Africa: The Invisible Chain – the Unspoken Bond Driving Zimbabwean Migration to South Africa

THE chorus is a familiar one, a relentless refrain in South Africa’s political and social discourse: “illegal Zimbabweans” are crossing the Limpopo in droves, “stealing” jobs from South Africans, social services like health and education and transforming the essence of the nation.

This narrative, politically potent and emotionally charged, is repeated in taxi ranks, talk radio shows and parliamentary debates.

However, for all its volume, it is dangerously incomplete. It focuses on the symptom, “the migrant”, while wilfully ignoring the deep-seated historical and economic engine that actively imports this labour. The truth, far more complex and inconvenient, is that the migration of a significant number of Black Zimbabweans to South Africa is not a random, anarchic influx.

It is, rather, the tail end of a deeply entrenched, paternalistic economic system that packed its bags and moved across the Limpopo River, travelling in tandem with White Zimbabwean capital and social networks.

To understand the present crisis, we must first confront a forgotten, shared past and acknowledge the invisible chain that binds employer and employee across generations and borders.

The story does not start in 2000 with Zimbabwe’s land reforms but in the colonial state of Rhodesia. Many South Africans remain unaware that their northern neighbour operated a sophisticated system of controlled and bonded labour (serfdom). This system was, for all practical purposes, a mirror image of apartheid South Africa’s Masters and Servants Act and related laws.

Southern Rhodesia (from the 1890s to 1980) created a coercive system that functioned as bonded labour. The 1930 Land Apportionment Act confined the African majority to overcrowded reserves. Combined with compulsory poll taxes and restrictive pass laws, this engineered a cycle of poverty.

African men were systematically forced into migrant labour for White-owned mines and farms to survive. This structure, perfected after the 1923 shift to self-government, effectively bonded workers to employers through state-backed legal and economic coercion until the end of White minority rule.

The Rhodesian legal architecture, particularly the 1969 Masters and Servants Act (originally introduced in 1901), entrenched a rigid, paternalistic system. This legislation granted White landowners, farmers and businessmen near-total control over Black labourers’ lives, movement and economic prospects. This framework legally bound workers to their employers, criminalising breach of contract to ensure a cheap, captive workforce for the White minority economy.

This was not a simple, transactional employer-employee dynamic, but it was a comprehensive social and economic bond, forged in the crucible of White supremacy. The Rhodesian state meticulously constructed a world where Black life was subordinated to White economic needs, creating a dependency that extended beyond the workplace to include housing, food and a semblance of social welfare.

This system produced a specific psychology, a culture of paternalism where the White “boss” or “madam” was not just an employer but a patron, a provider and an authority figure whose influence permeated every aspect of a worker’s life. This relational model, born in the fields and homes of Rhodesia, is the original template, the blueprint that would later be exported.

The collapse of Rhodesia and the birth of Zimbabwe in 1980 did not erase this deeply ingrained system overnight. While the political landscape shifted, many of the economic and social patterns persisted through the 1980s and 1990s. However, the two great waves of White Zimbabwean migration were first, before and after independence.

Then, more dramatically, during the botched land reforms of the 1990s and early 2000s, it acted as a catalyst for the transnational transfer of this relationship.

When White Zimbabweans, also labelled “Rhodies”, relocated to South Africa, they did not come empty-handed. They brought their financial capital, their businesses and their professional networks. But crucially, they also brought their social capital: a ready-made, pre-vetted labour force. As scholar James Muzondidya observes in his analysis of the Zimbabwean crisis, the displacement of White commercial farmers did not occur in a vacuum.

This displacement triggered a parallel and catastrophic displacement of the hundreds of millions of Black Zimbabweans whose entire lives and livelihoods were structurally tied to those farms. For these workers, the choice was not between staying in Zimbabwe or leaving; it was between utter destitution or following the only economic lifeline they had ever known.

This exodus was not a coincidence but a correlation. The capital of White Zimbabweans arrived in South Africa with hordes of cheap, attached labour. This explains the peculiar phenomenon we witness today across the northern provinces of South Africa and in its major urban centres.

These workers are not merely “illegal immigrants” but “domestic slaves by descent, so they are attached to the family of their masters, for whom they worked continuously without pay”.

The relationship between White Zimbabweans and Black Zimbabweans is akin to slavery in Mauritania, where light-skinned Arabs and Berbers (White Moors) own the dark-skinned Haratines. Arab and Berber families regard themselves as “White and noble, while Black is synonymous with slave.” Due to their long history, these Haratines not only speak the language of their White masters, Hassania (Mauritanian Arabic), but also constitute a significant class of bonded slaves.

Today, White Zimbabweans are a visible and often successful part of the South African business landscape. They own and operate sprawling game farms in Limpopo, productive agricultural holdings in the Mpumalanga highveld and chic restaurants in the trendy suburbs of Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town.

And who is so often employed in these establishments? It is frequently the very same Zimbabweans who worked for them, or their extended family and village members, back home.

This is not a case of businesses opportunistically scooping up “illegals” from the streets of Hillbrow or Pretoria. However, it is the reactivation of a pre-existing, generational relationship. Sociologist Maxim Bolt documents this “inseparable” link in his seminal ethnographic work, Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms.

Bolt spent years studying these communities and describes a world of interdependence that transcends international borders. He details how farmers who relocated from Zimbabwe to South Africa’s northern provinces deliberately recruited from their former workers’ networks, valuing their known skills, their trustworthiness and their understanding of the unspoken codes of this paternalistic dynamic.

The Black Zimbabweans who followed their former “boses” (bosses) were not random economic migrants in the abstract sense. They were a known quantity, pre-socialised into a specific work ethic and hierarchy, making them the ideal, reliable helpers for both private homes and demanding upmarket enterprises. The relationship offers a perverse form of security for the employee — a familiar face in a foreign land, a guaranteed job and a place to stay.

For the employer, it offers a compliant, dependable workforce that understands their expectations without needing to be told. This system, however, perpetuates an inherently unequal power dynamic, locking both parties into a historical pattern that resists easy integration into South Africa’s more formalised (though still troubled) labour market.

This takes us to the core of South Africa’s flawed immigration debate. The idea that businesses “unfairly” employ undocumented migrants is both legally accurate and sociologically oversimplified. It is accurate in a strict legal sense, as it sidesteps South Africa’s immigration laws. However, it is a significant misdiagnosis of the root issue. This is not mainly a matter of exploitative “job theft” from South Africans. However, it is the natural extension of a bonded economic system where capital does not arrive alone but comes with its historically shaped supply of labour.

The system itself sustains this “eternal relationship”. To complain about “illegal Zimbabweans” without also questioning the employers who actively maintain this pipeline is to deliberately ignore a key driver of the phenomenon. This selective focus is politically convenient as it directs public anger towards the most visible and vulnerable actors, the migrants themselves, while excusing a powerful economic constituency in White Rhodie business owners.

Politicians, including those like the DA’s Dr Leon Schreiber (also a Rhodie), are undoubtedly aware of these complex cross-border economic networks. As such, the DA’s policy generally frames migration through a “language of opportunity”, aiming to harness its economic potential. Its position advocates for freer movement of people within Africa, spurs cross-border trade, and integrates migration into a broader national economic growth strategy.

However, the public discourse, trapped in simplistic nationalism, remains fixated solely on border control and the documentation of individuals. The role of the employer, the pull factor embedded in a transplanted colonial labour system, is conspicuously absent from mainstream policy conversations.

Anyone who genuinely wants to address the issue of undocumented Zimbabweans in South Africa must first demonstrate the intellectual honesty to be mindful of the entire White-Zimbabwean bonded economic system. Repeating simplistic slogans about border fences and deportation is not only ineffective; it is a form of historical denialism or lack of awareness. It ignores the work of scholars like Bolt and Muzondidya, who have meticulously documented the origins and persistence of this system.

The relationship was shaped by the laws of Rhodesia, developed in its tobacco fields and revitalised in the game farms and restaurants of democratic South Africa. It is a resilient, adaptable chain of mutual, albeit profoundly unequal, dependence.

Until we have the courage to recognise this uncomfortable truth, looking beyond the migrant at the border to see the employer who awaits them, our debates on immigration will remain not only divisive and inflammatory but also profoundly, and perhaps intentionally, dishonest.

By New Zimbabwe.