saying that migrants sought the assistance of smugglers who helped them to dodge the Southern Rhodesian authorities’ measures of controlling cross-Limpopo mobility, I am by no means suggesting that the interactions between these two groups always happened in a pleasant and business-like environment. Labor recruiters often “used all sorts of tricks and ploys,” to force work-seeking migrants to sign up with them.69 One strategy they used was to establish makeshift camps in the border zone, from which they deployed African “touts” and “runners” along the routes that migrants used as they traveled between the two territories. In addition to intercepting migrants already en route to the Transvaal, labor recruiters sometimes paid bribes to village leaders to gain access into the African communities where they met potential clients. On entering African communities, recruiters often used cash advances, clothes, and food handouts to lure potential workers to sign up for work contracts and leave their villages.70 Given the challenges that cash taxation, land alienation, and other colonial policies caused among the African communities in Southern Rhodesia, it is not surprising that some people embraced labor recruiters, who they regarded as helpers rather than the exploiters that they were.
As the demand for labor in the Transvaal grew rapidly in the first decade of the twentieth century—when Southern Rhodesian authorities increased controls of cross-Limpopo mobility—the triangular space at the intersection of the Southern Rhodesia–Mozambique–Transvaal borders became a hive of activities associated with labor recruitment and smuggling. This area, then known as the Pafuri Triangle, was in a remote and rugged terrain infested with the tsetse fly and malarial mosquitoes. Emphasizing how difficult it was to get to Pafuri, Thomas V. Bulpin says, “The journey to this spot was as arduous as it was perilous, passing through a land tormented by the devils of heat and thirst where constant danger lurked around every corner, and only the most adventuresome or foolish attempted it.”71 Given that Southern Rhodesia did not have any administrative post in the Beitbridge area, the nearest place where state officials were located was the police station at Sibasa in the northern Transvaal, more than a hundred miles away.
Because the Transvaal government was not much invested in the control of cross-Limpopo mobility, the Sibasa police station served little purpose. As such, there was barely any presence of law enforcement agents at Pafuri during much of the first decade of the twentieth century. Taking advantage of the general absence of state functionaries in the Pafuri Triangle, numerous individuals with criminal records in the Transvaal sought to escape the law by camping in this place. Consequently, the Pafuri Triangle also became known as “Crooks’ Corner.”72
While some fugitives at Pafuri survived on hunting elephants and other wild animals in the Limpopo Valley, others joined the rank and file of unlicensed recruiters who also camped at Crooks’ Corner. As Martin J. Murray put it, most of the campers at Crooks’ Corner were “unscrupulous fortune-hunters specialising in smuggling a particular kind of contraband: African labour.”73 Being at the intersection of three different territories, this location also made it easier for the residents of Pafuri to play hide and seek with the police whenever the latter visited the area in pursuit of one individual or another. Boasting about how they used the beacon at the intersection of the three territories’ borders to avoid arrest, a former labor recruiter, who spent several years at Crooks’ Corner, said, “Whoever comes for you, you can always be on the other side in someone else’s territory; and if they all come at once, you can always sit on the beacon top and let them fight over who is to pinch you.”74 Migrants originating from areas far from the border, such as Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, and other parts of Southern Rhodesia, also went to Crooks’ Corner, where they linked up with labor recruiters ready to take them to potential employers in the Transvaal. It was also common for recruiters at Crooks’ Corner to dispatch touts to communities adjacent the Limpopo River to scout for potential workers. That the WNLA stationed some of its labor agents at Crooks’ Corner shows not only the extent to which this place had become an important part of the region’s market-oriented economies but also the ways in which border jumping blurred the distinction between formal- and informal-sector activities in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Sometime in 1910 two European adventurers, Alec Thompson and William Pye, built a store “atop a low, 500-feet high ridge, which formed a sort of topographical backbone to the wild wedge of land” between the three territories.75 In addition to selling food, clothes, malaria drugs (mostly quinine), and whisky, Pye and Thompson, like the rest of the campers at this place, also functioned as labor recruiters. They often engaged work-seekers who arrived at the store in starving conditions and passed them along to the Transvaal mine owners. In that respect, the pair used their store as a clearinghouse or auction floor for work-seeking migrants who ate, rested, obtained new clothes, and signed engagement contracts at Crooks’ Corner before proceeding to different places in the Transvaal and beyond.76 This effectively made the Pafuri Triangle the headquarters of labor pirates who promoted border jumping from Zimbabwe to South Africa in the early twentieth century.
The significance of Crooks’ Corner in this history is not simply that it quickly became the most known place where border jumpers met human smugglers. This place also became the center of migration-related violence within a few years of the British colonization of Zimbabwe. As labor recruiters sought to maximize returns in this environment, where lawlessness prevailed, some of them deployed violent methods. This often involved the use of guns to intercept border jumpers and force them to sign contracts that directed them to specific employers. It was also common for recruiters to fight over and rob each other of the migrants they would have mobilized. Referring to recruiters’ violent behavior, Bulpin wrote, “The bushrangers were as tough a crowd as any bully bosun. They asked no quarter from life, and gave none.”77
By the time the Transvaal merged with the Orange Free State, Natal, and the Cape Colony, forming the Union of South Africa in May 1910, border jumping had emerged a defining feature of the Transvaal–Southern Rhodesia border. What previously was simply a river in a frontier zone had become a geopolitical and juridical boundary. As was the case with the US–Mexico border, which split culturally homogenous groups into two sovereign states, the South Africa–Zimbabwe border tore communities asunder.78
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