Children and childhood within a Zimbabwean context

The study of childhood and contemporary migration of Zimbabwean children need to be contextualised within pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial relations that have shaped the country's political, socioeconomic and cultural contexts.

In pre-colonial Africa, children were viewed as central to the society as expressed through popular African proverbs such as ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. In Zimbabwe, there is a popular Shona adage that says: chirere chigokurerawo, whose central meaning is that parents and elders need to take diligent care of children (including orphans), the expectation being that the latter would return the favour in future (Mashingaidze, 2020). It is within this context that children were ‘conceptualised less as individuals and more as members of complex extended families to whom they owed duties and obligations for their existence’ (Kesby et al., 2006: 187). It was these traditional relations that epitomised communities as safety nets for the protection of children in traditional Zimbabwean societies (Bourdillon, 2005). This is consistent with the African value system of Ubuntu, founded on the ethics of collectivism (Khoza, 2005).

With regards to work, “gender specific child labour was central to a lineage mode of production that required many hands to undertake domestic, arable, and pastoral work” (Kesby et al., 2006: 187). However, it has been observed that the tasks undertaken by children were suited with their age and capabilities (Grier, 1994).

While marriage marked the transition from childhood to adulthood for both boys and girls, the transition process differed significantly by gender. In a context where ‘marriages were socio-economic strategies’ (Kesby et al., 2006), on reaching puberty the girl child would be expected to get married, and could be kidnapped or ‘eloped’, commonly with the active participation of family members. Contrary to western notions of childhood restricted to age, transition from childhood to womanhood was a process marked by the onset of puberty, closely followed by motherhood. Thus adulthood had little to do with attaining a particular age, but more about a woman's capacity to bear children and perform acts reserved for adult women (Grier, 1994).

In contrast, a young man remained a ‘child’ and a legal dependent of his parents until he reached a level of economic importance. Only then would he acquire a wife, build his own compound, and become an economically viable agent. Adulthood was therefore more about achieving a certain position in the social hierarchy than attaining a biological age (Grier, 1994).

Western influences on childhood in colonial Zimbabwe

The colonisation of the territory that we today call Zimbabwe by the British in 1890 saw the transformation of the political and economic landscapes, as Africans were driven away from their fertile lands into environmentally poor reserves, leading to the weakening of African economic systems and family structures. As Kesby et al. (2006: 187) argues, ‘just as they had in Europe, the forces of industrialisation and ‘modernisation’ had important social impacts in colonial Zimbabwe after 1890’. Meanwhile historical analyses of the impact of colonialism on African families have tended to prioritise men's experiences. Grier (1994) argues that the role played by children as part of both informal and formal labour force in colonial Zimbabwe was significant, although it has received far less recognition.

Children formed an integral part of the labour force of the colony as necessitated by colonial laws which were significantly gendered. For example, the Native Passes Ordinance (1904) compelled ‘adult African male’ to pay tax while the Native Passes Ordinance of the same year compelled all African male from the age of 10 to register for work (Grier, 1994). This subsequently saw the colonial regime adapting some key aspects of pre-capitalist relations of production which were considered a ‘necessary evil’ and being implemented during capital accumulation. One example was the employment of ‘master and servant strategies’ (which mirror current concerns about modern slavery) whereby, parents and guardians would sign contracts on behalf of their sons/male relatives and would subsequently receive wages on their behalf (Grier, 1994).

Apartheid-like pass laws became important in the construction of childhood and gender identities. While passes were introduced to promote the rural–urban migration of men to work in industries, women and girls were not required to carry passes as they were regarded as legal minors, who could only travel with male protection (Mlambo, 2014). Women who moved independently were stereotypically referred to as pfambi/iwule (prostitutes), hence unfit for marriage (Matshaka, 2018). This illustrates the fusion of Indigenous and European structures of patriarchal control, and the advent of a hybrid of childhood and gendered relationships, leading to a culture that restricts the mobility of children, especially girls. This continues to shape migration experiences in contemporary Zimbabwe (Muzvidziwa, 2001). Also the political move to end child exploitation in late Victorian Britain influenced the imagination of arranged marriages in colonies primarily in ‘sexual terms’, even though they were socioeconomic strategies (Kesby et al., 2006). This led to legal enactment of 12 years as the minimum age for marriage. Numerical age created a new cultural understanding of the child/adult dichotomy.

Children and the transformation of childhood in post-colonial Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe attained its independence from British rule in 1980 which subsequently saw the introduction of socioeconomic reforms that positively improved the quality of life of Black Zimbabwean citizens, including children. In particular, the concept of education for all became one of the major initiatives, which saw formal education transforming the notion of childhood by enabling children to spend most of their early years in schools and reducing early marriages, especially for girls. Legislations such as The Legal Age of Majority Act (1982) established 18 years as the start of adulthood and child protection also emerged as core to the protection of children's rights.

However, the introduction of Economic, Adjustment Programmes (ESAPs) by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1990s coincided with the advent of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and took a heavy knock on the strides made since independence. In particular, childhood was redefined as the HIV/AIDS pandemic orphaned many children amidst a political and economic decline. Initially, the extended family as the traditional social safety net proved to be remarkably resilient, providing for informal adoptions and fosterage of vulnerable children (Mushunje, 2014). As the epidemic reached its peak, and with more families being sucked into poverty, the extended family became a safety net with holes (Foster, 2005) as evidenced by children's (especially girls) increased school dropout to care for sick parents and relatives. Child-headed households subsequently emerged as a new complex family organisation that challenges the child/adult dichotomy. Kesby et al. (2006: 197) have coined the phrase ‘other childhoods’ based on the observation that ‘children living within child-headed units do not conform to many indigenous parameters of childhood, but neither do they meet the criteria for adulthood, and therefore are difficult to conceive using local understandings’. In this paper we explore the further evolvement of childhood in Zimbabwe in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in Zimbabwe in March 2020 signified a major threat to the country's ailing economy, weak social protection systems and fragile health care system (Madziva et al., 2021). Also, in a country where the informal sector has become the new economy sustaining the majority, young people constitute the bulk of the informally employed (Gukurume & Oosterom, 2020). Informal business activities have suffered significantly from the COVID-19 lockdown measures as exacerbated by government crackdown on the informal sector, including the demolitions of informal vending sites at the peak of COVID-19 (Mwonzora, 2021). Also, while before COVID-19, seasonal migration to and cross border activity between SA and Zimbabwe offered survival mechanisms for many families, the year 2020 saw 10 months passing with land borders closed to the passage of ordinary travellers. The pandemic has therefore compounded an already desperate situation resulting in people especially having to take more risks to cross the country's borders using illegal crossing points to ensure family survival (Mbiyozo et al., 2020).

It is within this context that we explore the migration of orphaned young people to SA. Theoretically, we draw on the concepts of intersectionality and bordering.

Theoretical framework: Intersectionality and bordering

A term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), intersectionality challenges the tendency to homogenise and essentialise lived experiences and identities in research with marginalised populations. People invariably find themselves entangled within multiple social identities (such as gender, ethnicity, class, age) and intersectionality enables an exploration of how these categories are experienced. In some cases and contexts, categories intersect to reinforce each other—changing each other's meaning and impact (Yuval-Davis, 2011). Intersectionality therefore seeks to facilitate the analysis of multiple experiences and fluid identities that are time and context dependent, with the aim to expose how different elements of identity can interlock and overlap to create compounding experiences that reveal the ‘vectors of oppression and privilege’ (Ritzer & Stepnisky, 2013).

Within the migration scholarship, there is increased recognition of the necessity and usefulness of intersectionality as a lens through which to understand migrants' lived experiences. Cheruvallil-Contractor et al. (2022) have used intersectionality to explore the complex identities of migrant children of a Muslim heritage in the UK care system. They observe that being a Muslim attracts different labels and connotations with huge impacts on children's sense of identity, well-being and belonging. Bešić et al. (2020) have noted the intersection of disability, refugee status and gender, showing how a combination of these elements, although rarely analysed in their interwovenness, substantially impacted the lives of the refugee children they studied. This resonates with Valentine and Sporton's (2009) research with Somali refugee children which shows how identities can intersect in complex ways to produce different meanings in different social, cultural and relational contexts, enabling individuals to exercise their agency in one context and suffer victimhood in another context. This point is made more explicit in the edited volume ‘Children and migration: at the crossroads of resiliency and vulnerability’ (Ensor & Goź Dziak, 2010, eds) which explores migrant children's experiences at the intersection of agency and victimhood, highlighting the interplay of structures, contexts and relations of power in producing different modes of being and belonging.

Building on these works, we use intersectionality to analyse our participants' lived experiences within the context of their complex identities of orphan, child/young person and migrant. We seek to understand the strategies they employed to navigate life opportunities as orphaned children and the enabling and disabling role of the other related identities including gender. As migration was invariably articulated through close ties of kinship, friendship and other connections, intersectionality offers the opportunity to further explore how, as orphaned migrant children, they negotiated the complex migration terrain and the dynamics of power involved.

For this population, migration was undertaken at a time of growing sensitivities around border crossing due to the Covid-19 pandemic. To this end, we contextualise this paper into the wider debates on borders and bordering. Yuval-Davis et al.'s (2019) new book, ‘Bordering’, is insightful in showing how in the contemporary mobile world, territorial borders are no longer confined to the margins but have been moved into everyday life. This involves what Vollmer (2021: 5) calls ‘the bordering processes of creating categories of people’ or the ‘bordering of identities’ and is therefore associated with the binary framing of ‘us' and ‘them’. This has thus necessitated the redefinition of belonging and citizenship (Vollmer, 2021).

The factors that shaped children's decisions to migrate

Our study shows the critical role played by the family environment. We observed that the home environment from which a child comes intricately determines their lived experiences. If a child comes from a household with weak social and family fabric, then the higher their vulnerability to all sorts of challenges, which most likely pressure them to reach the decision to migrate albeit the risks.

This is supported by Kesby et al. (2006) who in their study have raised concerns especially about NGOs' procedures, underpinned by constructions of childhood that relied on numerical age categories. They observed that on one hand, NGOs increasingly relied on adults in the communities to identify orphans in need, while on the other hand, treating child household heads aged 18 as adults who no longer qualify for orphan assistance. In so doing, the organisations took no consideration of the fact that placing adults at the centre of orphan care and assistance has the danger of reinforcing their exploitation in a context where the on-going economic hardships have given rise to a culture whereby children are increasingly used as ‘meal-tickets’ (Madziva, 2016). Neither do these organisations took note of the fact that the same Legal Age of Majority legislation which prescribes 18 as the start of adulthood also determines 21 as the age at which an individual can assume legal guardianship of their siblings (Kesby et al., 2006).

However, the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 and the related lockdown restrictions meant that Chipo, like many other citizens engaged in informal employment, could not continue with her vending activity as this required her to be mobile. This left Chipo feeling ‘helpless, not knowing what the future holds for me and my siblings’ (Chipo).

While it is true that COVID-19 has had severe impact on both adults and children globally, the pandemic has exacerbated the existing poverty situation of orphaned children like Chipo, leaving them with no concentrate economic options, making them more vulnerable as they seek optional survival measures.

At the age of 15, Jabu joined an uncle who was involved in artisanal mining. As noted by Mkodzongi and Spiegel (2019), while illegal under Zimbabwe's colonial era mining laws, which continue to structure the modern-day mining policies, artisanal mining has become an increasingly widespread economic activity undertaken by mostly the poverty-stricken groups including rural dwellers. Artisanal mining is classified as one of the worst forms of child labour and an area that reflects the tension between children's endeavour to earn a living and the global political concern to reduce child labour (Okyere, 2014). Jabu was grateful that the job enabled him to earn money to support his two siblings. However, he had to work hard to fit in the space dominated by adults and to carve his space: ‘I had to grow up quickly to cope with the demands of the job’. This confirms Hashim & Thorsen's (2011: 96) research with child migrants in West Africa which demonstrates children's increased efforts to prove to adults that they have the ‘resilience of youth to endure hardship and the capacity to earn an income’.

In Chipo's case, while she had heard of job opportunities in SA, adult relatives had increasingly warned her about ‘the dangers of children, especially girls, travelling and crossing borders alone’ (Chipo). This resonates with the historical constructions of women's migration during the colonial era, as against gender norms (Matshaka, 2018). Muzvidziwa's (2001) study has shown the continual relevance of this discourse. He argues that the emergence of the cross-border activity in the late 1990s, was characterised by media stories about women cross-borders ‘prostituting themselves with haulage truck drivers and spending long periods in SA selling nothing but their bodies … and linked to the problems of controlling HIV/AIDS’.

On one hand, the young people's agency had been thinned by the various constraints that characterised their lives overtime. Yet on the other hand, the new relationships formed during COVID-19 acted as thickeners of their agency. In both cases, the young people saw the opportunity to migrate to SA as the only way to escape from the poverty in the village.

Thus, as Punch and Tisdall (2012) argue, in recognising children's agency we also need to consider the circumstances in which children's agency is perceived as negative, challenging or problematic at least from adults' perspective.

Porous borders, negotiated passage and the impact of Covid-19 restrictions

While there is a long tradition of labour migration from Zimbabwe to SA, since early 2000s, international agencies such as Save the Children have been raising concerns about the challenges that unaccompanied child migrants from Zimbabwean face in SA (Palmary, 2007). Many of these children have been noted to face a myriad of challenges, both in terms of crossing the physical border and navigating the bordering practices associated with xenophobia (Mahmoudi & Mothapo, 2018; Fritsch et al., 2009). The problem has been heightened by the xenophobic tendencies among SA citizens, especially against Zimbabweans.

Also, the journey across the Zimbabwe–SA border is complicated by immigration and child safeguarding laws which resemble the colonial pass laws that placed adults at the centre of children's mobility. For example, laws on combating child trafficking in SA, which came into effect in June 2015, require unaccompanied children to provide a Parental Consent Affidavit from both parents (or a guardian) and a letter containing the address and relevant details of the receiving adult in SA (Department of Home Affairs, 2015).

While this is important for preventing child trafficking, the identity of being an orphaned young person automatically placed a barrier on our participants. As Van Houtum (2021) argues, in the contemporary society the fiercest borders are not those made of physical walls but paper ‘walls’ such as visas and other border-crossing requirements used to distinguish those who qualify to be admitted into a territory from those who do not.

The young people who participated in our study had used illegal crossing points as the official borders were closed due to COVID-19. While this confirms the porosity of the borders between the two countries, a major aspect of SA's initial pandemic responses was the construction of a fence on its border with Zimbabwe to curtail the flow of both illegal migrants and COVID-19-infected persons from crossing into SA (Jazeera, 2020). As Zanker and Moyo (2020: 106) argue ‘a COVID-justified fence with military protection certainly plays into the hands of the increasingly securitised approach to migration and refugee governance in SA’. Building of the border fence represents a replication of the apartheid era, where electric fences were erected on the Mozambican and Zimbabwean borders to curtail the flow of migration from these countries (Zanker & Moyo, 2020).

The pandemic response measures adopted by the SA government, like elsewhere, also included the shutting down of companies and small businesses, including the spaza shops that are mainly operated by migrants. Such measures left many migrants without the economic means to support themselves, forcing some to temporarily return to their countries of origin (Zanker & Moyo, 2020). The Zimbabwean government also responded by making buses available to facilitate home returns, especially for those on temporary visas. Thus, the increased return of Zimbabweans, which in turn facilitated the migration of some of the young people during the pandemic era, is relatable to the xenophobic violence and increased social inequalities in SA, reflecting the bordering trend (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019).

Therefore, the experiences of our orphaned child migrant participants need to be understood within the new bordering practices as necessitated by the pandemic. Below we explore how the young people deployed their agency in negotiating with different adults at different points of their migration journeys.

Our participants used diverse clandestine means to cross the border into SA with the hope of finding better economic opportunities to enhance their lives and those of the siblings left behind.

Young people's experiences when they arrived in SA

Existing research has shown that while children and young people migrate to SA with the hope of finding decent work, they invariably discover once they have arrived, that there are many other borders to cross. In particularly, employment opportunities are both limited and complex due to labour laws that criminalise employers who hire especially illegal and undocumented migrants and minors (Meda, 2017). This in turn provides unscrupulous employers with the flexibility to exploit this group of migrants as they cannot get protection from labour laws (Mahmoudi & Mothapo, 2018). Although the young people who participated in our study fitted both categories of illegal migrant and minor, most of them had job promises before leaving Zimbabwe.

As we can see from the above quotes, people related and familiar to the young people used deception and false promises, which fits with the global discourses of human trafficking and modern slavery. Human trafficking and modern slavery are complex terms that seek to capture the sexual and labour exploitation of vulnerable populations, and we do not have the space to engage with these debates in a paper of this nature. By this, we are not trying to underplay the extremely oppressive situations that the young people found themselves in. Neither are we trying to paint the picture of children as passive beings in migration, for which modern slavery scholars have been criticised (O'Connell-Davidson, 2015). What we seek to illustrate are the ways in which child vulnerability and exploitation are necessitated by the intersection of complex factors. In this case, the intersection of age, orphanhood, traditional family dynamics, economic hardships, anti-immigration policies as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the case study also provides the opportunity for thinking through the similarities with the economic strategies of the pre-colonial era in Zimbabwe where in times of famine and other calamities, the girl child would be pawned in exchange for food commodities. At the same time, it also resonates with the ‘master and servant strategies’ employed by the colonial administrators which enabled parents/guardians to sign contracts on behalf of children and earn wages from their labour power (Grier, 1994).

It is apparent that the illegal nature of the young people's migration makes it difficult for them to approach law enforcement officials such as the police, due to fear of deportation. This is one area in children's migration which reveals the role of immigration regimes in constraining children's competence and agency. Nonetheless, as Mayall (2002: 12) argues, agency also entails ‘negotiation with others, with the effect that the interaction makes a difference—to a relationship or to a decision …’ Indeed, Chipo was able to negotiate her way out of sexual exploitation.

Rescue, freedom and stigma

We engaged with the young people at the border posts on their way back from SA. Chipo had been assisted by the Zimbabwean community in SA, whereas Sharai had been deported after she was found working illegally and Rute had been rescued by a Human Trafficking NGO. In theory, the three young women were eventually freed from the predicaments that had befallen them, and yet in practical terms, their lives were characterised by stigma and uncertainty about their futures as they had not been able to achieve economic success in a place that is invariably deemed a land of milk and honey by those at home. They were therefore not prepared to go back home empty handed as this would certainly render them as failures in the eyes of both their siblings and the entire community. As Chipo lamented: ‘It was a meaningless sojourn that left me with scars and emotionally drained … I can't imagine going back to face my siblings without anything to give them’.

Moreover, the young people were unsure of how they were going to be received in their communities, due to their ‘spoiled’ identity as victims of sexual exploitation, which they knew would become the new defining attribute of their personhood and those of their families. As noted by Rute, ‘both I and my relatives will be the laughing-stock in the village’. These young women also feared that they would be associated with the historical stereotype of ‘prostitute’ attributed to the women who engaged in independent cross border activities to SA throughout the generations (Matshaka, 2018).