The millions return…
…not to Zimbabwe (that’s wishful thinking); to their jobs outside Zimbabwe.
Friends of mine recently came back from a Christmas break with their family in Botswana. The border between Zimbabwe and Botswana was heaving. They said the queue of people leaving the country stretched at least 3 km from the border, winding own the road and far into ‘no man’s land’ between the two posts.
These are obviously Zimbabweans returning to their jobs outside the country after coming home to visit friends and family during the Christmas break.
It reminded me of my own trip through the border last Christmas. We reached the Botswana border on our home journey and found ourselves tucked into a queue that would last hours and hours. Too weary to wait we turned back, and risked travelling all the way to a second border post, less used, thinking that it would be quicker than waiting in the queue. It was a risky choice because the crossing here involved driving across a river bed, and cars regularly get stuck in the sand. In wet weather the river rises fast and we have on at least one occasion been forced to turn back and spend another forex-chomping night in Botswana before facing the same horrendous queue into Plumtree anyway.
Last year the choice paid off. We crossed, and found ourselves the only people on the Zimbabwe side. The border post here consists of two small wooden huts – like large sheds – right on the river bank and shaded by big leafy trees. I love the quaintness of it, reminding me of border crossings into Zambia as a child. No sprawling ugly concrete buildings with impersonal cubicles for sour-faced rubber-stamping officials. Just a small hut and a few trees that feel friendly and welcoming.
The immigration official last year was very friendly and stamped my passport with a smile – maybe because I was the last entry into the country for the day.
Encouraged by his friendliness, I asked him if I could take a photo of the border post to send to friends overseas. He immediately became reserved and said no, it wasn’t allowed. I of course said I respected that so wouldn’t but thought it fairer to ask since this was a government building.
I was waiting outside while the rest of my party cleared customs. The immigration guy had closed his office and had ventured outside to enjoy a Castle lager under the trees on the river bank. He called me over and whispered why he wouldn’t let me take a photo:
“See that guy there”, he said, indicating a man sitting on a stool a few feet from the huts, “He could cause you trouble; you don’t know how things are in this country these days. Be careful”.
The guy he pointed out was wearing all black and I spotted an unholstered handgun tucked into the waistband of his trousers. He was doing nothing except sitting on a stool watching the huts, a picture of calculated gangster-style coolness. The immigration official went on to tell me that the guy in black was not customs or immigration, but something else, he wasn’t sure – CIO, army, or greenbomber…? He looked scary to me, scary enough that I decided not to encourage any more conversation on the topic in case the very friendly immigration official was actually CIO trying to lure me into a conversation that would end up with me in jail.
So we talked about the border post itself, the weather, his other jobs in different places, and we talked about the number of people who crossed from Botswana into Zimbabwe at this small isolated post.
He told me then that if I drove further inland to the rural villages at Christmas time I would see lots of cars parked outside village huts with Botswana and South African number plates, some of them large fancy cars. These belonged to Zimbabweans, he said, who work outside the country and cross back and forth regularly to do their jobs, bringing food and money home for relatives here. Christmas, he said, is the time that the biggest number return. So the sleepy border post is not as inactive as it might appear, and the creepy guy on the stool actually had more to observe than just two small huts and a guy having a beer under the tree.
It’s quite strange to think of the double lives so many people in our country lead, lives straddling countries and cultures with the terrible loneliness of working far from families. The scale of it, described to me last year by the immigration official and this year by my friends, shows how ‘normal’ it has become, a large number of our population sliding into a weary acceptance of what is simply an unacceptable and inhumane existence.
These are the millions who keep the country’s economy afloat, bringing back the critical foreign currency that our economy, so battered by government incompetence, can’t generate any more.
I wish I had thought to ask my friends whether the cars going back to Botswana had Zim plates or not? It occurs to me that with the wet weather we’ve been having this year, that the river at my favourite border post is probably in flood, making crossings there impossible. Maybe the 3km long queue included regular local ‘border crossers’ as well as Christmas visitors; it’s just as likely that the extra long queue reflects the fact that things are worse, and 2008 has also seen an increase in people desperate to find living wages outside our border.
