Unaccompanied child migrants from Zimbabwe to South Africa
Manase Kudzai Chiweshe, Chinhoyi University of Technology, Zimbabwe
In Zimbabwe, the migration process has long been understood as an adult phenomenon with little attention to children. This is mainly because migration has long been assumed to be a dangerous endeavor for children on their own. Childhood, by all accounts, should be an exciting time of growth and personal development. It is a time to explore without worrying about all the challenges facing this world. Yet in Zimbabwe, there is an ever-growing tragedy of unaccompanied and undocumented child migrants. Their heartbreaking stories and experiences point to a child protection problem that the Zimbabwean government has largely ignored. Stanley Kwenda, an investigative reporter, provides a poignant picture of this tragedy in a documentary screened on Al Jazeera. In that documentary, Kwenda asks sadly, ‘What has my country come to, that despair and poverty are forcing children to take such dreadful risks?’ The state of a government and a people is seen in how it treats its children. The growing number of children who are deciding that it is better to brave the unknown dangers of illegal migration than it is to stay in their home country starkly demonstrates the failures of the Zimbabwean state.
The socio-economic and political crises post-2000 in Zimbabwe has led to children migrating on their own using illegal means, mainly to South Africa and Botswana. Most leave Zimbabwe because of diverse challenges at home and opportunities available in the destination, yet they are often unaware of the difficulties of migration. Illegal migration exposes these children — especially vulnerable due to their age — to a myriad of problems.
What do we know of the children who migrate? Of the 8,408 children assisted by Save the Children Norway — Zimbabwe at the Beitbridge border posts between June 2006 and 2010, 86% were boys, and 96% were between the ages of 12 and 17. The five major child-migrant-sending districts were Chipinge, Masvingo, Mberengwa, Bulawayo and Chiredzi. All these towns are fairly near to border areas and have high rates of poverty. 73% of the children reported it being their first time crossing the border, and the majority cited economic opportunities as the major reason for travelling. Of the children crossing, 41% used the legal border post, while 40% used the Limpopo River.
Boys and girls use different means to cross the borders: by trucks using porters known as amalaitsha, by train, by walking or swimming across the Limpopo River. A 2007 study indicates that some girl migrants exchange sex for transportation by truckers. Gangs known as magumaguma at the border crossing points are paid to guide migrants across the border, but are reported to steal their clothing and belongings and even to physically and sexually abuse children. Other studies have shown that girls who migrate to South Africa were forced to have sex with the border guards to secure entry, while boys were forced to swim across dangerous rivers. Between 2006 and 2010, around a quarter of children attempting to cross the border to South Africa were intercepted by the South African police or army and subsequently detained.
For child migrants, things do not necessarily get easier once they arrive at their destination. Girl migrants frequently suffer abuse from their employers, both in commercial and domestic workplaces. Boys are more often the targets of physical abuse, but are also vulnerable to sexual abuse.
The current asylum system in South Africa does not offer any protection to children. This is despite the plethora of local, regional and international laws and protocols safeguarding the rights and interests of children — the Children’s Act, the Criminal Law Codification and Reform Act, the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child (ACRWC), to name but a few.
There is lax implementation of the UNCRC and acts protecting children in both Zimbabwe and South Africa, which leads to situations in which children are mixed with adults when arrested and deported. At times, the rights and best interests of undocumented child migrants are not taken into consideration.
In South Africa, most of the legal measures stating how migrant children should be handled and protected, in accordance with international and domestic laws, remain unimplemented, leading to a situation where ‘migrant children have fewer rights and a lesser status in their place of refuge than they had in the country that they left in search of a better life.’ When cases of ill treatment and abuse are reported, there is no thorough investigation and no arrests made, and this is the case both in the child’s home country and destination.
In conclusion, unaccompanied child migration is increasingly becoming a crisis of our time. The continued socio-economic crisis in post-2000 Zimbabwe is manifest in multiple human tragedies. In the context of challenges at home, children look for the necessary means to survive and migration becomes an important survival strategy. The child mobilises the necessary social and material resources to enable them to survive complex societal challenges, and as a result they migrate. It is thus imperative for nation states — both in countries of origin and recipient countries — to implement child protection policies that ensure safety, dignity and humanity for child migrants.
Further reading
Dube, R. 2012. Investigation into the experiences of undocumented child migrants from Zimbabwe to South Africa: A case study of experiences of irregular child migrants from Mberengwa, Unpublished Masters Thesis, Women’s University in Africa, Zimbabwe.
Dr Manase Chiweshe is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Lifelong Learning and Development Studies at Chinhoyi University of Technology and winner of the 2015 Gerti Hessling Award for the best paper in African studies. Chiweshe’s work revolves around the sociology of everyday life in African space s with special focus on promoting African ways of knowing. He is a young African scholar with interest in African migration, agrarian studies, land, livelihoods, football, gender and youth studies.
