With the end of apartheid rule in South Africa and the ongoing economic crisis in Zimbabwe, the border between these Southern African countries has become one of the busiest inland ports of entry in the world. As border crossers wait for clearance, crime, violence, and illegal entries have become rampant. Francis Musoni observes that border jumping has become a way of life for many of those who live on both sides of the Limpopo River and he explores the reasons for this, including searches for better paying jobs and access to food and clothing at affordable prices. Musoni sets these actions into a framework of illegality. He considers how countries have failed to secure their borders, why passports are denied to travelers, and how border jumping has become a phenomenon with a long history, especially in Africa. Musoni emphasizes cross-border travelers' active participation in the making of this history and how clandestine mobility has presented opportunity and creative possibilities for those who are willing to take the risk.
This action packed reader-gripping book is a grueling harsh journey of Zimbabweans who cross borders into South Africa illegally, in search of greener pastures. Their worst nightmare is not only the crocodile infested river Limpopo that they cross, but also what they locally call Amagumaguma, a notorious gang of thieves and contract slayers who prey on the little possessions they migrate with, rape or sodomize them and ruthlessly butcher the vulnerable in order to sell their body parts to local witchdoctors and those afar. These grisly murderers have laid into graves many lives! The ill-fated border jumpers also have to contend with vicious, ravenous predators like lions, leopards and hyenas and other such carnivores in search of easy prey. Brutal soldiers vigilantly guarding these borders for trespassers also add to their woes. Of course, these law-breaking border-jumpers have those who help them out. For a fee of a thousand five hundred rands or two hundred American dollars, the Malayisha (cross-border taxi drivers) transport them from various parts of Zimbabwe to the Beit-Bridge border post, where they are handed over to the Impisi (escorts) at secluded rendezvous outside the border posts. These Impisi are paid by the Malayisha to escort their passengers without passports, across river Limpopo right up to near Musina in South Africa where they pick them up again and take them to Johannesburg. The border jumpers however risk all these predators that hunt down anything that moves throughout the night. In the novel, we meet Themba Khumalo who had always wanted to go to the lucrative South Africa but did not have Malayisha' s fees until when his father died, he inherited two of his father's donkeys and gave them to a local Malayisha as payment in kind, for the fees to take him to Johannesburg. What he did not know was that where he was going, the familiar became mysterious and the unfamiliar, gruesome and bizarre indeed! It was a place of delusion and paradox with a very thin line between life and death, as too many predatory eyes were fixed on the prey!
THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY - Book 13 Fans around the world adore the best-selling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe—with help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsi—navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea. Precious Ramotswe is haunted by a repeated dream: a vision of a tall, strange man who waits for her beneath an acacia tree. Odd as this is, she’s far too busy to worry about it. The best apprentice at Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors is in trouble with the law and stuck with the worst lawyer in Gaborone. Grace Makutsi and Phuti Radiphuti are building the house of their dreams, but their builder is not completely on the up and up. And, most shockingly, Mma Potokwane, defender of Botswana’s weak and downtrodden, has been dismissed from her post as matron at the orphan farm. Can the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency help restore the beloved matron to her rightful position? As wealthy and powerful influences at the orphan farm become allied against their friend, help arrives from an unexpected visitor: the tall stranger from Mma Ramotswe’s dreams, who turns out to be none other than the estimable Clovis Andersen, author of the No. 1 Ladies’ prized manual, The Principles of Private Detection. Together, Mma Ramotswe, Mma Makutsi, and their teacher-turned-colleague help right this injustice and in the process discover something new about being a good detective. BONUS MATERIAL: This ebook edition includes an excerpt from Alexander McCall Smith's The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon.
Follows the summer adventures of Jake and Jill, twelve-year-old twins whose parents are employed at the Limpopo Game Park during the 1950s, and their friends Sipho and Thandi.
An increasing number of people today cross the Beitbridge border of South Africa and Zimbabwe. This comes with a corresponding growth of creative strategies that seek to aid the crossing of those people and goods that may lack the necessary documentation. Such ‘informal’ border crossings have come to define one of the important economic regions in Southern Africa, the post-1994 Limpopo Valley. This thesis approaches routine acts of facilitating undocumented border crossings as an everyday social politics with deep historical roots. By use of archival and ethnographic methods, the thesis examines the social history and embodied practices of a variety of actors who engage in undocumented border crossings. A particular focus is placed on the role of private transporters (omalayitsha), who represent an important link between an exclusionary and yet fragmentary migration regime and undocumented travellers. In three theoretical and four empirical chapters, and inspired by border studies as well as the critical realist approach in migration studies, the thesis connects border practice to irregular movement and cheap labour within a regional context defined, in part, by dispossession. Through thick interpretations of the lived experience of border practice, the study also connects such political economic processes (e.g. migrant irregularity, labour precarity and economic informality) to questions of social identity and migrant subjectivities. By situating the figure of the hyena at the centre of Southern African border struggles, the thesis invents an analytical concept that serves both an empirical and a theoretical task. Empirically, it enables a synthetic understanding of how everyday contestations around the possibility to work across the border for low-skill migrants have been interacting, through time, with broader processes of capital accumulation to partly shape the region’s migrant labour system. Theoretically, it shows how facilitation of undocumented border crossings calls for new sociological models that can account for processes that escape binary classification (as formal or informal, inclusive or exclusive, legal or illegal, ordered or disordered), thus contributing to a better understanding of the role of migration in the contemporary world. Allt fler människor korsar idag gränsen vid Beitbridge mellan Sydafrika och Zimbabwe. Samtidigt sker en motsvarande ökning av kreativa strategier som gör att även personer och varor som saknar rätt handlingar kan ta sig över gränsen. Dessa ‘informella’ gränsövergångar har kommit att definiera vad som efter 1994 blivit en av de viktigaste ekonomiska regionerna i södra Afrika, Limpopodalen. I denna avhandling betraktas rutinerna vid sådana oregistrerade gränsövergångar som en vardagens politik med djupa historiska rötter. Genom arkivstudier och etnografiska observationer undersöker avhandlingen en samhällshistoria och en mänsklig aktivitet där en rad aktörer är inblandade i en pågående, papperslös migration. En viktig roll i sammanhanget har omalayitsha, dvs. privata transportörer, som ofta är en viktig länk mellan de papperslösa resenärerna och den migrationsregim som å ena sidan stänger dem ute och å andra sidan är så fragmenterad att de tillåts passera igenom. I tre teoretiska och fyra empiriska kapitel, samt med ett angreppssätt hämtat från gränsstudier (border studies) och den kritiskt realistiska skolan inom migrationsstudier, syftar avhandlingen till att förstå gränsövergångens praktik i förhållande till den irreguljära mobilitet och det överskott på billig arbetskraft som sätter sin prägel på en region där många är fattiga och fördrivna. I avhandlingens djuptolkningar av migranternas levda erfarenhet vid gränsen förbinds i sin tur de politiskt-ekonomiska processerna (irreguljär migration, prekära arbetsvillkor och ekonomisk informalitet) med frågor om samhällelig identitet och migrantens subjektivitet. Avhandlingen ser hyenafiguren som central för förståelsen av de ’gränskamper’ (border struggles) som utkämpas i södra Afrika; med hyenan introduceras också ett analytiskt begrepp. Empiriskt sett möjliggör begreppet en syntetisk förståelse av hur vardagliga tvister och problem som präglar arbetsmigrantens försök att jobba på andra sidan gränsen över tid samverkar med större processer av kapitalackumulation, som delvis formar regionens migrantarbetarsystem. I teoretiskt avseende visar begreppet hur förhandlingarna som sker vid gränskontrollen klargör behovet av nya sociologiska modeller som kan redogöra för samhällsprocesser som undflyr varje binär klassificering (som formell eller informell, inkluderande eller exkluderande, legal eller illegal, ordnad eller oordnad), och på så vis bidrar det till en bättre förståelse av migrationens betydelse i dagens värld.
Argues that the historical primacy of youth politics in Limpopo, South Africa has influenced the production of generations of nationally prominent youth and student activists - among them Julius Malema, Onkgopotse Tiro, Cyril Ramaphosa, Frank Chikane, and Peter Mokaba.
Michael Nicholson...decides to drive back to Europe with his wife & children, a five month trip that takes them through most of the countries of East & Southern Central Africa. It is a fascinating itinerary
Tannie Maria might be the Karoo’s favourite agony aunt, but when it comes to matters of her own heart, she doesn’t have all the answers. Why is she having trouble telling her beau – the dashing Detective Henk Kannemeyer with the chestnut moustache – that she loves him? There are other, more pressing problems too. A tall, dark stranger zooms in on her Ducati motorbike: she is Zabanguni Kani, a journalist renowned for her political exposés, who, after receiving threats, moves in with Tannie Maria for safety. And who could tell that a trip to the country’s northern parts was on the cards? The journey plunges Maria and her friends into pools of danger, amid water maidens, murders, and Harley Davidsons. Ladismith’s famous crime fighter is back – with a tin of buttermilk rusks in hand – to restore peace from the Klein Karoo to the great Limpopo River.
