Migration myths. Why you shouldn’t always believe the figures for Zimbabwe

How many times have you heard that over 3 million people have fled Zimbabwe, migrating to South Africa or elsewhere? The figure varies, but it’s always big. But where does it come from and is it true?

This is a question asked by Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera in their edited book, Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival published in 2010. They trace the earliest use of the 3 million figure to South African media reports in 2003, and to comments made by Thabo Mbeki who claimed there were this number of Zimbabweans in South Africa. The figure has been repeated since, yet the media reports keep presenting a picture of people continuously ‘flooding’ across the border to South Africa. The figures just do not add up. You would think that there would be nobody left, beyond Mugabe and his cronies, if you believed everything you read!

Crush and Tevera point to the political nature of these figures. The argue that “The South African media and officialdom have a history of making up numbers about migration to the country. These numbers, often highly exaggerated for alarmist effect, acquire a life of their own once they enter the public realm. Tracking down their source usually reveals that they have no sound statistical basis”. They are, in other words, myths, and ones repeated by many who should know better.

Indeed the book shows there is no way of knowing the actual facts. No-one on either side of the border keeps proper records, people move back and forward between countries in the region with a high frequency and much movement is illegal in any case. The book offers some clues, however, and usefully compiles what statistics there are, but the authors are at pains to point out the difficulties of precise numbers particularly in the context of circular migration patterns. Circular migration – to places of work and back to home – has been part of southern Africans livelihoods for the best part of a century, as Debbie Potts points out in her recent book focusing on Harare. Yet, as Crush and Tevera point out, this history is often forgotten in contemporary policy discussions, framing current events as new, dramatic and with movement in need of containment. It is of course a familiar story for those of us who live in ‘fortress Europe’.

But have things changed as a result of the crisis in Zimbabwe? Has there been a greater movement of people and have patterns changed? The answer is of course, yes. There are some excellent new works on the Zimbabwean diaspora which tell us lots about who the diaspora are, where they come from and how they relate to ‘home’. Crush and Tevera concentrate on South Africa, while Joann McGregor and Ranka Primorac focus on the UK, for example, and the chapters in these books contain plenty of fascinating cases. As we show from data from Masvingo, patterns of migration have changed significantly in the last couple of decades, particularly from 1990s and the period of structural adjustment. The ‘classic’ movement to the farms or mines within Zimbabwe for a period followed by return to the communal areas on retirement has shifted. There are now new migrants, including youth without land or the prospect of land, the border jumpers; there are more women migrants, tapping into regional trade networks, and there is greater transnational migration, to other countries in the SADC region, but also significantly to the UK.

Each of these migrant groups (and there are of course others) link to home in different ways, sending remittances in different amounts and forms. In the 2000s, when Zimbabwe’s economy was in meltdown, these flows of remittances were crucial, especially if they could get into the country in foreign exchange. Work by Sarah Bracking and Llloyd Sachikonye for the Brooks Institute at Manchester offers some insights into these relationships, but a deeper understanding of how such external players interact with local economies is always difficult to grasp.

In a review of the Crush and Tevera book, Terry Ranger asks: “Perhaps the most important question is not why so many Zimbabweans have left, but why – and how – so many have stayed”. This is an intriguing question because if as Crush and Tevera point out ‘a few hundred thousand’ have left, then most people have remained, even if they leave for periods and return. Given the crisis at home, why? We know much about the push factors, but what about the factors that keep people at home? There are of course the natural bonds of family and home that are valued, the importance of familiarity and the support networks that exist. These are big factors especially when contrasting with the xenophobia experienced by migrants in South Africa, for example.

But there is also one hypothesis that is not explored in these works, one perhaps too difficult to contemplate. Perhaps for some things were not so bad at home; at least not as extreme as sometimes portrayed. The Zimbabwean economic crisis hit the still relatively small middle classes much harder than others. Others gained land, and some returned from abroad to gain access during the land reform. With no jobs at home and few in South Africa or elsewhere except for the connected and skilled, farming at home was perhaps a better option in this period. Certainly remittances have, as they have always done, offset the worst of the crisis, but perhaps land reform, although precipitating some migration from those dispossessed, including farm workers and white farmers, acted to provide a cushion for others. And, for significant proportion of new farmers in Masvingo province, particularly on the A1 plots, they actually fared rather well, and would not dream of leaving, and heading off to the uncertainties and vulnerabilities of the diaspora.

This post was written by Ian Scoones and originally appeared on Zimbabweland

Masvingo exceptionalism? The challenge of case studies

One of the main complaints about our book is that it’s mostly about Masvingo, and that it does not tell the whole story of land reform in Zimbabwe over the past decade or so. On all counts we are guilty. As we are clear in the book we are not making wider claims. This is a case study – of 16 sites in one province over 10 years. As Professor Terry Ranger remarks in his recent review of our book: “Patterns emerge but the book pays admirable attention to variation and variety”. Such a province-wide case study is still important, we maintain, as a basis for more in-depth comparison where contrasts and convergences can be teased out.

The Commercial Farmers Union of Zimbabwe and their supporters often make the point that Masvingo is ‘exceptional’, and that somehow are results should not be taken too seriously. They argue that this was not a ‘real farming’ area, and that something different happened there. Well, if this was not an important part of the commercial farming sector, why on earth did they not give up the land for resettlement many years before? Of course other areas in the Highveld are different, as we clearly state in the book. But, as we equally argue, there are some important broader patterns. And indeed, wider work that has emerged since has challenged in similar ways the five myths we lay out in the book.

A number of points are made about Masvingo ‘exceptionalism’. First, of course, Masvingo is in the drier part of the country, where certain cropping and livestock rearing patterns prevail. This agroecological difference is of course important, but let’s also remember that geographically the largest portion of the country is dry, with poor infrastructure and reliant on rainfed production, even in the former commercial sector. Second, the proximity to Harare is seen as a key factor in affecting the degree to which land was grabbed by elites through processes of violence and patronage. This again is true, and many of the high-profile cases where whole farms were taken by those well connected to the political-military elite are in these areas. But, as argued before in this blog, the pattern of ‘cronyism’ remains much under dispute. Third, as Terry Ranger argues in his review, the longer-term histories of particular places are important both in the processes and outcomes of land reform. This is absolutely correct. As we point out in the book it is these micro-political contexts, influenced by histories – of the liberation war, chieftaincy and political party allegiances – that have had really important influences on what happened, where. He admonishes us for not referring more to a set of important historical district studies (by for example Alexander, Kriger, Maxwell, Moore, Ranger, Schmidt), but all of these fall outside Masvingo (all are from Manicaland). In Masvingo there is a perhaps surprising absence of such studies, beyond the important study of Great Zimbabwe by Fontein, although we have some fantastically rich pre-colonial accounts from Gerald Mazarire and others.

These three factors will have a big influence on land reform processes and outcomes. But to what degree do these specificities (all variable indeed within Masvingo as we point out) affect the broad challenge of the 5 ‘myths’? We now have a growing body of work available to assess this, including the AIAS 6 district study led by Sam Moyo, the 3 district study by Ruziwo Trust led by Prosper Matondi, and the growing array of more focused, farm-based studies by research students and others, supported for example as part of the ‘Livelihoods after Land Reform’ small grants call, and some collected together in the important synthesis volume of the Journal of Peasant Studies by Lionel Cliffe and colleagues. These studies cover an increasing number of locations across Zimbabwe, with perhaps Matabeleland North and Midlands provinces being the least covered to date.

While the results from this now large body of work show wide variation, there are also some important common patterns. Overall, our analysis of the 5 myths is supported by other studies: all are rejected. A more detailed and systematic cross-study assessment would certainly be valuable, but the deployment of the ‘Masvingo is exceptional’ narrative in order in some way to reject the validity and applicability of our findings is clearly inappropriate. And so is the argument that ‘we need much more data from other places in order to take the wider significance of the Masvingo study seriously’. We have this data, and the body of work is growing: to date no one has dealt a killer blow to our study!

But what these other studies have done is nuance, extend and challenge some of the implications of our analysis. This is important. This is good research and how understanding progresses. Avoid the point-scoring, the summary rejections, and the attempts to side-line, but engage. This is certainly my attitude. The contrasts between studies certainly highlight all three of the factors highlighted above – agroecology, location and history – in interesting ways.

Clearly agroecology has a huge influence on what is possible in agronomic terms, but also the returns to investment, and so the incentives to invest in infrastructure, including greenhouses, irrigation and so on. This in turn influences the style of farming – higher potential areas offer opportunities for more intensive farming, where farm labour is important, and is more linked to the (still struggling) A2 sector. Paradoxically, until investment gets going (and this requires market confidence and stability as well as credit and financial services), it is the lower potential low-input areas based on smallholder family farm labour that are the more successful. Of course the tobacco story offers a different angle on this, and there are important lessons to be learned for the A2 farms more generally from this experience.

Proximity to urban centres, and particularly Harare, is again important. The attraction of big chefs is one dimension to this. It is certainly the case that the Mashonaland provinces had substantially more A2 plots allocated during fast-track land reform. These were particularly prone to capture by elites as we have discussed elsewhere. But we also have to differentiate between this sort of patronage – through manipulation of bureaucratic allocation procedures, for example – to the large scale ‘grabs’ of whole farms. The high profile cases of these are almost exclusively in the high potential Mashonaland provinces, and although small in number they are large areas and the ‘grabbers’ are very high profile people, from the president down. These are now euphemistically called ‘large-scale A2’ farms, and have been accepted as part of the new agrarian structure. The big question is whether these players gain the upper hand politically and assert a new dualism in farming, just with new owners. This would be a regressive move, undermining the aims of the agrarian reform. As a result an effective land audit and a close social, political and economic analysis of these new farms (and their new owners) will be essential. Here there certainly are important contrasts between provinces, and this must be an essential part of the wider political analysis (see next week’s blog on ‘missing politics’).

Finally, longer term histories of people and places are, as Terry Ranger, argues essential. This may not have a big impact on overall production patterns, for example, but the underlying authority structures, the role of different local elites, chiefs and others, as well as the political dynamic will all be influenced by such histories. This will have had an impact for sure – as it did across our sites in Masvingo – on land invasion and acquisition processes, as well as patterns of violence. But it will also influence future governance arrangements, and the possibilities (or not) of ‘rebuilding public authority from below’.

As Ranger correctly argues there will not be a ‘Masvingo solution’, and our book “is not the end but very much the beginning of a discussion”. This discussion is now well under way, and supported by a range of scholarship mostly from Zimbabweans studying what happened where to build the bigger story of Zimbabwe’s land reform.