With a black rucksack strapped to her back, the elderly woman constantly checks behind her shoulders in case
“I sell each clay pot for Pula10 (about US$1.60). I also have some dried traditional vegetables in this bag that go for a similar price. People here like traditional stuff and they are very friendly,” says Dube with a grin on her face.
Dube, of Mangubo village in Zimbabwe’s poverty-stricken Matabeleland South province, is among thousands of villagers who have been driven by hunger to make daring trips across the border into Botswana to sell clay pots and dried vegetables, which for some reason appear plentiful in one of Zimbabwe’s most arid regions.
Faced with failed crops and lack of income, Dube who is a widow, says she has had to play cat-and-mouse with Botswana’s police officers who are notorious for their brutal treatment of Zimbabweans, to fend for her six children.
“I no longer have any food provisions remaining at my homestead. The situation is so bad I accept things like maize-meal and tinned fish in exchange for these clay pots and dried vegetables. “I have a tiny field at home but the harvest will not be enough, so I really have to be in this business for quite some time,” says Dube carefully checking that her merchandise has not been damaged. And the scene not far from where we stood with Dube was probably all the confirmation one could need that the widow will not be alone “in this business”.
There, a group of three young men could be seen assisting each other scale the fence on the portion where it is not electrified. Unlike Dube, the men said their “illegal mission” to Botswana was not to sell merchandise but their labour doing menial jobs at farms and in factories.
“What else can we do? We are starving here,” said Mandla, who appeared the older of the three men. They all refused to give their full names, apparently disbelieving our promises that we would not tell on them to the border authorities.
Community leaders in Mangubo say while harvests appeared to have improved this year due to the good rains, a lot of villagers are still facing hunger after they failed to harvest enough as a result of lack of draught power and inputs.
More of their youths and widows will have to keep jumping the border into Botswana in search of survival, headman Ndabeni Maseko said.
He said: “The situation has definitely improved from what we experienced last year, but there are still some people who are going for days without food. As a result, some of them cross the border to villages like Nkange and Dagwi to sell clay pots or look for menial jobs that will give them quick money. “While it is illegal, there is nothing they can do because they have to survive. The situation is really bad here.”
Zimbabwe is in the grip of a severe food and economic crisis which critics blame on repression and wrong policies by President Robert Mugabe such as his seizure of white-owned farms for redistribution to landless blacks six years ago.
The farm disturbances slashed food production by about 60 percent leaving Zimbabwe, once a regional breadbasket, dependent on food handouts from international donors.
With inflation pegged at 913.6 percent and still rising, life has become a real grind for these villagers forcing most of them to trek into Botswana for survival.
But a trip into Botswana is no stroll in the park as the Gaborone authorities crack down on illegal Zimbabwean immigrants whom they accuse of fanning crime in that country. The exodus of hungry Zimbabweans into Botswana has strained relations between the two neighbours with Harare accusing Gaborone of targeting its citizens visiting that country for ill-treatment.
Zimbabwe often cites an electric fence Botswana has erected between the two countries, which it says is a Gaza-style barrier that could see hundreds of Zimbabweans trying to jump the frontier being electrocuted. Harare, which publicly insists relations with Botswana are cordial, also says the electric fence mirrors Gaborone’s xenophobic treatment of Zimbabwean immigrants.
Botswana, almost alone among Zimbabwe’s southern African neighbours to have voiced concern over Mugabe’s controversial rule, denies ill-treating immigrants from its northern neighbour and says the electric fence is meant to block free movement of wild animals and livestock across the frontier in order to curb the spread of animal diseases.
But whatever the true purpose of the deadly electric fence, Dube and hundreds of other villagers along the frontier here say it will not halt them from doing what they have to do to survive and that is, regularly and illegally skipping the border to trade their handmade wares or labour in return for food. - ZimOnline
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