Why do people leave zimbabwe

Most of them have gone to three countries — South Africa, Australia and Britain. Britain houses the majority with over , Zimbabweans are leaving their homes as a result of the repressive government in the country. For more than 40 years, President Robert Mugabe has repeatedly violated human rights. South Africa is actually one of the busiest borders in Africa, and the number of Zimbabweans entering has been increasing since President Mugabe escalated his brutal regime.

Two freshly cut spaces break the fence and in the distance a small campfire can be seen where border jumpers huddle for warmth. The IOM office opened in May and has been overwhelmed. We get no breaks. They are offered a hot meal, counselling and transport home.

Only 55 per cent accept: the rest immediately turn around and try again, according to officials who are powerless to stop them. South Africa's President, Thabo Mbeki, conceded last May that the enormous human influx 'is something we have to live with'. He avoided describing the economic collapse, hunger and repression creating the refugees. Christopher is one of the border jumpers. The law is for the President, he works for himself with the police and army only.

Length of time and legal status in the UK were also important determinants. In general, as Bloch shows, the longer people had been in the UK and the more secure their immigration status, the lower the desire to return to Zimbabwe. Only half of those with UK or EU citizenship wanted to return, for example.

Improvement in the political situation was mentioned by nearly 90 percent as a precondition for return. Other preconditions include an improvement in the economy mentioned by over 80 percent , the security situation over 70 percent and the health situation over 60 percent. Finally, when asked what development activities they were interested in pursuing in Zimbabwe, 62 percent said that investment in business was a priority.

Besada and N. Zinyama and D. Leslie, ed. Hammar, B. Raftopoulos and S. Jensen, eds. Raftopolous and I. Dansereau and M. DeWind and J. Holdaway, eds. Chappell and A. Fagen with M. Once a valid visa is issued a person may cross backwards and forwards until the visa expires without being recorded in these statistics. In other words, these figures should be seen as indicative not definitive.

Crush and B. Maimbo and D. Ratha, eds. Giuliano and M. Pendleton, J. Crush, E. Campbell, T. Green, H. Simelane, D. Tevera and F. Picciotto and R. Weaving, eds. Bracking and L. Kapur and J. Docquier and A. Lowell, A. Findlay and E. Goldin and K. Beine, F. Docquier, and H. Commander, M. Kangasniemi, and L. Stark and C. McDonald and J. Crush, eds. Tevera and J. Taylor and K. McDonald, ed. Piper, ed. Dodson with H.

Tevera, T. Green, A. Chikanda and F. Kutznetsov, ed. Van Hear, F. Pieke, and S. Newland and E. Pandey, A. Aggarwal, R. Devane and Y. Henry and G. Glick Schiller and G. Portes, L. Guarnizo and P. Glick Schiller, L. Basch and C. Levitt and N. Vertovec, Transnationalism London: Routledge, For a critique see R. Waldinger and D. Barkan, H. Diner and A. Newland, D. Agunias and A. Crush and D. Sisulu, B. Moyo and N. Buhlungu, J. Daniel, R. Southall and J. Lutchman, eds. Crush and W.

Pendleton, Regionalizing Xenophobia? Cowen and R. Crush, ed. See also R. King, R. Skeldon and J. My grandmother came to Johannesburg long ago before my mother was born. My mother was born in and she is the last born of nine children. My grandmother worked here for so long and she told us her mother had worked in South Africa too.

My mother never came here though. Only my aunties and uncle would come here. Some came and stayed forever and some just worked for a few years and went home. My father was a policeman during the time of Smith and the government of South Africa allowed the police to come here so my father came and looked for work here as a policeman. He went up and down. Immediately after finishing school in Zimbabwe I went for an interview to be a teacher. This is an Ndebele, this is a Shona. They gave preference to Shonas even if they did not pass the interview.

I was just disappointed so I came to South Africa instead. At first I was a garden boy and later I became a houseman. Now I am a salesman in a small shop for bags and jewellery. My sister is working as a domestic worker and my brother-in-law is working for a company in Germiston. You have to eat while you are serving the customers. I earn R a month. From there I just go to my flat and sleep. There is nothing else I do except on Sundays I go to church.

The police here are always a problem. They keep on asking you this and that. I hate to be asked the same thing by the same police every day. Sometimes my aunt has to come and talk to them so I am not arrested.

The police are afraid to arrest South Africans because they are told that someone will come to their house and kill the children. I always tell myself one day the truth will come out.

Population migration into and out of present-day Zimbabwe long pre-dates European conquest and the imposition of artificial colonial borders. Not only did people move from one area to another as need arose, ethnic boundaries were fluid enough to allow individuals or groups to move in or out of population clusters and ethnic groupings with relative ease.

Movement did not cease after the establishment of colonial boundaries either. These arbitrary borders divided families, clan groups and ethnic communities between different colonies.

Not surprisingly, local communities generally ignored these colonial impositions and went about their normal business with their kith and kin, crossing borders without regard to colonial laws and immigration requirements.

They also crossed borders in search of employment, and for other reasons, and continue to do so to this day. This chapter traces the long history of Zimbabwean migration from precolonial times to Population movement into the area began with the peopling of the Zimbabwe Plateau. In the twentieth century, white immigrants from Europe and South Africa established farms and plantations and mines where they employed black migrants from neighbouring countries such as Malawi and Mozambique.

Migrant workers from some parts of Zimbabwe engaged in circular migration for work in South Africa. They returned at independence, just as whites began to leave in growing numbers. However, in general, Zimbabwe was more of a receiving than a sending country before This was to change in the s as the country was dramatically transformed into a leading migrant sending country.

Zimbabwe was originally the home of hunter-gathering, stone-age people who are believed to have inhabited the region from , years ago onwards. They were eventually displaced by the Bantu, an iron-age people with skills in mining and iron smelting, coming in from the north.

By the year , a cattle-keeping culture, referred to by archaeologists as the Leopard Kopje culture, had developed in south-western Zimbabwe, reaching its climax around with the development of Mapungubwe on the Shashe-Limpopo River confluence.

This cattle-keeping and farming community traded in ivory and gold with traders from as far afield as China. The Mapungubwe culture went into decline after with the rise of the Great Zimbabwe culture, with its capital at the Great Zimbabwe complex, built between and , south-east of the modern Zimbabwean city of Masvingo. Like its Mapungubwe predecessor, the Great Zimbabwe culture was based on cattle-keeping and farming, as well as trade in gold with the Swahili coast.

In its turn, this kingdom went into decline from about onwards, with some groups moving westwards to found the Torwa state whose capital was at Khami near the present-day city of Bulawayo. Others moved north-westwards to establish the Munhumutapa Kingdom, which by had expanded as far as the Indian Ocean and whose economy was based on gold mining and trade. The Munhumutapa Kingdom eventually went into decline in the face of growing Portuguese influence along the Indian Ocean.

They attribute the population dispersal to drought and environmental degradation, trade, and the advance of white settlement. Another group originating from northern Natal in the s, under the leadership of Soshangane, devastated the area around present-day Maputo and then established the Gaza Empire, part of which encompassed the Shona-speaking groups of eastern Zimbabwe, such as the Manyika and the Ndau. Lastly came the Ndebele under Mzilikazi.

Having initially settled in the northern Transvaal, Mzilikazi and his followers were forced to move northwards in because of the encroachment of Boers from the south.

They eventually settled in southwestern Zimbabwe and established the Ndebele Kingdom incorporating local Rozvi groups in the process. Ndebele hegemony over southwestern Zimbabwe was to be broken only with the arrival of European colonialism at the turn of the century when white immigration changed the political and demographic profile of the country even further. White hunters, adventurers, explorers and missionaries had long traversed the land between the Limpopo and the Zambezi before British colonization in , but none had settled permanently in the region.

This was all to change with the arrival of a group of approximately whites, calling themselves the Pioneer Column. Early white immigration was fuelled in the run-up to the establishment of the Union of South Africa in There was a large inflow of mostly English-speaking immigrants from South Africa between and from 11, to over 23, , making this the fastest white population growth decade in the entire period of colonial rule Table 2.

Increased white immigration was also a result of vigorous efforts by the BSAC government to entice white farmers into the country. While the country did have some gold deposits, they were nowhere near as abundant as had been envisioned. After a hiatus during World War One, white immigration picked up again. The numbers declined from to because of the Great Depression and the deliberate Rhodesian government policy of discouraging immigration in order to minimize unemployment.

Immigration also declined considerably during World War Two due to the difficulties of overseas travel. In , a record 17, immigrants arrived. Economic depression in the Central African Federation from to , and the rise of militant African nationalism, led to a decline in white immigration. This decline continued in the s when economic sanctions were imposed on Rhodesia after its unilateral declaration of independence UDI in November Escalating military clashes between the regime and nationalist liberation forces made the country unattractive as a destination for European migrants.

However, some immigrants entered the country fleeing black rule in African countries such as Kenya, Zambia and the Congo. The country also received large numbers of immigrants from Mozambique and Angola in following the end of Portuguese colonial rule in those countries.

Throughout the twentieth century, foreign-born whites outnumbered those born in the country Table 2. The dominance of immigration over natural increase was still evident as late as when approximately 59 percent of the white population were foreign-born.

Of these, over 55 percent arrived after World War Two Table 2. Source: A. Rogers and C. Table 2. Until , net migration consistently outnumbered natural increase Table 2. One reason for the slow increase of the locally-born white population, at least in the early period, was the paucity of white women in the country. Until , the gap between the sexes was very wide. Thereafter it narrowed as more vigorous efforts were made to attract female immigrants.

The percentage of white women in the country rose from 34 percent to 44 percent between and Increasingly, the white population began to resemble that of older settler societies Table 2.

The first comprehensive census of the African population was not until , although limited sample surveys were taken in , and A prominent feature of the history of white migration was its high turnover rate. For every ten immigrants who entered the country between and , seven left. An analysis of net migration between and shows that, in this period, Rhodesia received a total of , white immigrants but lost ,, or 67 percent, through emigration Table 2. White emigration increased during the UDI years as the economic and political situation deteriorated and the military conflict between the regime and nationalist liberation forces intensified.

In the first few years of UDI, however, the country actually recorded net migration gains, partly as a result of concerted campaigns by the Rhodesian government to woo immigrants through vigorous propaganda campaigning in Europe, travel subsidies, and the provision of housing, tax relief and customs concessions, among other incentives.

The inflow of white immigrants into the country might have been larger had successive Rhodesian governments not been very selective about the type of immigrants that they would accept.

Of the 33, whites in Rhodesia in , 32, were British by birth or naturalization. By , British settlers accounted for 92 percent of the white population.

Similarly, the majority of immigrants during the immediate post-War period were British born and nearly half migrated directly from Britain to Rhodesia. Throughout the period under study, therefore, the immigration of non-British whites was kept to a minimum.

Afrikaners remained generally suspect and unwelcome. Despite such attitudes and restrictions, the number of non-British immigrants did increase slightly in the s and during World War Two. By , there was a sizeable Italian population in the country. But collectively, they remained a small minority compared to the largely British white population in the country. While building the country as a British settlement remained the ideal, Afrikaners, Greeks, Italians, Portuguese and other European ethnic groups were now welcomed.

As for Indians, laws were enacted early in the century to limit their entry. Because of these measures, the Asian population never constituted more than 2 percent of the total population of the country. For a brief period following the independence of Mozambique and Angola in , there was a sudden surge of immigration when an estimated 25, whites fled the Portuguese territories to Rhodesia. Despite this measure, emigration continued to swell Table 2. High levels of white emigration continued into the independence period.

An estimated 20, people, mostly whites, left the country in , fleeing the incoming black government. Between and , net migration losses exceeded 10, annually despite the fact that there were many black Zimbabweans returning from exile. Labour migrancy in Southern Africa dates back to the s with the development of the sugar plantations of Natal.

Thereafter, it intensified with the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in and gold on the Witwatersrand in The uneven development of capitalism in Southern Africa, with its emerging mining and agricultural economic centres in South Africa in the nineteenth century and Zimbabwe in the twentieth, led to new forms of migration, as workers from neighbouring countries migrated in search of work.

Labour migrancy linked the various countries and colonies in the sub-region into one large labour market, with various countries sending and receiving migrants. In this regional migration network, Zimbabwe played a dual role as both a receiver of migrant labourers from its neighbours and as a supplier of migrant labour to South Africa.

Sometimes it was used merely as a conduit by migrant labourers from Malawi and Zambia en route to South Africa who would work in Zimbabwe for a while to earn enough to finance their journey southward and then move on. Local Africans were reluctant to work on the mines and farms, partly because they were still able to produce agricultural surpluses and meet their increasing tax obligations to the colonial state.

The colonial authorities resorted to coerced labour or chibaro to try to obtain the labour they required. The general reluctance of local Africans to enter the colonial labour market led to growing reliance on foreign migrant workers. They dominated the wage labour market in the early colonial years, not just on the mines and farms, but also in the urban centres. The early colonial labour shortfall was met through the recruitment of African labour from neighbouring territories, with the main recruiting grounds being Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique.

Rhodesian mine owners also experimented with recruiting Aandab, Abyssinian, Somali and Chinese migrant labour without much success. Between and , a government agency, the Rhodesia Native Labour Bureau RNLB , recruited foreign labour and supplied an average of 13, workers to employers each year. Meanwhile, the colonial state assisted employers to secure labour by concluding labour agreements with Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi.

Malawian labour migration was boosted by the introduction of a free transport service for migrant workers in Source: T. Others were allowed to settle in Zimbabwe after a stipulated period of service.

An estimated , Malawians and Zambians took this opportunity to settle in the country. The number of male labour migrants from Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique continued to increase Table 2. By the s, they were well-represented in all sectors of the economy Table 2. With the exception of commercial agriculture, there were few female migrants from these countries. Foreign workers continued to be very significant in that sector until the s Table 2.

Of approximately , Africans employed in the economy in , about , were foreign-born. Mozambicans were next. Source: P. Source: J. Crush, V. Williams and S. Source: D. By , the South African gold mines had become the major regional employer of migrant labour. Mundonda is filled with hope as he takes the journey with his family, heading to a land where he lived a decade ago.

Every day Zimbabwean migrants like Mundonda, Matimbe, and hordes of others head to countries like South Africa, unable to bear staying in the country any longer, according to human rights activists. As such, there is a renewed exodus of Zimbabweans like Mundonda and Mutimbe fleeing an imploding economy and deteriorating human rights situation in the Southern African nation. In , more than 2 million Zimbabweans migrated to its neighboring giant South Africa, most as economic refugees fell into a deep economic crisis, with inflation shooting up to a mind-boggling million percent.

Over almost two decades, South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Mozambique have been destinations for Zimbabwean economic refugees.