Hostile Refuge
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IT WAS OCTOBER when I flew to the border town of Musina, a dusty backwater of 60,000 people located 300 miles northeast of Johannesburg, to get a firsthand look at the Zimbabwean influx. The trip north from the nearest airport in the farming town of Polokwane was a monotonous drive through sparsely populated bush, broken by a few ramshackle tin-roofed settlements. In the early morning, as I neared Musina, I spotted five dazed men wearing threadbare clothing standing along the two-lane blacktop—almost certainly illegal arrivals from Zimbabwe who had just crossed the river.
Two giant slag heaps greeted me as I turned off the Limpopo Valley highway and approached the town's outskirts. Musina came to life in 1905 as a copper mine, and after malaria was eradicated it grew prosperous until the early 1980s, when the copper ran out. Newly independent Zimbabwe became a base for bloody cross-border ambushes and attacks by the ANC on white ranches around Musina. With the end of apartheid, Musina got a new lease on life as a trading post. (Musina's Beit Bridge, the only span along the entire border, is named after Alfred Beit, a German mining baron who financed its construction in the 1920s; the Zimbabwean town of Beitbridge lies at its opposite terminus.) Illegal immigration has given a new jolt to the local economy, I was told by Jack Klaff, a white rancher and Musina's ex-mayor, as we walked down the town's bustling main street. Indian-owned supermarkets and appliance stores stood alongside a KFC, feed stores, and shops selling biltong, a jerkylike specialty. "The police force has grown dramatically, Home Affairs guys are stationed here, troops are in town, and they all have to eat and shop," said Klaff. "Plus, many of the Zimbabwean illegals work on the nearby farms, and they spend their money in town. The town is booming like we've never seen it."
Musina's traders aren't the only ones profiting off the refugees. Smugglers lurk in the bush on the Zimbabwe side of the Limpopo, charging $100 a head to guide the desperate. The Zimbabwean police, notoriously corrupt, demand "$80 if they catch you," one recent arrival told me. On the other side, South African troops, spread thin along the border, and immigration officials also shake the migrants down, according to refugees. Fleets of taxis wait at night alongside the river, packing in refugees at about $30 a head, for the long drive to Johannesburg, where the job opportunities—as well as the risk of arrest—are far greater.
Musina is also the last stop in South Africa for those whose luck has run out. Once every fortnight, Home Affairs officials pack hundreds of detainees from the Lindela Repatriation Center in Krugersdorp into a train for the 16-hour journey north back to Musina, then truck them across the Beit Bridge to Zimbabwe. It is a cruel, endlessly repeated, and largely futile operation. On a recent Thursday morning, I arrived at the Musina station at 11 a.m., just as the "Limpopo Local" arrived. Uniformed police with billy clubs and plainclothes Home Affairs men jumped off first, then herded a crowd of shabby detainees onto the platform. "Lines of 10!" barked a cop from the unit charged with guarding the prisoners. "Ten per row. Sit down!" The Zimbabweans— all men in their 20s and 30s—knelt obediently in the gravel. Some clutched plastic bottles of water or juice, and many carried or wore heavy down jackets, which doubled as sleeping bags. The air reeked of sweat and defeat. A minute or two after the men lined up, a smaller group of women prisoners stepped off the train and formed their own row on the next platform.
"We had a lot of jumpers today. We lost about 20 off the train today, but no reports of deaths," said the head of the unit, a "colored" captain from Pretoria named Roet. Despite being beanpole thin and bespectacled, Roet, with two pistols slung around his safari shorts and a dark-blue police shirt with a red special branch insignia, cut a crisp, authoritative figure as he surveyed the throng impassively. "Sometimes you recognize them," he said. "You say to yourself, ‘I remember repatriating this one a week ago—he's on the train again.' They say, ‘You can arrest me, but I'll be back before you get to Johannesburg.' Usually they're right."
Wearing a pressed, light-blue shirt and clean khaki pants that set him apart from the ragged-looking men around him, a 26-year-old man named Brian said he came from the town of Kwekwe in the Midlands region of Zimbabwe, and that, after graduating high school, he had worked at a slaughterhouse there. But it closed two years ago, and, with no prospects and no money, "I finally said, I have to come here," he explained. Brian slipped across the fence two months ago, paid $40 for a ride to Johannesburg, and found a job making tiles for $14 a day—enough to support his wife and two-year-old son back in Kwekwe and pay the school fees for his younger brother. When the police burst into the factory on September 6, Brian said, they arrested 16 of the 20 workers—all Zimbabwean illegals.
He spent two weeks in Lindela with 1,500 other illegal immigrants, 900 of them Zimbabwean. Tuberculosis and other diseases were rampant, he claimed; medicines unavailable or out of date, the food was "horrible," and the guards teargassed him and a dozen other prisoners at 10 o'clock one night "when we wouldn't turn off a football match on television." (In the first half of 2005, 28 people died at Lindela. Reports have also proliferated of guards demanding bribes or sexual favors from detainees in exchange for release. South Africa denies that detainees at Lindela are treated harshly. "We have invited the media to visit Lindela to see for themselves the conditions," says Mantshele Tau, a Home Affairs spokesman. "As far as we are concerned, we subscribe to international standards, and we are obliged by international conventions to treat refugees as humanely as possible.") Without the money to get home to Kwekwe, 200 miles from the border, Brian said that he'd probably sneak back across to South Africa at the earliest opportunity. "My father is dead, my mother is old, I'm the only breadwinner in the family," he told me. "I don't know what will happen to me."
