Hyenas of the Limpopo: “Illicit Labour Recruiting,” Assisted Border Crossings, and the Social Politics of Movement Across South Africa’s Border with Zimbabwe
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it