Hyenas of the Limpopo: “Illicit Labour Recruiting,” Assisted Border Crossings, and the Social Politics of Movement Across South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the negotiation of undocumented cross-border movement, or assisted border crossings, at Beitbridge, South Africa’s border with Zimbabwe. By reading border practices as arising from a complex synthesis of state regulatory norms with social relations that shape everyday encounters with the Beitbridge border space, the article argues that assisted border crossings are temporally, structurally and experientially determined. The article proposes the local concept of ukutshokotsha as a way of understanding “border struggles” that shape this “morphogenesis.” Located in historical, regional, political-economic, as well as experiential contexts, assisted border crossings are analyzed as rooted in everyday encounters with a fraught border space, as opposed solely to the border’s official institutional norms. The article argues that a focus on border practices is important in as far as it privileges the complex agency of disparate border actors, of the border, and of the shifting meanings of borders that emerge from everyday practices. By describing the colonial style “illicit labour recruiting” and post-independence “assisted border crossings” as a socio-historical, phenomenological, and political process, the article emphasizes the active role of middlemen in shaping the nature and meaning of the Beitbridge border and of the political economic organization of cross-border movement in contemporary Southern Africa. The article argues that the social politics of movement across the Beitbridge border is as much a contingency of history, a material, social and existential aspect of contemporary border practices, and a characteristic of everyday forms of Southern African state formation in a general context of socio-economic crisis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".