In the Shadow of a Conflict: Crisis in Zimbabwe and its effects in Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia

3. Poverty, Shelter and Opportunities: Zimbabweans’ experiences in Mozambique

67 Introduction It was during the year 2008 – the year of the most dramatic and most contested elections in Zimbabwe to date – that unprecedented numbers of Zimbabweans crossed the border to seek refuge in Mozambique. While the majority of those who left the country during the decade from 2000 went to South Africa (UNHCR, 2010), thousands also crossed into Mozambican territory. A significant number of them ended up in the border province of Manica. In 2008, during the tense, violent period between the first round of elections on 29 March and the second round on 27 June, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) made operational plans for the reception of Zimbabwean refugees in neighbouring countries. By June 2008, it had plans for five refugee camps sites in Mozambique; two of them were to be located in Manica Province, with a capacity to receive around 70,000 people (UNHCR, 2008). These plans were, however, never put into practice. This chapter seeks to describe the Zimbabwean presence in Manica Province against a backdrop of their virtual absence from both the public scene and public debate in Mozambique. It also provides an interpretation of why no refugee camps were ever established to receive the overwhelming influx of people into the border zones in 2008.2 With hindsight, we can see that the cross-border movement of Zimbabweans into Manica Province in 2008 only represented a peak in a more continuous flow of people seeking alternative livelihood opportunities and shelter from the economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe. This movement should, in turn, be placed in a historical context of more than a century of cross-border migration. A range of historical and more recent analyses describes the local and regional dynamics of migration ever since the present-day border-line, after considerable controversy, was agreed upon through the treaty signed by Britain 3 Poverty, Shelter and Opportunities Zimbabweans’ Experiences in Mozambique Randi Kaarhus1 In the Shadow of a Conflict 68 and Portugal in 1891 (e.g. Newitt, 1995: 355; Hughes, 1999; Allina-Pisano, 2003; Tornimbeni, 2007).3 The influx of Zimbabweans into Mozambique during the last decade has, by contrast, not been extensively documented and analyzed. Duri (2010: 128) even refers to contemporary cross-border dynamics in the area as ‘conspicuously underrepresented in scholarly works’. Data sources and fieldwork This chapter draws on a diversity of published and unpublished written sources in combination with on-site fieldwork. A review of academic literature on Mozambique in general, and studies concerned with the border region Mozambique/Zimbabwe and the Province of Manica in particular, was supplemented with reports on refugees and migrants in the region and reports on the human-rights situation in Zimbabwe, as well as in Mozambique. Fieldwork was carried out in Manica Province during five stays in the period between October 2007 and April 2010, totalling approximately eighteen weeks. Through informal visits and participant observation in various locations in the province, as a researcher I was able to meet with civil society organizations and NGOs working in Manica, and also had the opportunity to carry out ten formal interviews with people representing different locally based organizations. I further conducted 40 in-depth interviews with Zimbabweans living in Manica, in addition to having a large number of informal conversations with both Mozambicans and Zimbabweans.4 Here the identities of the Zimbabweans interviewed are concealed in order to protect their privacy and security, as most of them have had to resort to some form of extra-legal procedures in order to survive and make a living in Mozambique. Finally, I had a limited number of informal interviews with people on the Zimbabwean side during brief visits across the border. The analysis presented in this chapter is, furthermore, based on the author spending a total of more than three years in Mozambique during the period 1999–2011. Background and context In early 2000, when a majority of Zimbabweans did not support President Mugabe’s ZANU-PF in the constitutional referendum called that year, it was commonly seen as the first serious challenge to the party-in-power since Zimbabwean Independence in 1980. Soon after the referendum, the land invasions on commercial farms, induced by the President and officially legitimized 69 Poverty, shelter and opportunities through the new and radical Fast Track Land Reform programme, resulted in increasing numbers of evictions both of white farm owners and black farm workers on large commercial farms. By...