Migration, Borders, and Borderlands

Making National Identity in Southern African Communities

Munyaradzi Mushonga, John Aerni-Flessner, Chitja Twala, Grey Magaiza

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9781978795587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Compiling various perspectives from borderlands across the SADC region, Migration, Borders, and Borderlands: Making National Identity in Southern African Communities, edited by Munyaradzi Mushonga, John Aerni-Flessner, Chitja Twala, and Grey Magaiza, provides a synthesis of the experiences of borderland residents in this economically and socially integrated region. This book reframes debates around nationalism and belonging in southern Africa as it uses the idea of a "borderscape" to argue that nations are made at the border and in the contestations that take place in the borderlands. Understanding borders and bordering in the SADC region is crucial to understanding how policies made in oft-distant national capitals have played out among borderlands residents over time. The contributors present why national citizens in SADC so often end up in countries distant from where they were born and reside, and why leaders need to be cognizant of this. Exploring gender, history, policy, and the ways that people have moved across borders despite a myriad of restrictions stretching from the early twentieth century to the present, this collection centers the voices and experiences of the most marginal to make the plea for a more humane border regime in Southern Africa and globally.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Part I: Bordermaking, Smuggling, and Contemporary Resonances
• Chapter 1: “Putting Gunboats on the Lake”: Frelimo’s Guerrilla War and Malawi’s Border Dispute with Tanzania in the 1960s
• Chapter 2: Permitless Crossing and Tourism: Constructing Border Regimes in the Drakensberg Mountains, 1950s–Present
• Chapter 3: Posted Passports and Fake Stamps: Documented Mobility, Invisibility, and the Informal Enforcement of South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe
• Chapter 4: Contested Borderscapes, Border Farms, and Guided Travels in Zimbabwe’s Struggle for Self-Rule, 1960–1970s
• Part II: (Im)Mobilities, Transnational Communities, and Settlement
• Chapter 5: “The River Is a Natural Resource, Not a Border?”: Understanding Tonga Borderland Community Responses to State Border Security Policy in Binga District of Zimbabwe, c. 1957 to 2017
• Chapter 6: Crossing a “Fictitious” Border: Angolan Refugees’ Mobility and Settling Dynamics in the Lower-Congo (1950s–1970s)
• Chapter 7: Angolan and Mozambican Border Towns: Interconnecting and Consolidating Southern African Mobilities
• Chapter 8: Cross-Border Mobility of Mozambicans to South Africa and the Growth of Informal Trade in the City of Xai-Xai 2005–2022
• Chapter 9: Cultural Capital, Virtual Borderlands, and the Making of the Southern African Communities in Two Zambian Novels
• Part III: Gender and the Politics of (Il)Legal Border Crossing
• Chapter 10: “You Have to Pay with Your Body”: The Precarity of Subaltern Basotho Migrant Women within the Lesotho-South Africa Border(land)s
• Chapter 11: Women Entrepreneurs and Border Jumpers in the Zimbabwe-South Africa Border
• Chapter 12: Of Paqama Gates and Paqama Scouts: The Innerworkings of Regulated Illegal and Irregular Border Crossing between Lesotho and South Africa
• Index
• About the Contributors