Fence-Jumping, Zimbabwe’s new national sport.
Bumping along a sandy track in the pre-dawn gloom, sleepy boredom turns to excitement as security guard Pappi Molefe hisses “Illegals!” from the open back of the Landcruiser and turns on his failing torch to reveal two frightened young men huddled under Mopane bushes.

Isaac and Nathan, in their twenties, say they had made their way from Harare alone, and that two other men had joined them once they had illegally crossed the Limpopo River.  Those two had disappeared into the darkness at the approach of our vehicle. While talking to them alongside the road they had hoped to reach, a pickup truck with a steel canopy slows alongside us.  The driver recognizes the security patrol and begins to curse and shout insults, threats.  Did I hear the Ndebele for ‘kill’ in that diatribe?  Pappi simply turns away and the vehicle lurches off.  “They are here to pick up the Zimbabweans,” Pappi tells me, grim faced, “We are interfering in their business.”  The shadowy men who guide the illegals across the border are in constant cell phone contact with the drivers.  Moving human cargo across the Limpopo is big business, and has become a sophisticated – if low tech – operation.

Pappi tells them where to find water, and points them in the direction of the closest town, Musina. Pappi is not about to waste his time arresting just two Zimbabweans. The previous week he had caught a group of 175 men, women and children, single-handed. I’m relieved and secretly pleased he has not bothered to apprehend them: two courageous young men have been given a chance to reach their El Dorado: South Africa’s industrial and commercial heartland – Gauteng, some 700km to the south.

Pappi and his colleagues continue their patrol as a wan grey dawn lightens the scrubby bush.  We soon come across a wide swathe of fresh tracks in the sand.  “Maybe sixty in this group,” he grunts as he leaps off the open safari vehicle.
The tracks are etched into the gritty sand so sharply even I can follow them at a jog, but then we find the spot where the group rested, regrouping after forcing their way through the game fence.  A blue plastic packet lies discarded at the base of the fence, the tiny ornamental clay pots that shattered in a fall. In an instant, I have a vision of the type of person we are chasing: desperate, naïve, yet optimistic enough to bring these cheap useless curios all the way across the Limpopo.  Did that person hope to sell the pots for subsistence money or was it a gift for someone down South, someone who might be able to help?  A pair of blue toddler’s shorts lies discarded, perhaps lost in the dark, when the guides had urged them to move to swiftly set off again.  I think my own two year old’s proud endeavors to dress himself, and of his clumsiness when rushed.  Pappi takes advantage of the moment to roll tobacco in a piece of newsprint. The harsh, pungent smell mingles with the sulfurous tang of the match.  I study him: the well-worn tobacco pouch, the unlikely sandals, the short club and the barely concealed pistol tucked into his trousers.

Perhaps uncomfortable with being surreptitiously stared at, he points behind me, I turn and see a faded pale blue towel under a thorn bush.  It has clearly been exposed to the elements longer that just one night.  Next to it is a dark patch, richer than the surrounding soil “Here we found a woman, with her dead baby on her chest, wrapped in that towel,” says Pappi. I stare at the spot as he continues, “The doctor said that the baby survived a least two more days after she had died.”

I don’t have much time to dwell on the scene, though the forensics are chillingly apparent.  Soon I am panting in Pappi’s wake as we pursue the group through the bush on foot.  “We will catch then soon,” he whispers.  It’s a race to beat them to the road, where mini bus taxis and pick-ups await the.

It is sickeningly exciting, chasing down these poor and wretched refugees from Mugabe’s failing Zimbabwe. It is also rather frightening:  what will happen when we catch them, are they armed, violent?  It is with mixed feelings of relief and disappointment that our hunt ends at a gaping hole in the barbed wire fence fronting the national road.  All we found were discarded water bottles.  They were gone, on the next leg of their journey.

Every day, hundreds of Zimbabweans are caught and returned across the border.  Army officers and locals say that the trickle of fence-jumpers had increased to a torrent.  Most Zimbabweans have given up hope of either political or economic normalization under President Robert Mugabe’s dictatorial rule. The South African daily Business Day recently published an amusing yet shocking statistic: If someone were to spend one million Zimbabwean dollars on beer, drank them, and waited a month to return the empties; he would make a profit of some 16 million Zim dollars.

A Kenyan friend recently visited Zimbabwe and was shocked at the extent of state’s grip on ordinary citizens: “Every bar I drank in had two or three state informers or secret policemen.”  Perhaps that observation says more about the habits of pro-Mugabe thugs than it does about state oppression, but recent years have seen a brutalization of the average Zimbabwean by the state in many ways.  Political freedom does not exist unless it is the brief window around elections when a farcical imitation of democracy is played out.  The shanty towns that shadow every African city became a target of Mugabe’s army and police as they were believed to be predominantly opposition supporters: the shacks and informal dwellings were razed, bulldozed and their inhabitants forced to survive under plastic sheeting.  Individuals were arrested, beaten and tortured.  Youngsters are recruited into ruling party youth militia, and they are encouraged to rape as part of their intimidation of regime opponents.

Any Zimbabwean who has managed to retain a spark of revolutionary spirit after all this has then to overcome the mind-numbing ordeal of finding food and fuel in a failing/failed economy.  For many, the prosperity and freedom found south of the Limpopo is the only answer. South Africa is also a target for Zimbabwean criminals – many of the gangs operating in crime-plagued South Africa are Zimbabwean, often military men who use their skills in daring and violent bank robberies and cash-in-transit heists.  One of Johannesburg’s eccentricities is the plague of blind Zimbabwean beggars at traffic lights.  Sitting trapped at a red light, trying to decide whether to pass some change through the window or ignore the outstretched hands has made the Zimbabwean influx quite personal for many of us.  I sometimes wonder why Zimbabwe has so many blind people.  The blind each have their sighted assistants who hold out a tin cup or a hat or just an upturned palm for a handout.  Sometimes the police raid the busiest intersections after some good citizen’s complaint and dozens of blind Zimbabweans are arrested and sent to Lindela repatriation camp to be deported.  They are here without papers, illegal immigrants, unrecognized as either economic or political refugees.

Obtaining a passport is not an option for the poor and so they have to cross illegally.  Those caught and deported by South African security forces simply turn around and try again, hoping to make it through.  One young woman told of being arrested for the eighth time.  The border post is a roundabout for desperate Zimbabweans.

It is primarily the army who catch the would-be immigrants.  They are tasked with guarding the thousands of kilometers of shared border.  We meet a couple of the local officers at an army base near the riverbank, mercifully shaded by the bridge.

A prefabricated building is crowded with Zimbabweans, while a few men stand outside, smoking.  The oldest is in his sixties the youngest are the babies strapped to their mothers’ backs by blankets or towels.  The majority of the illegals are women, younger women with infants.  They are processed by a soldier and then they will be loaded ontop trucks and taken to the border crossing on the bridge above to be repatriated.

It is a quiet, almost contemplative place, this holding building.  No one appears stressed, it is all rather matter of fact.  There is a sense of resignation, but more than that, most Zimbabweans accept that to get into South Africa they have to face being caught a few times.  For some of them, this ritual gamble has been undertaken many times.  Money earned in South Africa has to be taken back to assist their families at home, and there are always family and emotional crises to be dealt with.

Then two military patrol vehicles arrive, and the atmosphere changes – they are jammed with people who have just been picked up.  In one of them a toddler is weeping bitterly as his clearly terrified mother tries to calm him.  As they climb off the vehicles, an officer asks her what the matter is “My son is hungry.  He has not eaten in two days.”  She says.

Within minutes, soldiers arrive with armfuls of food, their own rations.  The officer uses his penknife to cut an apple into slices and feeds them to the boy, who immediately stops crying.  “It makes me think of my own child, who is the same age.”  I rather guiltily look away as I’d rather not someone see the shine in my own eye.  A little while later, he admits to having abused the refugees in the past.  He used to mistreat them, even give them a smack, or a punch.  “I believed they should stay in their own country, sort out their problems there.  They come here and add to our employment problems, many are criminals.  I was angry that as a soldier I was chasing these people down day after day.”
“Then I met a woman, and I asked her why did she not stay in her own country.  She looked me in the eye and said she could not.  She was the last adult alive in her entire extended family, and there were a dozen children to feed, clothe and school.  This was her eighth trip across the border.  On three of those trips she had been raped by the ‘guides’ or gooma-goomas, but that had not deterred her”.

He says that it was his Damascus moment, as if the Zimbabweans humanity had suddenly been revealed to him.  He began to treat the captured border crossers with care and respect.

We are then taken on a tour of the fence.  The border is a beautiful area, low verdant hills that line the immense sandy banks of the Limpopo.  It might well have been great greasy green Limpopo in Kipling’s time, but today is just a simple stretched foot leap across.  It is, really, I did it.  It took me just 30 seconds to breach the multi million dollar – backtracking along a set of Zimbabwean footprints.  The fearsome razor wire barriers have been cut through and bent back in enough places to render the fence an exercise in futility.  In one fifty meters stretch, there were twenty-five holes or other breaches.  Army officers say that they were forced to turn the electric current down to warning amperage from the deadly level it had been set to in the Apartheid years.  It would seem that the inhumane is the only way to deter illegals from crossing, a move unlikely under the current regime.

For others, crossing the border is a more banal affair. Right under the Beit Bridge spanning the neighboring countries, within calling distance of an army base, teenagers are sitting on the catwalk under the road bridge, their feet dangling loosely several meters above the final razor wire fence.  They appear remarkably unconcerned, and chat to us about their plans to enter South Africa.  They say they have been across several times.  Should I say their stories rang untrue, that I suspected they were lying?  Wish I could, but actually their youth and the thought of what difficulties awaited them had me on the verge of tears.

Suddenly there was a flurry of activity further back along the catwalk, behind the array of fences.  Four teenagers clamber down between the concrete bridge supports and race off to the West.  We follow in the car, seeing glimpses of their clothing through the drab bush.  Then nothing.  Not a sound nor movement.  Parking on a rise, we watch for their emergence at any of the dozen possible crossing places.  Minutes pass.  Have they been scared off our presence?  Fifteen minutes pass and then they appear some 50 meters away.  One skinny youth is holding up a roll of razor wire and the other two are crawling under it, snagging their clothing as they wriggle free.  They run across to the next fence, which has a hole the size of a gate cut in it, and then they vault the final tall fence as if fence jumping was Zimbabwe’s national sport.  They are in South Africa.  It all looks so easy.  The third youth is watching from the far side of the barriers: “It’s okay,” I yell, “you can come.”  “No, he calls back “ I will come across in the morning, I have to help other friends.”  What a selfless guy, I think.

The two have scampered over to our car, and are sitting low in the back seat.  Tariro Mbudzi, 17, and Obey Sithole, 19, are negotiating for a lift away from the border in exchange for interviews. There is no need; we had already decided to give them a lift.  In the confessional atmosphere of a moving car, their stories emerge.

Firstly, we discover that the kids hanging high above us were not fleeing Zimbabwe but the ‘guides’ who charge people to help them across.  The other two youths running with Tariro and Obey were also guides.  But as is common, the guides or gooma-goomas, also rob their charges.  They describe what happened in the fifteen minutes when they were hidden in the bush: the guides threatened them with pangas – machetes – and rifled their bags, taking what they though valuable.  Tariro had his favorite Zimbabwean compact discs stolen, and the player, as well as a baseball cap and a pair of smart dress shoes.  The good shoes were in case he got a job interview.  Tariro comes from an upper middle class home.  His father is a fomer high-ranking military man, and a stalwart of the ruling ZANU-PF of Mugabe.  He is now a businessman, but still strongly supportive of the party.  Tariro is a supporter of the opposition MDC, and a little fearful of his disciplinarian father.  He and his school friends like Obey spent hours discussing how they would go seek their fortunes after their final exams.  Obey had been down South before, he had gone to work for his uncle in construction:
“It was slavery,” he says, “Never again.  I will make my own way, perhaps as a builder.”  He asks to use my cell phone to call his cousin, who lives outside of Johannesburg.  They arrange to meet downtown.  Obey is unclear of how he will make a living, but at least they have a place to crash.

Tariro is more subdued, he is thinking about home, and how his father will take the news of his departure.  Two nights ago, in a darkened Harare suburb, Tariro roused himself at midnight to write a difficult letter: a goodbye to his father.  He spent three hours penning a careful and respectful note ending off by saying that God willing, he would be able to help support the family.  He slipped out before dawn, and took a bus to the border, where he naively hooked up with the gooma-goomas.

It is clear that Tariro comes from a relatively privileged home, but tensions with his father and more especially with his stepmother, as well a sense of adventure pushed him to leave.  He sold his near-top-of-the-line Nokia cell phone to pay for his travel, but all that was taken by the gooma-goomas.  Nonetheless, he is confident that once out of Zimbabwe, everything will fall into place

A few weeks later, we hear from Tariro: he needs work, any kind of a job, even gardening.  Can we help?

Greg Marinovich  text and images copyright 2007. This piece first appeared in a.magazine