus it is much more difficult to separate the border, which probably is a symbol of a “long history of cross-border mobility and social integration” (Klotz Reference Klotz2016:181), from how migrant mothers were affected and at the same time responded to the changes in policy and regulation. Carisa Renae Showden reminds us about women:
Taking up and reworking the forms of power that shape their….sense of the possible and righteous, even when their choices conflict with what others might consider the correct choices in these difficult circumstances. (Showden Reference Showden2011:xiii)
In our case, the women simply fell back on already existing relationships with omalayisha, and in some cases they created new relationships with the cross-border bus crews. The women’s willingness and ability to pay allowed them to negotiate the constraints in the movement of their children imposed by the new policy regimes.
In addition, the options taken by the migrant mothers cannot be ignored and taken as being irrelevant; they depict the shift in “Zimbabwean migration intentions, from temporary to permanent and semi-permanent migration” that was identified by Crush and others (Crush et al. 2015:365). Through the strategies adopted, the migrant mothers were sending a clear statement about their intentions: they were not leaving South Africa in the foreseeable future.
They also had the social networks, which played a major role in the decisions they made and the options they selected. It would appear that the migration intentions and the negotiation of the border are parts of the same package. Migrant mothers would probably be willing to renegotiate the border for contact with children if that would provide them with an opportunity to remain in South Africa, rather than to be reunited with their children in Zimbabwe.
One of the main points of this research is to demonstrate that the agency of the migrant mothers in negotiating the border is intricately linked to their migration intentions and the policy as an external impediment. Even if there are risks, the actions taken are justified as necessary requirements to ensure that their migration intentions are not compromised.
